Who Will Pay For a Commercial Space Station After the End of the ISS? 211
MarkWhittington writes: While NASA is planning its road to Mars, a number of commercial interests and place policy experts are discussing what happens after the International Space Station ends its operational life. Currently, the international partners have committed to operating ISS through 2024. Some have suggested that the space station, conceived by President Ronald Reagan in 1984, could last as long as 2028. But, after that, there will still be a need for a space station of some sort, either in low Earth orbit, or at one of the Lagrange points where the gravity of the moon and Earth cancel one another out.
"...there will still be a need..." (Score:4, Insightful)
Indeed - WHY do we need a space station? (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course if the Chinese threaten to launch one on their own, then Congress will suddenly find the money - but probably by raiding lots of other Science budgets. This probably would not be a good thing...
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It would have been interesting to "retire" the shuttles as in orbit stations...but I suppose the whole issue of how to get the last person back to earth might have been an issue.
Sure, after you'd built a completely new power generation system to replace the fuel cells, and torn them apart and rebuilt them so they didn't leak air at many times the rate a space station does.
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One of ISS's primary goals was to study long term human habitation in a microgravity/radiation environment with an eye on long duration voyages like a Mars shot
All of that research had already been done on Mir. The ISS did nothing new in this area. Even if there was a need for more research, Mir could have been kept around for 1% of the cost of the ISS.
Re:Indeed - WHY do we need a space station? (Score:5, Interesting)
No, you could not have done it on Mir. Mir was small, horribly kludged together and really not extensible. It was going to deorbit in a bunch of pieces by itself or more gracefully (as was done). It was beyond EOL. Well beyond. It was a testament to Russian engineering that it stayed up as long as it did.
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In order to support the business model of the people on this panel, yes.
and lets not even get started on Congress & sp (Score:3)
Obama's doing it
Bush the lesser did it
Clinton did it
Bush sr did it
"or at one of the Lagrange points" (Score:4, Interesting)
How's it going to protect crew (and equipment) from hard radiation? Seems to me that getting all that (lots of) extra mass to escape velocity would make it *way* more expensive than.
Would it be more practical to build a habitat in one of those caves that the Moon is supposed to have?
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How's it going to protect crew (and equipment) from hard radiation? Seems to me that getting all that (lots of) extra mass to escape velocity would make it *way* more expensive than.
Would it be more practical to build a habitat in one of those caves that the Moon is supposed to have?
But how can one deal with moon dust?
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Concrete isn't air tight or structural by itself.
Granted it if you find enough water on the moon it is a good part of being useful.
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There's another resource the moon has in abundance: Power. You can enjoy slow-tracking unfiltered sunlight, suitable for use in either photovoltaics or solar furnaces. What do you get if you melt moon-dust and resoldify it into a casting basin?
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Given that reaching the nearest viable Lagrange Point is going to mean going at least 150K miles rather that the three to four hundred currently needed for LEO I think Radiation Shielding is the least of their problems given how ridiculously expensive it is getting into space to start off with
Orbital mechanics does not work that way. Expense doesn't simply scale with distance.
Getting to LEO requires ~10km/s of delta-v, whilst going from there to L4/5 requires an additional ~4km/s, which could be undertaken using highly fuel efficient ion or VASIMR engines.
The fuel required to for the second leg of the journey wouldn't be more than a single percent of the total fuel for the trip, which could take a few months.
If you want to get there really quickly you could do it in nine days using traditiona
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3.77 to Earth Moon L1. That makes a little more sense.
3.42 to EM L2
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
or if you prefer slow boating the difference
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Thank you, I had not thought of that.
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Didn't think there was that much sex at the ISS.
Re: "or at one of the Lagrange points" (Score:2)
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That's the simplistic way of saying "mass". Which is really expensive to launch.
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uh, no.
It's not mass?
Water makes a great shield for radation.
It's a low-density shield. Lots of launches would be required to lift the requisite amount of water.
(lead) causes a great deal of scatter
But it would be scattering the radiation *away* from the station, right? Because otherwise it wouldn't be shielding us.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_protection#Shielding/ [wikipedia.org]
http://www.adl.gatech.edu/research/tff/radiation_shield.html/ [gatech.edu]
How do present-day astronauts survive? The answer is - they can't for very long.
Veteran astronauts caught on Space Stations during such storms must spend t
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if we can get it to orbit cheaply
But that's the problem which is nowhere near being solved.
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There's a much simpler solution to the water problem. Don't send meatbags. Do all the work with robots & advanced waldo systems. Even ignoring the water, you could afford to lose (completely) several robotic mining systems for the cost of one human-rated craft.
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Maybe they could build a spacestation into an asteroid that they pulled into the Lagrange point.
By the time you can afford to do that, you can also afford to launch lead and water to shield your station.
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Everyone who knows even the barest amount about space mining knows this.
Space mining engineers have as much practical experience as astrobiologists.
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This is orbital mechanics. It is as hard to pull something down a gravity well as to pull it up, unless you either want it to hit something at the bottom of the well or want it to do a fly-by. Typically, when moving something down the mountain, you use some form of lithobraking to get the proper velocity at the end. That doesn't work in space.
As long as we're talking about Lagrange points, we're talking about a two-body system, so we can presumably do a gravitational slingshot maneuver to reduce the s
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You could try atmospheric braking your asteroid to shed some of that unwanted energy. You'd better be really sure of your calculations though, or braking becomes breaking.
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The same side of the moon points towards Earth all the time. If you don't know that, the rest of your post is rather equally useless. :)
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Why are we ditching the ISS? (Score:3)
Is there some technical reason the ISS will no longer work after the mid-2020s or is it merely a budget issue? Why are we not keeping it up there if it is still serving whatever purpose it was designed for?
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mold maybe?
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Lysol. Send the maids up on the next rocket out of Russia.. Send Consuela [youtube.com]
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Lots of vital unreplaceable/unrepairable parts would probably be well beyond their design specification and thus prone to failure.
What cannot be repaired? (Score:2)
Lots of vital unreplaceable/unrepairable parts would probably be well beyond their design specification and thus prone to failure.
What on it cannot be repaired or replaced? Why would they design it that way? It's basically modular in construction as far as I can tell so it's not clear to me why they couldn't replace any given portion of it. Is it that we don't/won't have an adequate lift vehicle? Just terrible design?
Re: What cannot be repaired? (Score:2)
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Remember, we're really not able to do that kind of 'deconstruction / rehab' in space. All we've managed to do is bolt / unbolt things and plug some wiring harnesses together. Unless the item was specifically designed to be replaced in space, it will be very difficult to do so.
Now, this would be an interesting and useful exercise in and of itself but I don't see it as sexy enough to get funding.
Re: Why are we ditching the ISS? (Score:2)
Gaskets and Seals (Score:3)
Is there some technical reason the ISS will no longer work after the mid-2020s or is it merely a budget issue? Why are we not keeping it up there if it is still serving whatever purpose it was designed for?
IIRC from a previous ./ article, the gaskets and seals are only rated to work so long and their effectiveness is decreasing with time. The ISS already leaks and has to be resupplied and as time goes on, the cost of maintenance will go up. Any attempt to replace these parts in space would end up costing so much that it would be cheaper to just build a new space station and send it up. This is one of the obstacles to any Mars trip. They'll need something that can contain its atmosphere with minimal leakage ov
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My guess is that in addition to aging, there is the law of diminishing returns.
When we first build a new scientific apparatus, there are plenty of discoveries being made, then, it goes downhill, because much of what can be done with it has been done.
So the next step is to improve it, for example by adding new instruments, or upgrading the old ones. But there is a limit on what can be done. And at some point you end up with something that is very expensive but produces very little. Sure, we can still hold on
Obligatory Reagan Worship! (Score:4, Insightful)
conceived by President Ronald Reagan in 1984
Thank you, samzenpus. I wasn't sure what to thank Saint Ronnie for today. Did he forge the structure with the same death-ray eyes that he used to tear down the Berlin Wall?
Re:Obligatory Reagan Worship! (Score:5, Insightful)
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The Republicans are remembering a time when they could field a candidate that someone would want to elect, because they don't make lizard-man conspiracy theories seem plausible.
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The Republicans are remembering a time when they could field a candidate that someone would want to elect, because they don't make lizard-man conspiracy theories seem plausible.
The Republican establishment don't want their candidate to become President, because then people might expect them to do something. Having Trump in the White House is their nightmare scenario; they'd rather see Hillary there, so they can keep telling Republican voters 'you must vote for us in Congress so we can stop Clinton!' Why else do you think they keep pushing for another Bush?
They hated Reagan for the same reason they hate Trump: they're both outsiders who could actually win.
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I still think Reagan would have made a great king. He had presence. I think he'd have had to change his name, though. "Ronald, King of the United States of America and Protector of the Seas" doesn't have the right ring.
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He defeated the Soviet Union using dollars instead of your dad.
Brilliant, although there turned out to be a catch; now we get to listen to you.
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He defeated
That's cute. We were both running through money at a wild rate. The USSR hit bottom first. We were getting there thanks to brilliant ideas like the Star Wars program.
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Exactly. How brilliant was that? It was a complete bluff.
Just in case you weren't there: We all bought into Star Wars. All of us. To a nerd, it seemed kind of far fetched, but plausible in theory. Non-nerds bought it hook line and sinker. They said they could do it. The CIA has secret shit that we don't know about. That's true today; it was certainly true then. To make it a plausible bluff, they needed to convince us first.
Who cares what we thought, really; the Russians bought it. That's what mattered.
There
Re:couldn't get elected now / jerb "creators"! (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't forget the top tax bracket rate was 50% under pinko Ronnie.
Ronald Reagan would never make it as a republican any more, he is far too liberal on that and many other things as well. Hell, Reagan was more liberal than our "liberal" POTUS on many things.
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It's Mark Whittington. A nice guy, but a serious believer in the Church of Ronnie.
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It's Mark Whittington. A nice guy, but a serious believer in the Church of Ronnie.
Well, he is in friendly hands here on slashdot. The Church of Ronnie is very popular amongst slashdot readers. It is slightly more popular than the church of Ron Paul, though sometimes slightly less vocal.
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Ronald Reagan was mentioned for any reason
My point is that he didn't actually have anything to do with it, and is getting credit for it just because slashdot has an overwhelming conservative majority. I actually find this somewhat amusing in a way, as of course Reagan is far too liberal to be accepted in the GOP today (in fact a solid argument can be made for him even being more liberal than our current "liberal" POTUS).
You're still pissed your side lost the Cold War, aren't you?
My "side"? What exactly do you think you are talking about with that statement? And for that matter, why do you think anyone
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Capitalism won the cold war because it generated enough excess wealth that money could be wasted on destructive and useless government objectives without the system collapsing like under communism. Yet people are still arguing with each other about how much more we should be wasting on destruction and useless government objectives...
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I think you get his little joke. Or maybe not - kids nowadays...
It just so happened. Heh. Obviously, if things had been the other way around; they would have won, we would have lost, and you would be standing in line for bread instead of posting on /.
Can't you kids at least wait until we die before you rewrite history?
The Market? (Score:2)
Answer (Score:5, Informative)
Who Will Pay For a Commercial Space Station After the End of the ISS?
China
Place policy experts? (Score:2)
"Conceived by Ronald Reagan" (Score:5, Insightful)
Ronald Reagan no more conceived the International Space Station than he painted the Sistine Chapel. First, ideas for space stations go back to the 1920s, and in the 1970's the US and the USSR both started flying space stations (Skylab and Salyut, respectively). Second, while in 1984 Reagan proposed Space Station Freedom in his state of the union address, it is not what we have flying now. Third, while Reagan was not totally senile in 1984, he was never a technologist, and did not himself play any role in the development of the (proposed) station; the plans were developed by NASA and just announced by the White House.
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If I remember correctly, Reagan supported giving NASA a few billion dollars for a space station, and NASA burned through all that money without putting a single part of it in space?
Then Clinton pushed ISS as a way of making friends with the Russians, and it survived various attempts to cull it on that basis.
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If I remember correctly, Reagan supported giving NASA a few billion dollars for a space station, and NASA burned through all that money without putting a single part of it in space?
Then Clinton pushed ISS as a way of making friends with the Russians, and it survived various attempts to cull it on that basis.
That's not a bad summary.Al Gore actually did a lot of the pushing, it was not so much making friends with the Russians as keeping their scientists and engineers peacefully employed, and getting ESA and Japan on board was also essential (it turns out to be much harder to cut truly international programs), but you got the basics.
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Pedantry.
By that same logic, I'm sure you'd agree then that it shouldn't be called Obamacare, the president cannot claim credit for "Getting Bin Laden" or even signing the Iran deal? Nor, then, should Reagan be blamed for Iran/Contra or the massive deficit spending of his administration?
Did Reagan conceive or build the ISS? Clearly not.
But there's a thing called the "head of government" that (at least used to) means "the buck stops here" giving them credit for programs they championed and disasters that h
I know who.... (Score:2)
Elon Musk.
That man needs a place where he can wear a silver turtleneck and pet a white cat while laughing at the world with an evil laugh.
I fully welcome our new Elon Overlord.
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That Ronnie! (Score:2)
Tourism (Score:3)
I went to this meeting, and I thought it was one of the best commercial space meetings I have been to.
The summary was pretty on point, except that it didn't mention the prospect of tourism really taking off as the costs and complexity of going on-orbit decrease. (Right now, among other things, you have to learn Russian to become a space tourist.) It really looks like commercial space stations will become a reality in the not too distant future.
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And that's too bad. It seems like the established space-faring, rocket-launching community is against tourism as being "below" them, but I'd still bet it's economically viable -- there are many communities, towns, states, and even entire countries that base their economies off of tourism. It's not the best long-term economic plan, but it'd definitely work in the short-term to get space travel to become commonplace, which is all we really need.
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Tourism was certainly discussed at the meeting, and Bigelow (for example) is counting big on it, but it didn't seem to make the summary.
Tourism is not the money. (Score:4, Insightful)
No one, unfortuately (Score:2)
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What a joke (Score:5, Insightful)
conceived by President Ronald Reagan (Score:2)
What use is that statement? Ronald Reagan came up with the idea of a space station, or specifically ISS? Yeah, the US wanted to make their own station that he announced in 1984, but to give him credit for coming up with the idea is downright foolish. It did not become an international project until the 90's at the end of the cold war. People have been dreaming of internationally operated space projects for as long as we have known we could put things in orbit.
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people that have read way too many Ben Bova novels
Or the news articles that went around last month about the asteroid that just buzzed by with $5 trillion worth of platinum on it.
Clearly no RoI there. Low-orbit docking for such efforts would have no value. :/
Re:No one. (Score:4, Informative)
Or the news articles that went around last month about the asteroid that just buzzed by with $5 trillion worth of platinum on it.
Clearly no RoI there.
If you ever managed to mine that platinum, it wouldn't be worth $5 trillion any more. It's a commodity. The market would collapse. Gross demand for platinum in 2013 was only about 260 metric tonnes. [matthey.com]
Re:No one. (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure, if you mine it and dump it all on the market at once.
In reality, anyone able to pull off a commercially viable asteroid mining operation probably has enough savvy that they wouldn't just flood the market: they'd control the supply to keep prices just below that of available terrestrial sources.
This is really no different from De Beers controlling the price of diamonds, or OPEC controlling the price of oil.
Re:No one. (Score:5, Funny)
If you dumped it on the market all at once there won't be any people left alive to buy it.
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Nice.
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If you ever managed to mine that platinum, it wouldn't be worth $5 trillion any more. It's a commodity. The market would collapse.
Not if de Beers was mining it. Wives will be demanding platinum engagement and wedding rings, because, "Platinum is Forever".
In a Schrödinger's Cat type situation, there will be simultaneous be a glut of platinum . . . but at the same time a shortage, which will make those platinum rings very expensive.
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And if you can add some kind of traceability, I for one would love to own a platinum ring that was mined from an asteroid.
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You might be able to get some government subsidies though. Platinum is really useful stuff - it's a great catalyst for all sorts of reactions, and an excellent electrocatalyst too, plus it's pretty much inert otherwise. If it were cheap, hydrogen might have become a viable means of bulk energy storage by now.
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I'm going to guess that people would find more uses for platinum at $100/ounce, so that's not a cap. That eight gigabucks a year is a reasonable planning figure, though.
Re:The answer is... (Score:3)
Bob Bigelow. [bigelowaerospace.com] He's the guy whose company is sending an inflatable module to the ISS later this year. They already have a proof-of-concept module in orbit, and would already have launched their much bigger BA330, but there's currently no rocket powerful enough to loft it. But the upcoming SpaceX Falcon Heavy will be powerful enough, and that should be flying by this time next year.
Their plan is to rent space in the BA330 to countries and/or companies that want to do something in microgravity, but can't affor
Re: The answer is... (Score:2)
Re: The answer is... (Score:4, Interesting)
I stand corrected, thanks. In any case, the point remains that Bigelow is ready and waiting to launch the "next" space station, and that wait will be over in a couple of years. I think the vast majority of people out there are unaware of how radically different the launch market will be in just a few years from now. Very likely, in about six weeks, SpaceX will "stick the landing" of the booster stage on their next launch. That historic event will bring an order-or-magnitude drop in the cost of getting to space. And that will change everything.
Right now, the "market price" for a ride to LEO is about $70 million per person, and hardly anyone can afford it. But what happens when it's $7 million? There's going to be a waiting list for bunks at the Bigelow Orbital Hotel & Resort, and the "space economy" will be off and running.
The Google Lunar X-Prize will be happening around the same time, opening the moon to private exploration and exploitation. Planetery Resources and Deep Space Industries are also gearing up for their role in that new economy. I think this tipping point is going to happen much more rapidly than most people appreciate.
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Sadly, NASA is looking to only send up 4 at a time, which makes it somewhat expensive, though much less than Russia's current BS.
As to BA, if SpaceX can launch BEAM this year, then BA will likely start building their space station as soon as one of the human launchers is approved by NASA.
Do not count on SpaceX being successful with their landing. Right now, they have thrusters on th
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Do not count on SpaceX being successful with their landing
Doesn't matter if they land the booster on this flight or the next (etc.) they are clearly making progress toward that goal,and will reach it soon enough. And I agree, Bigelow will shift into gear as soon as a reliable, affordable man-rated launch system is available.
But keep in mind, SpaceX's quote of $20m per seat is based on the throw-away-booster cost model. The minute you start reusing boosters, that model will change. We don't know how much yet, because we don't know how many times you can reuse a boo
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My only issue is that until the pitch,yaw and roll of the barge is controlled, they will not be able to land a pendulum on that moving barge.
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True enough. But even if they land it, only to have it teeter off a bit later, that will still be the proof of concept they need.
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And soon after the moon has rings generated from dirt bike rooster tails.
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Mars, bitches!
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They tried to make an argument in this "book" (marketing PDF):
http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/626862... [nasa.gov]
The arguments seem to fall into three classes: (1) dual use technologies (stuff developed for the ISS that also has other uses), (2) experiments in microgravity or in orbit, and (3) experiments related to the effect of microgravity on astronauts.
Of these (1) doesn't require actually launching or paying for the ISS; you can have that more cheaply by directly financing those programs. (2) can be done far more cheapl
Re:What has the ISS done for us so far? (Score:4, Interesting)
The greatest, I think it is subjective, but a few Google searches can tell you some of the important findings.
For example there in this video : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... [youtube.com] the selected three are :
- Cosmic ray detectors on the ISS discovered particles that may confirm the existence of dark matter.
- Study on the effects that living in space has on the body. For example, they discovered that in addition to bone and muscle, the eyes were also affected.
- New generation cancer treatment using micro-encapsulation come directly from the results of research done in micro-gravity on the ISS.
Re:"need"? "benefits"? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:"need"? "benefits"? (Score:5, Insightful)
And what is the benefit you are getting from the F-35 program? Or the $1B or $2B tank refurbishment program that the army didn't want? Or how about the $3T spent on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars? Or the $800M on Wall St. bailouts? (And yes I know there are programs that waste large amounts of money in my country too.)
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Re:"need"? "benefits"? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah the benefit definitely is dwarfed by the cost.
Oh unless we manage to move off this rock and colonise space then the benefit of the research done thus far may break even with the cost.
If we're in space and the earth gets wiped out by an asteroid then the benefit becomes priceless.
That's the problem with science. With hindsight we can see a great deal more than with foresight.
Hertz and Maxwell both sunk money into completely useless theoretical research that didn't have any foreseeable practical applications and Dirac created a completely useless equation. People called for de-funding all of this research and said it was a waste, yet we have our modern way of life thanks to these people, electricity, radio, lasers, etc.
Don't worry you're not alone in your thinking. In the UK it's a hot topic with Lord Mandelson recently saying that we should only be funding practical science which increases future prosperity. Now he's facing backlash from the entire scientific community as it's almost impossible to predict how for example theoretical physics would affect future prosperity.
Could it be a big money pit? Maybe. Could it be the best investment humans have ever made? Maybe.
Re: "need"? "benefits"? (Score:2)