US Not Getting Money's Worth From ISS 217
greysky writes "On the 45th anniversary of his first trip into space, astronaut John Glenn says the U.S. is not getting it's money's worth out of the International Space Station. From the article: "Diverting money from the orbiting research outpost to President Bush's goal of sending astronauts back to the moon and eventually on to Mars is preventing some scientific experiments on the space station"."
Time to reevaluate the whole program (Score:2, Insightful)
The launch of SpaceShipOne should have been a wake-up call for the U.S. The future is NOT in NASA.
-Eric
Manned missions suck (Score:3, Insightful)
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/18/magazine/18WWLN
Regarding manned missions: "It's fine to do it for national spirit or exploring the cosmos, but the problem is that it comes at the cost of observing and protecting our home planet."
Sunk Costs (Score:5, Insightful)
The International Space Station was a bad idea from the get-go. It was placed in the wrong orbit, with the wrong components, and wrong plans for construction. It was a disaster from the moment it started, and was only conceived because Congress and NASA managed to twist a good plan for a moon-staging point into a useless abomination meant to symbolize international cooperation.
While I'm the first to admit that it's rather cool having a space station flying over our heads, I also know that it's a turkey. Skylab was far more useful than the ISS ever was, and that was launched in a single launch on the back of a Saturn V. In comparison, the ISS has required over a dozen Shuttle flights for construction, and it's still not done yet. Worse yet, the Space Shuttle is required by the plan for the regular reboosts of the station back into a stable orbit. It's just not a good design.
While I understand that Former Senator Glenn is upset that we're not seeing a return on the money we spent on the station, he needs to pay more attention to the economics of Sunk Costs [wikipedia.org]. The money is already spent, and there is little to be gained from investing more money into the station. All that would happen is that NASA would waste further taxpayer funds that would show little to no return.
As a taxpayer myself, I would be extremely unhappy with NASA if they weren't diverting funds to the CEV program rather than the ISS. The development of the Ares V would provide NASA with far less expensive options for building and maintaining space stations. Options that would allow them to use such stations for useful ventures (like staging for moon missions) rather than mere symbolism.
Bah (Score:2, Insightful)
Line up your little doggies... (Score:5, Insightful)
Diverting? How about focusing on something which grants us more opportunities. A space station is low earth orbit does not provide us with a stepping off platform that something more permanent, like a moon base, would. Besides being more difficult to shield from radiation, heat, and micrometeroites, we have to constantly push it back up. Worse, it is planned to come back within the lifetime of many of these other programs being put forward. In other words, unless we have a plan to keep it up permanently why throw money at it.
Blaming Bush for the space station and state of NASA is really reaching. Don't even try that line that NASA would be better off if all the funds from Iraq didn't get spent as Congress never cares for NASA unless it can bash whomever is in the Adminstration at the time.
Re:Time to reevaluate the whole program (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Time to reevaluate the whole program (Score:3, Insightful)
Compaines do the same thing to, but they are allowed to go out of buisness, or do a major reorganization in an attempt to trim the fat. Unless governemt gets involved with the companies to make sure they stay alive then they are just as bad.
Re:Time to reevaluate the whole program (Score:5, Insightful)
I know you're using the oldest karma whore trick in the book, but
The launch of SpaceShipOne should have been a wake-up call for the U.S. The future is NOT in NASA.
I agree that private funding is the future of space. I do see a role for NASA in the forseeable future at least for the pure research and exploration roles that they are currently doing a good job at. There's not much impetus to send a probe to Io just to see what the place looks like, unless you have a budget designed around ideas like that. Private interprise wouldn't see the ROI -- certainly not until gathering resources from another body becomes feasible, and even then they'd need some reason to think resources were there. However, for a space station or cheap flights to the moon, I'm looking at the private ventures.
Could see this coming ... (Score:4, Insightful)
STS-95 (Score:2, Insightful)
perhaps true, but... (Score:3, Insightful)
Anytime nasa reprioritises money, something gets left behind. It's a careful balancing act of expense vs. return on that investment. There is still some science being done on iss, and will be more in the future. It's just not as much as origonally envisioned. How important is that? How do you prefer to weigh that against going to the moon and preparing to go to mars?
Ideally, we do both, but that means taking money from defense, with which this president isn't likely to go along.
Re:Time to reevaluate the whole program (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Shuttle Joy-Rider (Score:1, Insightful)
I had the highest respect for John Glenn until he traded political favors to then-president Clinton for a joy-ride on the shuttle. He is in no position to lecture anyone on NASA waste.
Re:Time to reevaluate the whole program (Score:2, Insightful)
Its name is SpaceShipThree [wikipedia.org], and is on the drawing board... SpaceShipOne did what it was designed to do, go straight up 100miles, and come back. Asking it to reach LEO is like asking the wright flyer to cross the atlantic.
Tm
Re:Time to reevaluate the whole program (Score:3, Insightful)
As for using private industry to get into space, what do you think they do now? Who builds and launches all those rockets? It's all contracted.
Re:John Glenn is Pro ISS (In Case It Wasn't Clear) (Score:3, Insightful)
Successful at what? That's what no one can seem to tell us. John Glenn says that's there's "potential". You say that it can be a success. Neither one of you is telling what exactly the station is supposed to be useful for?
Anyone who looks carefully at the specs of the station realizes that it's not useful for anything. It can't act as a staging point )wrong orbit), it can't service satellites (not high enough), it doesn't offer any astronomical observation abilities over dedicated satellites like Hubble, its internal capacity is not that much greater than the Space Shuttle, and any ground observations are being done better by the Space Shuttle and dedicated sats. Basically, the ISS sits up there and shows the flag. (Or flags, as the case may be.)
If someone can give me even one good reason to keep the ISS, I'd run out there and help them rally for funding. Unfortuntely, no good reason exists. Just a lot of romanticism about manned space travel. Well, guess what people? Living in space is like living on the tall ships of yore. The ability to go new places had a lot of appeal, but the unhealthy conditions, uncomfortable quarters, stench of fellow humans, constant danger, and claustrophobic living space didn't make it worth the hassle unless that ship was doing something important. Tall ships weren't built by the governments of their time for pleasure cruises, and neither should Space Stations.
Re:John Glenn is Pro ISS (In Case It Wasn't Clear) (Score:3, Insightful)
- Weightless Treadmill
- Spacewalks for Leak Checks
- Studying fires in zero gravity
- 4 year old polymers
- Testing of Dust Detectors
- Taking pretty pictures of the Earth
- Play with their Magic Rocks kit
Yes, these are incredibly important experiments that we absolutely cannot do without the Space Station. (Can you hear the sound of my eyes rolling?)
There is practically nothing at those links that couldn't be done by the Space Shuttle with the SpaceLab attachment, or by dedicated satellites already in place. All these items are is justification for the station's existence. None of them make any serious advances in human knowledge, and many of them are retreads of experiments that have been done before. Even if we assume that some of these experiments are Very Important(TM), none of them are so important as to give the station priority over the CEV program. Anything the station is doing now could be done by an Ares V lifted station for a LOT LESS MONEY.
Nice try, but no dice.
Re:We've never gotten our money's worth out of spa (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Indeed. (Score:5, Insightful)
And why? Why, so we can go to the moon! And set up a permanent base there, with enough room for half a dozen people To do low-gravity research! In a vaccuum! With three times the cost for delivery of supplies! And we'll spend two decades building it, with huge cost overruns. And opposition to the moon base will grow. And the government will insist on "getting it done", and then divert all funds for operation of it onto some other project that's the "new things". Sound familiar?
It's not the cost overruns on ISS that bothers me. It's not the capabilities of ISS or the kind of science that can be conducted there that bother me (it's actually much better than most peoples' perception of it). It's this whole "lets get it up to full capacity so we can say we built it, then let it crash so that we can move onto our next disturbingly-similar project" attitude that bothers me.
Re:We've never gotten our money's worth out of spa (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Indeed. (Score:5, Insightful)
The moon is very mineral poor. It has huge quantities of certain elements, but is largely devoid in most. It is not a place to build a self-sustaining colony.
Even producing food on the moon with recycled/Earth imported nutrients would be a nightmare, given that you have a choice between only low-angle light all day (and only in very tiny regions of the moon), light for two weeks then darkness for two, or using a huge amount of electric power at an awful efficiency conversion rate (perhaps 2% of the energy you input ending up as food). It'd be easier in space, and as we know, it's not easy in space. Completely closed habitats are nasty for plants in ways that most people wouldn't expect. For example, ethylene. Plants produce it. On Earth, it blows away and breaks down. Harmless to humans. However, to plants, it's many times more deadly than carbon monoxide is to humans. Hard to detect in such tiny quantities, and hard to prevent from accumulating. That is just one of many, many problems that must be addressed.
Not that other aspects of building a self sustaining colony on a more mineral-rich world are any easier. In fact, they're much, much harder. Take any piece of technology essential for running a colony -- let's say, an ore crusher. Pick just one component of that ore crusher, preferably one that gets consumed over time -- let's say, its oil for lubrication. Trace back all of the components (petroleum oils, silicone oils, EP additives to form a film to prevent contact welding, detergents and dispersants to keep particulates in solution, emulsifiers, etc) of that oil back to their natural resources. You're left with a monstrous dependency chain. And no, you can't cut corners without cutting capabilities. Even if you could, just a pure petroleum or silicone oil has a huge dependency chain on a non-Earth planet. And no, you can't just substitute a vegetable oil. It works poorly. You can refine vegetable oils to produce lubricants -- say, polyol esters from soybean oil -- but it's still problematic (vegetable oils and products derived from them oxidize quickly and don't lubricate well and are not suitable for high stress situations).
This is just one component of one device used in one aspect of maintaining a colony. Sci-fi presents far too rosy of a picture of how hard it is to establish even close to resource independence on another planet.
Re:oblig. (Score:3, Insightful)
How did this get on /.? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:oblig. (Score:3, Insightful)
No, he focuses on oil and the related strife and struggle because its a relatively solid tactic to divert as much attention as possible from the continuing unsolvable economic issue that is the US national debt. While technically there is no realistic solution to this problem that will not result in major upheaval across the globe, it can continue to be sustained for some period of time as long as (1) too much attention isn't payed to it (see the '29 market collapse for a smaller scale version of what happens when the public reacts abruptly to an economic crisis), and (2) the GNP combined with some business-friendly militaristic muscle is enough to keep the top-tier of the global economic community happy or at least quiet. Reducing deficit spending to zero (or even creating surplus) via outlay cuts or inlay increases will not fix the problem; not for a very very long time. So long that there is no reasonable economic lending belief that such is a reasonable proposition, instead the desired lending path is to keep the machine running and keep all the balls in motion all the time. National bankruptcy, at this level, would mean untold suffering and devastation for many many people around the world. Hate Bush or Love him (or neither), he and his gang are trying to do what they feel is the best approach to ensure maximum possible distraction. The next administration will do the same, perhaps via different tactics, but the end-goal will be the same. They have to. There is no other option that 99.9% of the people on the planet who have families won't find horrific (including presidents, vice-presidents and prime ministers). Its just a matter of either fooling enough people or juggling the balls so that nobody catches sight until the next administration takes up the reins.