US Not Getting Money's Worth From ISS

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"."

Some things never change

[0123456]

Last night I was capturing a camcorder video from a talk I went to by some astronauts, who were talking about how they were about to start building Space Station Freedom, and then President Bush had promised them a manned landing on Mars by 2019. Nearly fifteen years ago now.

I just thought it was kind of funny that now we still haven't finished building the International Space Station and while the next President Bush has promised them a manned landing on Mars at some point in the distant future, it's looking less and less likely that even the new 'spam in a can' launcher will reach orbit by 2019, let alone that anyone will be going to Mars.

At this rate, I guess NASA astronauts will be landing on Mars in the year 2300. At least private companies will already have hotels and crazy golf courses set up there for them so they won't need to build huge rockets to get there.

I have plenty of fingers...

[DriveDog]

to point. So Shrub is the anti-Midas. What's new? The ISS, shuttle, and Bush's manned mission plans all suck resources from important stuff like interplanetary probes, future propulsion research, and the next space-based telescope. But of course we could have them all for a fraction of the cost of throwing hardware and soldiers into a black hole in the middle east. NASA maybe mostly a welfare program for contractors, but it can't compete with the Pentagon. Does anything make sense? Perhaps a scary asteroid on a collision course with Earth would be the kick we need to build cool stuff and undertake important high-risk missions.

Re:Indeed.

[monkeydo]

And just what does he mean by "Getting our money's worth?"

"To not utilize that station the way [b]I think it ought to be utilized[/b] is just wrong," said Glenn. Thanks for clearing that up, Senator.

Another interesting article

[johndiii]

Concerning the relative merits of the Shuttle vs. heavy-lift single-use boosters [slashdot.org].

Re:John Glenn is Pro ISS (In Case It Wasn't Clear)

[0123456]

"If someone can give me even one good reason to keep the ISS, I'd run out there and help them rally for funding."

ISS was built to funnel money to the Russians to discourage their rocket scientists from moving abroad to design missiles for people America doesn't like. I suspect that justification is a bit out of date now.

Re:Indeed.

[Tackhead]

> He's hardly alone in that view. The current plan for what to do with the ISS is bloody ridiculous: finish spending a fortune to get it built, and then not fund it for long past there. The components mostly have expected ~40 year lifespans (and judging by other craft, say the MERs, this is probably an underestimate), but once we finally get to the "cheap" part (maintenence of the station), we're just going to let it burn.

Agreed, but the fundamental problem is that the "purpose" of a project like ISS depends on who you ask.

For just about every politician (with the exception of John Glenn, who, as an astronaut, may be excused for having an interest in science :), the only "purpose" of a project ISS is to funnel tax dollars into local industries.

The more expensive it is and the longer it takes to build, the better. As soon as it's "built", however, the "cheap" (maintenance) phase of the project begins, and its usefulness as a vehicle for directing pork to campaign donors ends. Hence...

> 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.

...what you said. Bothers me too. But we don't get to vote. Only the politicians get to vote; we just get to pay for it.