Ask Slashdot: Should the ISS Go Commercial? (npr.org) 193
Slashdot reader stevent1965 writes:
The costs of running the International Space Station are a burden for NASA's budget. It has cost over $100 billion to construct and annual operating expenses run between $3 and $4 billion per year, representing a substantial percentage [about half] of NASA's manned space exploration budget. What to do, what to do?
A potential solution is to turn over operations (if not ownership) to private enterprise (Elon, are you listening?) Commercialization of space exploration may be anathema to some, but there is ample precedent for the government ceding control of publicly-funded endeavors to private enterprises. The Internet is the obvious example.
Why not give corporations control of the ISS? Are there drawbacks? Benefits? Which will prevail? Let's hear your opinions.
Sunday NPR noted that a few weeks ago NASA held a press event at Nasdaq's MarketSite to announce and promote "the commercialization of low Earth orbit," with astronaut Christina Koch beaming down a video from space to say that the crew was "so excited" to be a part of NASA "as our home and laboratory in space transitions into being accessible to expanded commercial and marketing opportunities" (as well as to "private astronauts.")
But there are big logistical and financial hurdles. (Even NASA admits to NPR that revenue-generating opportunities first "need to be cultivated by the creative and entrepreneurial private sector.") So leave your own best thoughts in the comments -- the how, why, what if, or why not.
Should the International Space Station go commercial?
A potential solution is to turn over operations (if not ownership) to private enterprise (Elon, are you listening?) Commercialization of space exploration may be anathema to some, but there is ample precedent for the government ceding control of publicly-funded endeavors to private enterprises. The Internet is the obvious example.
Why not give corporations control of the ISS? Are there drawbacks? Benefits? Which will prevail? Let's hear your opinions.
Sunday NPR noted that a few weeks ago NASA held a press event at Nasdaq's MarketSite to announce and promote "the commercialization of low Earth orbit," with astronaut Christina Koch beaming down a video from space to say that the crew was "so excited" to be a part of NASA "as our home and laboratory in space transitions into being accessible to expanded commercial and marketing opportunities" (as well as to "private astronauts.")
But there are big logistical and financial hurdles. (Even NASA admits to NPR that revenue-generating opportunities first "need to be cultivated by the creative and entrepreneurial private sector.") So leave your own best thoughts in the comments -- the how, why, what if, or why not.
Should the International Space Station go commercial?
A Commercial ISS (Score:5, Interesting)
NASA TV in a few years time.
Today's space walk is brought to you by the Ford Motor Company and Chase Manhattan Bank, we'll be back just after this break.......................
OK, we're back. During the break the astronauts exited the Skittles EVA hatch and are now working their way along the hull, Taste the rainbow!
No thank you, just, no.
Non-commercial is better Re:A Commercial ISS (Score:1)
NASA TV in a few years time.
Space Walk Today is brought to you by a grant from the Ford Foundation and the Chase Foundation, proud sponsors of this broadcast and the Ford/Chase Shuttle fund, which underwrites visits to Space Station to children of those who died in service to their country.
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NASA TV in a few years time.
Rule 34: There will be porn of it...
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Rule 34: There will be porn of it...
Zero-G porn may be the way to make the ISS profitable.
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I remember reading about someone who actually made some zero-g porn. It was on one of those "vomit comet" aircraft, not in space. Some sci-fi thing. I think it won an award but only ended up using about 20 seconds of actual zero-g footage. This was quite a long time ago, like the 80s.
Could be a bit of a nightmare to clean up on the ISS, and I hear here is enough bacteria up there already.
Oh god, can you imagine if one of Man's first space stations was lost to jizz-induced short circuit?
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>> Oh god, can you imagine if one of Man's first space stations was lost to jizz-induced short circuit?
That'll teach the engineers to use sealed switches *everywhere*.
Re: A Commercial ISS (Score:2)
Silvia Saint, fantasy girl of pretty much anyone who was a young dude in the 90s
Uh, according to others............ yeah
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Who is paying 20M to fly to the ISS to pay another $100 to have a hooker?
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That's not necessarily a bad thing [youtube.com]
Not just that (Score:3)
Also, it's gotten really moldy [mysteriousuniverse.org]. The call out to Musk is kind of absurd when he could just put his own mold-free station in orbit if he chose.
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Unless precautions are taken, anything human inhabited will be covered in bacteria and mold and other things in short order. We're very dirty beings - foreign non-human cells number more than human cells. And even worse, we need them to live - even if you get rid of all the bacterial and stuff on the skin, we still have our digestive systems.
So it will spread. And even
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You make that sound like a bad thing - but we're specialized multicellular organisms that evolved to live in an environment overwhelmingly dominated by microbes. Strip us of our symbiotic microbes and we'll die quite rapidly.
The problem isn't that we're not clean enough, it's that we're tackling the problem from the wrong end - we're trying to build a human supporting machine, and then deal with the inevitable potentially dangerous microbial contamination.
What we should be doing is cultivating a safe and h
Re: Not just that (Score:2)
The fact that it's really mouldy however might turn out to be one of the most important bits of science to come out of the place. We're learning that life , or at least unicellular life is incredibly adaptable to conditions capable of instakilling a human. It's an incubator for the sort of life we might consider unleashing on Mars one day, as well as a sign that many of the places we once thought pointless to look to for life might in fact be inhabited by extraterrestrial mono cell life
Human on Mars or STFU (Score:1)
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Radio controlled cars are faster and cheaper than humans.
Get out of the cave (Score:3)
Radio controlled cars are faster and cheaper than humans.
Faster and cheaper to get there but not to actually do things. Humans are FAR faster and more flexible and more capable to do useful things once we are there. Your argument is kind of like saying we should all just telecommute because we can do a few useful things over the phone. We go places in person because there are a lot of tasks that we cannot accomplish quickly or at all unless we are actually physically present. You cannot learn what it means to sail on an ocean unless you actually do it. You a
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Faster and cheaper to get there but not to actually do things.
Correct. But if you look at the project from first design to completion, robots win easily. Also future robots will have better autonomous tech on board so that they also can do stuff quicker. And because robots are orders of magnitude cheaper, you could send many of them, multiplying the yield.
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Humans are FAR faster and more flexible and more capable
Then we should build better robots.
Investing $500B in robot R&D will benefit humanity far more than spending $500B to send a human to fetch a bag of rocks from Mars.
Mars is hard (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps stop watching so much Sci fi and look at reality. It takes years to get there and in zero G that means serious health problems. And thats just the start - the mars soil is highly toxic which means far greater decontamination issues than going to the moon, they will have to stay on the surface for years if they come back at all which means huge amounts of food required (and water possibly , depends if they can melt some ice and decontaminate that) and huge amounts of fuel to power the mission. This is HARD.
Sadly just saying "warp factor 9 Mr Sulu" and being there in 2 minutes doesn't work in the real world.
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Perhaps stop watching so much Sci fi and look at reality. It takes years to get there and in zero G that means serious health problems. And thats just the start - the mars soil is highly toxic which means far greater decontamination issues than going to the moon, they will have to stay on the surface for years if they come back at all which means huge amounts of food required (and water possibly , depends if they can melt some ice and decontaminate that) and huge amounts of fuel to power the mission. This is HARD.
Sadly just saying "warp factor 9 Mr Sulu" and being there in 2 minutes doesn't work in the real world.
Yeah, while I like the idea of getting people out exploring, we need to get some robots out there start melting ice, growing food, and everything else humans will need to survive. Sure humans are more adaptable but less people are going to cry over the robots we lose while learning to do it right.
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We can't even get this ship called Earth right. Six million people in Chennai are essentially without water, and more in India face ultimate starvation because crops will fail.
So we think we're clever enough to go to the moon, to Mars, because we're so really great at taking care of our own spaceship.
I understand the exploring spirit, but what humans need to survive must be perfected here on earth before we burn untold resources exploring the heavens. Commercial sponsorship brings in the Space Hanseatic Lea
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We can't even get this ship called Earth right. Six million people in Chennai are essentially without water, and more in India face ultimate starvation because crops will fail.
So we think we're clever enough to go to the moon, to Mars, because we're so really great at taking care of our own spaceship.
I understand the exploring spirit, but what humans need to survive must be perfected here on earth before we burn untold resources exploring the heavens. Commercial sponsorship brings in the Space Hanseatic League, where fiefdoms will grow, and the meritocracy separates you and what you need to live-- like air, water, food, health care, and the reality of being human.
Groups of scientists with a specific focus produce a bit different results from massively corrupt governments.
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Groups of scientists with a specific focus produce a bit different results from massively corrupt governments.
So tell a group of scientists to focus on fixing problems here on Earth.
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Groups of scientists with a specific focus produce a bit different results from massively corrupt governments.
So tell a group of scientists to focus on fixing problems here on Earth.
They have plenty of solutions, no one is interested in paying, or sacrificing a little, for them.
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We can't even get this ship called Earth right
This is an ad misericordiam argument. Human beings are capable of a multitude of things while other things, including those things that are not good, happen. Just because on this planet there exists a government or set of circumstances that cause others to suffer, does not mean that some completely different group cannot figure out how to live successfully on another planet. The two different aspects of humanity can be, I know surprise to be sure, ran by two different groups of human beings. Just becaus
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/whoosh.
"You can take people out of politics but you can't take the politics out of people."
You completely missed the parent's point. We can't even manage _this_ planet's resources properly -- what makes you so sure we won't fuck up another planet? We are _already_ leaving garbage on the moon not to mention all the orbital / satellite debris / junk in space around the Earth. Everywhere humans go they pollute.
People won't change (until after First Contact in ~2030 as we will finally have proof that we have b
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/whoosh.
"You can take people out of politics but you can't take the politics out of people."
You completely missed the parent's point. We can't even manage _this_ planet's resources properly -- what makes you so sure we won't fuck up another planet? We are _already_ leaving garbage on the moon not to mention all the orbital / satellite debris / junk in space around the Earth. Everywhere humans go they pollute.
People won't change (until after First Contact in ~2030 as we will finally have proof that we have basically been operating as spiritual teenagers -- we are arrogant and ignorant enough to assume we are at the center of the universe; not literally of course but we even had those beliefs too for a while until we came to our senses after murdering enough people who dared to speak a different opinion. At least we no longer out right kill people for "heretical" beliefs -- we just kill their career instead.)
Put us on a habitat that has to be self sustaining and people will adapt and make it work (or go nuts and kill themselves, but I tend toward the former...). Leave them here on earth where the planet has such an excess of resources that we can massively over use them and have no noticeable impact on tomorrow, next week or next month (may start noticing it 1-100 years but...) and people will just keep pushing debt (environmental, technical, financial, whatever) off for as long as absolutely possible.
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You get it right by making the place of your origin self-sustaining, not abandoning it gleefully with rationalizations. Your "full stop" mentality means you boorishly wish to make your case, then put your fingers in your ears, flatulence cum lingua latine along the way, as though your command of Latin somehow blurts sufficient testosterone to carry your miserable argument.
This isn't about governments, as governments are artificial constructs that don't work without us.... and arguably don't always work FOR
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We do these things BECAUSE they are hard (Score:3)
Perhaps stop watching so much Sci fi and look at reality. It takes years to get there and in zero G that means serious health problems. And thats just the start - the mars soil is highly toxic which means far greater decontamination issues than going to the moon, they will have to stay on the surface for years if they come back at all which means huge amounts of food required (and water possibly , depends if they can melt some ice and decontaminate that) and huge amounts of fuel to power the mission. This is HARD.
Of course it is hard. And expensive. For all the reasons you specify and more. That doesn't mean it isn't worth doing. Everything you mention is a problem that we have no reason to believe cannot be overcome with enough investment and technology. Sure it's going to take us quite a while to get to Mars and far longer to do much more than plant a flag there. Decades if not centuries most likely. But the simple fact remains that there is an ENTIRE PLANET full of barely explored possibilities just waiting
Appetite for large public projects (Score:5, Insightful)
This is HARD. Sadly just saying "warp factor 9 Mr Sulu" and being there in 2 minutes doesn't work in the real world.
Most people advocating for more space exploration understand it is hard. We still want to do it. Hard just means expensive anyway, so really all you are saying is we don't have the appetite to spend. The Apollo program cost about $175 billion in 2019 dollars, and NASA now estimates restarting a program to send men to the moon would cost $20-30 billion with today's technology. So lets say going to Mars is two orders of magnitude harder. So $2.5 trillion over 10 years to have a man on Mars by 2030. I've seen estimates closer to $1 trillion, but lets assume massive cost overruns.
So $250 billion per year. 1% of US GDP, or a third of yearly military spending. On a program which will mostly spend its money on research and US high tech manufacturing, thus funneling most of its money back into the US economy. I'm perfectly fine with that cost.
How about making it a global project. The US has only 15% of the world's GDP, and funds about 20% of the United Nations to give one example of the US's share in funding another massive global program. Lets say the US only covers a third of the total cost, bringing the total cost down to $85 billion per year. I'm even more okay with that cost.
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Why not spend $2.5 trillion on zero-carbon energy instead ?
Because it is hard (Score:3)
Interesting choice of subject line. "Mars is hard"
Last time we sent a human to another celestial body, someone said:
--
We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard,
because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.
--
JFK
Re:Mars is hard (Score:5, Interesting)
This is HARD.
JFK:
We choose to go to the Moon! We choose to go to the Moon...We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard;
Yes, Mars is hard. But I'll wager the bet that Mars in the 2020s is easier than the Moon in the 1960s. We've had people in zero-G for 438 consecutive days, most plans take around 180 days to reach Mars. Radiation is on the order of career limits, where career limits involve a moderate increase in cancer risk not lethal doses. Perchlorates are nasty but you're in a space suit functioning as a hazmat suit, it's not worse than many toxic chemicals on earth. We need a lot of supplies and fuel yes, but we have experience from remote outposts, expeditions, military rations etc. that packing for two years is not really a big problem. On the ISS we have experience with food and water reclamation, CO2 scrubbers and whatnot. If you compare the Saturn I/IB/V to F9/FH/BFR the rocket itself is well on the way.
We have a lot of stretch goals if we want to make it more than a flags and footprints mission, but if you're looking at the capability gap I think we're good. What's been lacking is the economic will to actually do it, but SpaceX has done the F9 and FH so if they say here's the BFR with a fixed price delivery to Mars I can't help to think it will be used. Heck if the US won't pay it I wouldn't be surprised if the EU will, actually that would be hilarious. Here's a billion euros or two, let us plant the first flag. Too bad it won't happen on Trump's watch - there really is no time even if he gets re-elected - otherwise I'd get the popcorn for that one.
I hate to break the news to you... (Score:2)
... but having lots of money doesn't break the laws of physics or biology. Mars is approx 120 times further away than the moon. Thats the difference between sailing across the english channel and sailing across the pacific. Its orders of magnitude more complicated endeavour.
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Perhaps stop watching so much Sci fi and look at reality. It takes years to get there and in zero G that means serious health problems. And thats just the start - the mars soil is highly toxic which means far greater decontamination issues than going to the moon, they will have to stay on the surface for years if they come back at all which means huge amounts of food required (and water possibly , depends if they can melt some ice and decontaminate that) and huge amounts of fuel to power the mission. This is HARD.
I agree with most of what you say but think you over estimate much of the difficulty. Assuming good launch window, time to Mars in the transfer orbit should be around 9 months, time on Mars 4 months, and 9 more months back. Even going by the efficiency and weight of food and water as handled on the ISS, the mass shouldn't be beyond the capacity of a four person mission to Mars with foreseeable rockets under current construction. Shielding will add mass and needs some real world testing. Hardest part in tech
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Great place for a wedding reception! (Score:3)
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They should rent it out for parties.
They could add another module (for privacy) and sell Zero G Honeymoon packages.
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They should rent it out for parties.
Hey, a great Spring Break destination for rich kids!
Topless "Girls Gone Wild" Astronauts! Titties in zero G!
Start making a price list (Score:1)
With commercial enterprises and tourism underway to get into space, NASA needs to start putting a price list together on how much they will charge for using the ISS. You can bet your bottom dollar that if an accident happens in space the first thing theyre going to use is the ISS. What is the NASA going to do then? They wont be able to refuse but they can order them to pay compensation for using the ISS's resources. Whatever it is NASA charges those enterprises cant complain if NASA clearly announces what t
Pull a Willard Scott (Score:3)
He became famous for saying hello and Happy Birthday to people.
Do that on the ISS...for a price of course. Though Willard mostly said hello to older folks, the skies the limit (yeah, that just happened) on what ages would get the shout out.
And let's not stop there. Individually sealed pictures children have made could be taken to the station, held up to the camera with the astronaut announcing, "Happy Birthday Billy!". These messages would be recorded and played on the actual birthday. Afterward the pictures would return to Earth and be framed with a certificate of authenticity. Included in the frame would be a little screen which would then play the video. Again...for a price.
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At $4 billion/year, you would have to charge $126 per second for wishing Billy a happy birthday. If I were Billy, I'd want a more useful gift.
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Screw useful, Billy wants bragging rights.
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Billy's friend: I got new GPU with 250 FPS !
Billy: Pah, buddy, I've got a video of a dude singing Happy Birthday!
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...which sold for four figures on eBay even if his father paid five.
Before they de-orbit it? Sure! (Score:3)
If they're going to de-orbit it sometime anyway and there still is use for it I say they should sell it. Not to some douche who can't handle the thing of course, but to a company that has a reasonable plan and can prove they know what they are doing.
My 2 cents.
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If they're going to de-orbit it sometime anyway...
That should be stopped. This thing has historic significance. One day, despite the best efforts of ignorant politicians, travelling through into and through space will be as normal as flying is now. Just as the Smithsonian is a fantastic place that gets more than a few visitors a day, the ISS will attract everyone from geeks like me, the curious, historians, students and unenthusiastic kids. That is unless the same vandals have sent it into the Australian desert like they did with Skylab!
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That would be far more difficult than you'd guess at first glance. The ISS perigee drops a couple of kilometers per month, and has to be boosted regularly to restore it. Moving it to a higher/slower decaying orbit will render it useless because it wasn't designed for the longer orbital period. Maintaining it as a floating museum would effectively require a continuous human presence on it.
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Then raise it's orbit. I suggest L2 as a good place to send it. Fuel would have to be expended to deorbit it. Instead, expend the fuel to put it somewhere it won't need boosted every so often.
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Stupid predictive text!
I would rather miss one out than stick one in spuriously. I guess my phone feels the opposite...
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I think the novelty of visiting the ISS would wear off fast. It's not exactly a nice place to be, mostly a windowless, noisy series of corridors with nothing much to do.
I dare say that if there was much of a market for it the Russians would be exploiting it already. They have been taking up tourists for decades now, first to Mir and then later to the ISS. Even as costs have come down the number of people willing to stump up the cash hasn't dramatically increased.
I suppose part of the problem is that to be a
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$3-4b/year is "only" around $10m/day...
For a credible plan, let's start right there. It does not take $3.5 billion to run the ISS. It takes $1.45 billion [nasa.gov],[*] including experiments. The other $2.5 billion is for "Space Transportation", which if you dig into that document is the money going to SpaceX and Boeing to redevelop America's human spaceflight capability in the form of the Crew Dragon and Orion capsules.
ISS operations and maintenance was $1.1035 billion in 2017 and approximately that in 2018[**]. Yes, to all those significant digits.
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Chances are if they do want to de-orbit then Russia will take it's bits and start building them into its own station.
Best option would be to make up with the Chinese and combine efforts with them. The Russians might do it anyway once the US parts are burning up in the atmosphere.
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Nobody would pay (Score:4, Insightful)
It's 20-year-old (and more) technology, the management structure is horrendously complicated, and it has a bunch of infrastructure that is most likely unnecessary for whatever a commercial company would do with it.
But, before we even get there, what the hell would a commercial enterprise want to put humans in low-Earth orbit for months on end? What is the point? We know it's a terrible environment for people, and there's nothing useful that they can do there that can't be done by robots equally well.
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But, before we even get there, what the hell would a commercial enterprise want to put humans in low-Earth orbit for months on end? What is the point?
To prepare them for that trip to Mars, of course.
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Idea Received. (Score:3)
What is the point? We know it's a terrible environment for people, and there's nothing useful that they can do there
So what you are saying here is, Big Brother in Space.
Green-LIT!
If the Internet is an obvious example (Score:2)
Commercialization of space exploration may be anathema to some, but there is ample precedent for the government ceding control of publicly-funded endeavors to private enterprises. The Internet is the obvious example.
And all things considered, how did that turn out for the better?
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In most places of the world internet, aka know how, aka lines/fiberes is/was funded by: the government.
Or do you think the line going to my house was build by a private corporation 50 years ago?
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I live in the US. The line going to my house was built by a private corporation 18 months ago. My understanding is that the vast majority of our Telco cable plant is/was designed, built, and installed by private companies.
I know it is the case for our cable companies.
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Yes and if you read carefully: I wrote "most places of the world". The US is an exception.
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Yes and no. Those lines may have been built by private companies, but they were run on public right-a-ways for free (read subsidy). They also run over private property for free via as a result of locally granted easements (read subsidy). Often, they were given monopoly rights for the privilege of running their lines (read subsidy). Many times, they were simply handed piles of cash by the federal or local governments to run those lines. I'm not saying this is bad or that private companies didn't massive
Orbital Money Pit (Score:2)
The ISS is owned in part by several different countries, so NASA can't unilaterally decide to sell/lease the whole thing (although they could probably buy out the JAXA/ESA stakes without much trouble). A bigger problem is that the ISS is quickly approaching its best-by date, and is starting to break down. It's probably trickier to calculate depreciation on a unique space station in orbit compared to, say, a car on Earth; but the current monetary value is likely nowhere near what it cost to build and hoist i
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If Musk wanted to sell space tourism, the easier option would be to have people stay in the Dragon capsule for the duration of the flight.
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NASA would not bother buying out ESA or JAXA. They could simply limit ppl to a commercial section and that would be taken care of.
However, I think that Bigelow will add a BA-330 which can hold 6-7 ppl on their life support (and interior support more), which would allow several things:
1) move all sleeping spots over to the BA-330. That gives ESA/JAXA a lot more science room. That will sit pretty with them.
2) by adding more life support, moving sleeping out, and allowing up to say 14 ppl
Too expensive (Score:2)
The reason the ISS is not commercial, like every big research project is that they are much too expensive to be profitable.
SpaceX is profitable because they produce workhorse rockets, for the huge market of commercial satellites. They don't do pure scientific research.
The ISS is a scientific experiment. No company in their right mind will take it up. We can imagine renting space for private experiments, like for drug companies, or maybe space tourism for billionaires though. But I think it is already the ca
leave it better than you found it (Score:1)
Commercial, Yes - Tourism, Get Real (Score:2)
Until the high cost of getting mass into orbit comes down at least one order of magnitude, there won't be any meaningful space tourism. Count the number of people with more than $10B and there's your market.
Commercialization of the ISS I think has a real shot, especially when you look at drug manufacturing and materials science. Being able to "print" proteins and create metal/ceramic alloys/crystals with unique properties because of micro-gravity should be a hundred dollar business by the end of the 2020s
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Secondly, you underestimate 'tourism'. In particular, many nations are itching to get up to space and train ppl. India. S. Korea, UAE, Sweden, UK, etc. At 60M / seat (just to access), would be a joke. However, Dragon can take ppl up there f
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Commercialization of the ISS I think has a real shot, especially when you look at drug manufacturing and materials science. Being able to "print" proteins and create metal/ceramic alloys/crystals with unique properties because of micro-gravity should be a hundred dollar business by the end of the 2020s.
While manufacturing in space has always been a possibility, I am unfamiliar with any specific manufacturing tech that would even begin to justify it. Even if there were, it would still probably be cheaper for a company to build their own manufacturing space station than use a moldy one built from old tech with seals that are giving out, especially by the late 2020's.
Meh... (Score:2)
I hear it has a mold problem. Not worth the hassle.
The government creates the money (Score:1)
The government creates the money (no, it doesnâ(TM)t raise it from taxes, because where did we get the money from to pay our taxes in the first place? Our jobs? Where did our employers get it? Selling stuff? And where did we get the money from to buy the stuff? And so on... It all originally came from the government.)
So have the government keep paying for it, in fact, they should raise the budget and try to do more interesting and useful stuff.
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The income is backed by the production of goods and services (if there are 1 billion tables sold and 1 billion dollars of income and absolutely nothing else being consumed in your economy, a table obviously costs a dollar), so there is a limit.
Distribution of new money can become inflation (can't actually buy more--think like "gold standard" and you still have the same amount of gold) or optimization (poverty areas start spending, creating jobs and activating labor, thus producing things which are represe
Dunno (Score:2)
The US pays Russia for astronaut transport, they pay SpaceX to transport food up, Millionaires pay to get up there ...
What would you do more?
Ads on the outside?
What is the return on investment? (Score:2)
Should the International Space Station go commercial?
That's not the interesting question. There should be no principled objection to it being a privately owned asset. Sure it was built with tax dollars but it's not hard to envision it being sold to an interested private enterprise for an appropriate sum. The question is what could possibly be the business model. Private ownership requires profits. A research laboratory, particularly one focused on basic science, is almost never a source of significant near term profits. It's not clear what the business
Depends on content ... (Score:2)
... will CBS' "Love Island" by shooting on location there?
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I was just thinking along these lines. A studio buys it and leases it out for space/sci-fi movie production.
Maybe Wicked Pictures could even have a few stage sets up there. I'd buy that DVD.
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Zero-gravity porn?
I'm going to hell.
yes (Score:2)
If it's cheaper to let people die, corps will (Score:2)
The movies "The Martian" or "Apollo 13" could never happen if the ISS were corporate run. If the cost of saving the crew is greater than letting them die, corps will choose the latter. ("That's what the stockholders would want.")
Look at the plane crashes of 911. The airlines decided it was cheaper to quietly bribe the families of the passengers who were killed so they wouldn't complain ($1.8M was given to each) *after* the fact rather than: 1) publicly take responsibility, or 2) protect fliers by hiring
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Never, this is a corporate move (Score:2)
to leverage my tax dollars, corporations running ops in the space station will only profit on my tax dollars and then when things go bad walk away. And leave me/us holding the bag.
I also believe the first astronauts lost in space will be due to corporate shenanigans. There needs to be accountability that trickles up. Corporations do not work that way, never have, never will.
IF NASA can't afford it, scuttle it in the sun, or sell it to the highest bidder with IronClad binding covering it's end game. In fact,
Elon is not the saviour (Score:2)
First off, the majority of commercialism would actually be space training for nations and probably some real tourism.
India, UAE, S. Korea, Brazil, all of the ISS partners, etc have all expressed a desire to spend more time in space. Problem is, there are limited slots for both launch and habitat. Garver, O, & Bolden have solved that by pushing Commercial Crew. We will shortly have 2 manned launchers with 5 and 7 seats. In a
Pan American World Airways (Score:2)
If they do commercialize the space station, Pan American World Airways should run it.
must everything be commercial? (Score:2)
it costs money, so what? govs are spending more money on other, useless things, i rather have them spend all their money on sience, education, culture etc. these don't need to be commercialized.
Not for SpaceX (Score:2)
I don't know why people assume SpaceX would want to buy into the ISS. It's nearly two decades old, all 1.0 technology, and the polar opposite of a rapidly evolvable design. The mixture of systems, modules, and interfaces make even small changes require significant engineering. Unquestionably SpaceX can learn from it, and I sincerely hope they can match the ISS astounding safety record. Despite that I don't see how it enables Mars colonization. That's the goalpost they're shooting for.
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Whoosh
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You might want to consider educating yourself about the "morans" meme [knowyourmeme.com] so that you'll recognize it as a joke the next time you encounter it.
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But will they have Horshack?
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What if NASA and the other governments that originally paid for it, now leased the ISS for commercial use? You could get your tax money back over a period of years (well, at least some of it).
I'm no expert, but it seems to me like NASA and other space organizations should be working on getting out into the solar system, possibly starting with lunar colonies: rocket science, in other words. The ISS, IMHO, is now rocket engineering.
(I know, it's a satellite, not a rocket, but I think the point is clear enou