Panel Advises Longer Life For Space Station

suraj.sun writes "A presidential panel reviewing the US space program has found that the United States needs to boost NASA's budget by $1.5 billion to fly the last seven shuttle missions and should extend International Space Station operations through 2020. The panel also proposed adding an extra, eighth shuttle flight to help keep the station supplied and narrow an expected 5-7 year gap between the time the shuttle fleet is retired and a new US spaceship is ready to fly."

Re:No they didn't.

[FlyingSquidStudios]

Isn't there a fourth option? Namely- use Soyuz to transport people from now on until NASA develops something else that can dock with the station. I'm still pissed off that they canceled the habitation and gravity research modules- both after the modules had already been assembled!

Re:No they didn't.

[QuantumG]

Umm.. that's all 3 options. Even if the shuttle gets extended, it will only be extended up until Orion is flying. And if COTS-D comes along, that will change things too.

Re:WTF isnt a space station permanent?

[Darkness404]

Every space station is temporary. Eventually things start to fail (see MIR) and end up becoming very expensive to maintain or unsafe to keep sending missions.

Re:No they didn't.

[Brian Gordon]

Of course, designing and assembling the modules is nothing compared to the cost of getting thousands of kilograms more than 300km straight up against gravity and accelerated to 7700 meters per second...

Re:WTF isnt a space station permanent?

[QuantumG]

It has a mass of 303t.. and it is in such a low orbit that atmospheric drag is still a major effect.. so you've got to boost that vast mass back into its orbit every couple of months.

The "permanent" adjective applied to the station means that it is "permanently manned" - as in, there is always someone on-board for as long as the station is up there.

People are often talking about moving the ISS into an orbit that is more useful for exploration.. say, an orbit that crosses the inclination of the Moon now and then. Basic calculations though, show that any attempt to "move" the ISS would cost as much delta-v as launching a brand new station.. and as launch costs remain the major dominating factor in space activities, you might as well make a new station.

Re:WTF isnt a space station permanent?

[markringen]

particles in space will eventually destroy everything. the Russian mir was full of holes at the end of it's life. but till date it was the safest space station ever created by man, the same people also made 75% of the ISS :P (Russians yup)

Re:One has to wonder...

[Brian Gordon]

Because going from "we should build a space rocket thingy" to getting into that kind of orbit is extremely expensive. We've built NASA over 50 years of continuous research and have veterans running the administration that have worked there their entire career. You can't just stuff a bunch of engineering grads in a building with calculators and piles of money and let them cook like we did, unless you want to give them 50 years and several horrible disasters. And once you have the thing designed and built, it has to be extensively (expensively) refitted and repaired after every launch.

And what are the material gains? Nothing, because you could have just let America pay for it and give you the research for free anyway.

Re:Decommission Shuttle at the station

[Anonymous Coward]

why not just guide it to hit the atmosphere upside down?

unNope

[Gary W. Longsine]

Well, vast amounts of science, as you say, could possibly be done on it. Thing is, not much of the possible science really started. The substantial delays in construction meant that the crew required to do the science, and many of the modules, didn't arrive until recently. That's why dumping the thing in a few short years is such a crime. $100 Billion, twenty years, and the lives of seven astronauts were given to build the ISS, and NASA wants to dump it to make room in their budget for an unfunded Mars stunt. The very plan is criminal.

Re:WTF isnt a space station permanent?

[ColdWetDog]

Nice idea, but it won't get off the ground. Literally. Too many payload constraints to really do that sort of thing. Everything pushed into space has to be really thought about, weighed, tested and re thought about.

You're reading too many Science Fiction novels again. No Russian scrubbers piloted by stoned Rostas. No shuttle tanks parked in orbit.

At least for a while. Let's get Mr. Fusion working and then look at these issues.

Re:Nope

[QuantumG]

I think all the people who's lives have been saved by the medical research done on the ISS would disagree.

You've gotta understand.. every scientist will say that the research of every other scientist is unworthy of being funded, because they want the funding for themselves.

There's vast amounts of work being done on the ISS.. and on the Shuttle for that matter.. but you've gotta dig to find it. Why? Because the media has repeatedly told NASA that it is boring and they don't wanna hear about it.

Science is boring.. yeah.. that's the society we live in.

Re:Nope

[Anonymous Coward]

"What" live-saving medical research has been done on the Shuttle or ISS?

From the link above:

"No serious contributions to knowledge of protein structure or to drug discovery or design have yet been made in space." ASCB, July 9, 1998

"The enormous investment in protein crystal growth on the Shuttle and Mir has not led to a single unique scientific result." NRC, 1 March 2000

Don't get me wrong, I am very interested to hear about anything useful going on up there other than the super-cool factor (I am a big fan of NASA TV and watch often), but as you say it's just not being reported. Wait a sec, not being reported anywhere? Nobody's talking? Not even NASA? Not the scientists? Pardon me, but could you help an AC out with a few links? (/. won't let me log in to science.slashdot today for some reason even though the front page is no problem.)

aside: the preview of this post looks like crap. does AC not get any html formatting options? My apologies.

getting to orbit cheaper, X-33 (VenturStar)

[Gary W. Longsine]

That's one of the major problems with the current Constellation / Orion / Aeries I / Aeries V / Moon / Mars plan. Although it's likely to be quite a bit more reliable (e.g. safer) to fly, the Constellation program doesn't do much to increase access to space. Constellation re-uses the Apollo/Shuttle launch infrastructure, with only two launch pads and two (or possibly 3, there is an unfunded plan to build one more) crawlers, and the constraints of the Vertical Assembly Building (with a limited number of assembly bays, one of which is used for storage of rocket parts). This means the flight rate to orbit tops out at something like a dozen or 18 launches a year, maximum. Flight rates for the heavy lift Aeries V are likely to be so low that the vehicle will never achieve a reasonable per-flight cost, because too few vehicles will be built to get the cost of flight hardware down.

NASA has abandoned the goal of building a reliable, cheaper transportation system. They were hot on the trail with the X-33 / VentureStar [wikipedia.org] program. Like nearly all R&D programs, it went over the original budget and behind schedule. However, the program had the right goals, and the right basic plan for getting to them. If NASA had stayed on course, we would have had a replacement for the Shuttle by now. The planned VentureStar production flight vehicles would be flexible enough to sustain the ISS. It would have a capacity high enough (in terms of payload per flight, which was similar to the Shuttle) and flights per year (which could scale with the addition of vehicles, without the constraints of the expensive and limited Apollo-era launch systems). The modernized vehicle design (lifting body airframe, engines with fewer moving parts, substantially more durable thermal protection system, simplified container-paradigm-based payload integration) would yield shorter turn-around of a single vehicle, from days to a couple weeks, compared to a few months to several months for the Shuttle).

Instead, NASA dabbles in scramjets, with a million here and a million there in loose change. Scramjets are a technology with great potential, but even if aggressively funded (which they are not) they won't be ready for a long, long time. A more modest program like the X-33 / VentureStar could get us to higher flight rates with Shuttle-like capacity and reduction in cost of payload delivery which would be substantial enough to stimulate the space economy. We could get to the Moon and Mars a lot cheaper, and go there more often with a rational approach to building a transportation system. (NASA needs to rethink the in-space transfer vehicles, too. VASIMR is a technology within our reach, and if developed as the inter-planetary engine, can dramatically reduce flight times to Mars, from many months to 1 month.)

Re:How about...

[meringuoid]

do you just send up a new part? That will cost a lot more than sending the part down, having it repaired, and sending it back up.

I suspect it will cost insignificantly more. The launch is usually the expensive part, not the construction of whatever it was that broke.

The Space Shuttle was designed to be able to capture and to return to Earth satellites in orbit. It even did so a couple of times. Just enough to demonstrate that it wasn't worth doing, and that it was far more cost-effective to let dead satellites go and just put up a new one.

Re:Nope

[Anonymous Coward]

To be fair, your quotations are a decade old, and the second one doesn't even mention ISS.

I'm not claiming to know anything to the contrary, but 10-year-old sound bites are not exactly strong evidence.

Re:option 4: the US quits participating

[QuantumG]

I mentioned this in another post (or two):

1. There's no ion engine that can do the job.
2. The US put it up, they're legally required to bring it down.

And finally:

3. The station barely functions now, it will not function after even 2 years of neglect, let alone 50.

Smarter people than you are working on this program, give em some credit.

Re:getting to orbit cheaper, X-33 (VenturStar)

[FleaPlus]

NASA has abandoned the goal of building a reliable, cheaper transportation system. They were hot on the trail with the X-33 / VentureStar program. Like nearly all R&D programs, it went over the original budget and behind schedule. However, the program had the right goals, and the right basic plan for getting to them.

I was with you right up until you mentioned the X-33. The X-33 would've tested some really neat technologies, but the way to test previously-untested new technologies is NOT to cram them all into one spacecraft which relies on all of them working to succeed. Rather, one creates a number of simple spacecraft which test all the technologies individually. The X-33 approach was just asking for failure.

That, and I'm rather more partial to the DC-X [wikipedia.org] approach to single-stage to orbit. It relied on already-existing technologies, cost a fraction of the X-33 and actually flew a number of test flights, until it was canceled so NASA could focus more on the X-33.

Re:space shuttle cost

[afidel]

There's a difference between the program cost divided by missions and the incremental cost per mission.

Re:space shuttle cost

[The Grim Reefer2]

Sure, you can massage the numbers all you like, but money taken from the tax payers and given to NASA is how we should be looking at it.

That's strange. I always looked at it as money given by the tax payers to invest in the future of mankind.

Re:space shuttle cost

[hey!]

Well, this is a rational stance to take towards sunk costs ... if you have a time machine.

Suppose you buy a very expensive car, and figure out that it costs an average of $1.00 per mile to operate it over its lifetime, half of which represents the investment in the car itself. You look at a hundred mile trip, which you can take by bus or car, and the bus costs $60. Is it rational to take the bus because the averaged cost of the car trip is forty dollars more? No, because taking the bus doesn't magically get you $50 of investment sunk in the car back. In fact, no matter how you slice it, you're spending $10 more to take the bus.

Now if that trip is a waste of time, if it is worthless, then of course you shouldn't drive *or* take the bus. You should stay home. I *think* that's what you are saying. That's a reasonable position depending on what's important to you. But you can't say people who *do* want access to space should ignore the difference between average and marginal costs, because if we *do* end up going there the wrong decision means more dollars out of everyone's pocket for no good purpose.