Slashdot Mirror
Proposed Next-Generation Space Station
WallytheWalrus writes "This NewScientist.com article discusses the proposed next generation of telescopes and space stations. The concept presented with little fanfare by the NASA Exploration Team (NEXT) consists of placing a space station about 5/6ths of the way to the moon at one of a handful of local Lagrangian Points. This station would act as a springboard for constructing new telescopic mirrors, maintaining the telescopes that use them, and as a haven for future manned exploration missions. If only NEXT's budget was more than $4 million a year...."
Unfortunately you can't take all of NASA's plans at face value. They also have a plan filed to start populating mars in 2018.
The only website I read is Slashdot and its links, so when I see a visited NewScientist.com link I know that something is wrong
duplicate posting from a couple of days ago?
.... well again, that was dissipointing
I'm in as soon as they tell us what the frill the first one is doing of importance.
I went and hunted down that very link to find you'd beaten me to it.
meh, I guess I should have checked first!
This article has been posted just 3 days ago..
Although I actually dont mind reading about it again. The ISS is a facinating project. I believe its the mark of a new era of human development. Forever on will we have a permantly occupied 100% human-built living environment in space. Our children will only know of a planet that actually has orbiting space stations, like some of us dreamed about usually while watching star trek.
OK this is the same story as a couple days ago but I just remembered that in the movie Space Cowboys, a character wants to take the russian satelite with the nukes to the moon. Somebody says that that is a long way but someone else says that he only has to get half way and then the gravity from the moon will take him the rest of the way. Well now I know thatyou would have to get 5/6s of the distance before the moon's weaker gravity would capture you. Oh well, if you can suspend disbelief long enough to beleive they would send Clint Eastwood and James Gardner into space, I guess you can overlook the physics too.
Today's vices may be tomorrow's virtues.
WTF is this? The misleading Star Trek topic titles day?
You're making me earn my karma today, you bastards.
Okay, on topic: Am I the only person who really wants us to go back to the moon? If this space station gets built, I sure hope that they use it to act as a halfway point between the earth and the moon, and not as just a platform for Orbital Mind Control Lasers.
Hm. Can we moderate stories as Redundant? :-)
--GrouchoMarx
Card-carrying member of the EFF, FSF, and ACLU. Are you?
NASA should invent a time machine for the sole purpose of preventing slashdot duplications.
Looks like we need to teach some people how to use that new fangled botton in the upper right corner of the screen (the one labled SEARCH).
In other words: raise taxes.
---
Bush's Argument: Raise children, not taxes
"The lesson to be learned is not to take the comments on slashdot too literally." --Vinnie Falco, BearShare
If only NEXT's budget was more than $4 million a year... :)
Maybe Apple will buy them too
These are points where the gravitational pull of two bodies, such as the Earth and the Moon, cancel each other out, providing a stable location to position spacecraft.
I am very surprised The New Scientist makes such a mistake. These points are stable mainly because of rotation. In a nonrotating system, there is only one equilibrium point, and that is unstable.
ato
Well, at least this year the toilets on the space station will be ready and paid for.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
If only NEXT's budget was more than $4 million a year....
If only NASA could stay within their proposed budgets...
Seriously though, Congress wouldn't be so iffy about giving NASA money if they actually stayed within their budget. Now no matter how little they say a project will cost, everyone will always roll their eyes and assume it'll cost like 10 times that.
For already-moderated-discussion and insight, go here
Jesus saves souls and redeems them for valuable cash prizes
This is offtopic to moderate accordingly, but I wanted to point out that the game "Independence War 2: Edge of Chaos" used Lagrangian extensively as an important part of the game, as well as many other concepts in "real physics" that so many games ignore, either because the developers don't care or don't know. This was a point of respect to the game, but that it is huge, well designed, has a great plot and well-written character development helped too. It is, however, one that requires patience (Very LARGE area to explore.) and Windows (Unfortunately, it does not run in WineX at all.)
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
I thought Steve Jobs liquidated NEXT and went back to Apple.
Voodoo Girl is the bomb!
Can somebody check to see if Timothy has Alzheimer's?
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/10/2 3/210222&mode=thread&tid=160
well, maybe that last article was just a step in the right direction or something
....Deja Vous!
While the concept of placing a space station at a libration (or Lagrange) point seems nice on the surface, it's a very tough proposition in reality.
The problem is that the myth of a libration point as simply some kind of nifty stable point in space where gravity balances has been propagated for a while now. I've seen this mistake turn up in countless places, including some otherwise reputable textbooks. The reality is far more complex, and difficult to analyze.
For starters, the L1, L2, and L3 are unstable. That means that anything put there will tend to drift away over time. Not only that, but the L points don't even exist in reality - they are an artifact of a simplified gravitiational model (three bodies only). Once you incorporate the eccentricity of the primaries, and the effects of the other planets, you find that the L points are not so much points as variable regions of space with rather messy dynamical properties that we still don't fully understand. Oh, sure, you can mess around with numerical explorations and experiments, and there are a couple of series approximations that give reasonable first guesses at some particular solutions, but we are still a long way from being able to characterize and predict the full dynamics in one of these regions.
So, placing some thing actually at a libration point is out. But, as it turns out, you can establish periodic or near-periodic orbits around the approximate region of the libration "point" (so-called halo or lissajous orbits). We still don't really undertsand these orbits that well either, but we know enough to be able to have successfully put some unmanned probes out at the Sun-Earth L1 point (e.g. ISEE-3, SOHO, and most recently Genesis). Note that these are all Sun-Earth L1 missions, not Earth-Moon which would add another layer of complexity due to the influence of the Sun's gravity of the Earth-Moon system.
At present, the process of designing a new trajectory for a libration point mission consists of a fair amount of trial and error, and iteration. Techniques have improved some in the last decade (check out the work by Martin Lo at JPL and Kathleen Howell at Purdue on using dynamical systems theory to find transfers to/from halos), but it's still a lot of work to generate a finished trajectory that meets all of the necessary constraints. Trying to do this kind of thing with a manned, maneuvering spacecraft is going to be extremely difficult. In particular, any kind of rendezvous between two or more spacecraft will be difficult, since it's tough to predict where your spacecraft is going to go (very non-linear dynamics). Planning L point trajectories in real time really isn't that feasible until techniques improve a lot more.
This is a very active field of research, but there's still a long way to go before we're likely to be really ready for manned missions that do anything other than hang around on their own at L1 for a while.
Yeah. With your hand extended and palm flat. In your palm, a joint.
We are ALL aware at this point that timothy is the most-to-blame individual in reposts. Timothy has taken NO ACTION to prevent his errors. Timothy is dragging the site down. C'mon, to catch this one all he had to do was check articles posted in the last couple of _days_. I say its time to take Timothy's ability to post new stories away. It seems like a logical step to make him submit all article proposals to another more responsible editor. That would allow someone to 'check his work', and it obviously needs checking.
;)
Do it for the sake of the site. Do it for your users. We all want continuing improvement on the site. We can make slashdot a better place.
What we need now is a plan to mine asteroids.
Without this process/technology in place everything we do in space is extremely expensive because we have to carry all of our mass into orbit.
If we ARE mining the asteroids, or the moon, or whatever else is handy (and hey, how about not throwing away space shuttle tanks, that would be a start at least) then at the very least we can use the mass for shielding from both radiation and impact, but one hopes that we will also be refining steel in orbit so we can use it for the heavy structure of our various constructions. We all love aluminum and titanium, but steel is more useful, especially when you don't have to worry about building things from it which are strong enough not to collapse under their own weight. We just have to figure out how to make it so we can move them, or make it so we don't have to move them.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Many here have spoken of the "insane" "horrendous" "crazy" amounts of money spent on IIS. How many think that this money was spent *mostly* to make sure that no one died?
.005% of risk reduction? Unwise, because we lose the ability to pursue our dreams. We're deadlocked.
Was it a good thing to spend that money on? Is the IIS over-engineered in favour of preventing un unfortunate death? (Aside - How many of you, after viewing the interior of an Apollo era craft, would still go into space in one of those?)
Let's look at a little history. If during the 18th century, we had spent an equivalent amount of dough on sailing ships (with the (un)stated goal of preventing deaths (monarchs HATE to look bad)) I think we'd still be looking for our assholes with a mirror. We'd never have left Europe. The economy of the day would not have tolerated it.
My father-in-law was one of the Canadians who helped develop the nuclear power station system called CANDU. His stories are quite telling. His take on risk? - during development of CANDU the engineering studies required would fill a couple of banker's boxes. Today, those studies would fill a small stadium. With a exponential rise in cost. Why? What's the return? A couple of lives? A dozen lives?
My point is - we have tried to reduce the risk to zero and this is not only stupid, but unwise. Stupid because there will always be a risk. How much money are we going to let timid politicians/bureaucrats spend on that last
"Acceptable risk" is a term that has been lost from the West's vocabulary and it is time to bring it back.
4 million a year? My company spent more on that just implementing one database last year, which isnt even all that business critical. I think that NASA should do more of those pay for flight things and become more cosumer driven if it wants to succeed. If people want to pay lots of money to go into outer space, then it is worth spending that money to make it happen!
The NewScientist.com discusses the proposed next generation of networked workstations. The concept presented with massive fanfare by Steve Jobs (NEXT) consists of placing a workstation about 5/6ths of the way to the moon at one of a handful of local Lagrangian Points. This workstation would act as a springboard for constructing new business models, propping up older, failing businesses, and as a tax haven. If only NEXT's stock price was more than $4, fifteen years ago....
I thought Lagrange points collected a lot of dust, which would be bad for optics. Its not like you can vacuum that stuff up either. If you are 5/6ths of the way to the moon already, why not just go the rest of the way? A luna's gravity keeps the dust down and provides many other benefits. I expect Luna would also supply SOME building materials, like maybe 10 foot thick rock walls to stop cosmic rays, for example. The lunar gravity would be a disadvantage for launching other missions from there, but perhaps that could be compensated for.
If there are more informed people out there who see what I don't, I'd love to hear it.
The U.S., Russia, and other countries can't even complete and maintain the current Space Station on schedule, and it still isn't as functional as was orginally intended with the current time schedule. Though this makes for some cool Gee-whiz science and experience working in low/no gravaity environments, I don't foresee any nobel-prize winning science coming out of the International Space Station. We certainly don't need another one.
If NASA intends on building something useful, it should consider building a large space ship for touring the solar system for conducting long term research with a crew of about 100 people. For propulsion, it could probably use a very large array of solar panels and those non/asymmetrical capacitors that were recently patented by NASA. Heck, with the large electric field generated from the propulsion system, external radiation might not be the serious problem that it is currently on the International Space Station.
I've long felt that human progress into space has been on some form of hold since the 1960s. JFK announced that we would goto the moon not many years before we actually did. Then we went back a couple of times. Then not much.
The major achievement of the late 70s was the Space Shuttle. The major achievement of the turn of the century will be the ISS. Obviously these are significant achievements but why we haven't been back to the moon in 40 years is baffling.
I'm very happy to see a station being considered that won't just be in orbit. I hope it is a sign of things to come. I'd really like to see a moon base in my lifetime. I don't know much about space but I'd expect it must be easier to build a big station if you build it on something.
We need to be up there. In large numbers. We need private industry up there. NASA should be focussing on putting human living quarters in space and providing transportation up there. I think there should be some kind of space oriented general contracting agency focussing on getting as many people up there for as long as possible. We need scientists, professors, entrepeneurs, the media...all sorts of people to go up and see what we can make of it.
If space really is the new frontier, it should be accesible. I hope this is a step in the right direction.
Say wasn't this on Slash...oh forget it...
[n8.r0n] http://petesweb.spymac.net/
To the tune of "Home on the Range"
Home on Lagrange
Oh, give me a locus
Where the gravitons focus
Where the three-body problem is solved
Where the microwaves play
Down at 3 degrees K
And the cold virus never evolved.
Many people have noted that there has been a reaction to the story posted a few days ago about NASA putting a space-station at Lagrange points. This is good, I guess: Congress should consider carefully how the government licenses engineered systems, because it's an important public policy question: it shouldn't be decided by a backroom push from business lobbyists (Microsoft). There are certain things that bother me about this whole story though, and I'm going to try to trace the trajectory of it below.
.mp3 of Dan Burnett's "Sun Rings", based on detection instruments aboard NASA's Voyagers, Galileo, Cassini spacecraft, go right ahead: there is no copyright on it whatsoever. (Actually, the song itself is still under copyright, but Congress' performance of it wouldn't be...)
As far as I can tell, it started with this Newsforge story. The Newsforge story was excerpted and copied by an Australian newspaper, and from there, it was off and spreading. The headline chosen, "SuSE Linux now has the latest Exchange killer, but this time for Exchange Server", is not particularly accurate, but it did a great job at stirring up outrage.
From there it really started making the rounds. It was repeatedly submitted to Slashdot with all sorts of flaming, incorrect commentary - in fact, after reading a dozen different submissions, I didn't think any of them were even close to accurate. I picked one and posted it, trying to do my best to a) provide an accurate headline and b) provide an accurate summary of the issue at stake in a few sentences. To recap again: when something is available both in Quicktime and DivX, the Federal government gets no copyright whatsoever and the work is true public domain. If you want to copy, reproduce, or sell an
However, when the Federal government hires some one at MIT to create code or install Openexchange Server, there is no clear rule regarding the copyright status of the work. Sometimes the contractor keeps the copyright and gets to do a drop-in replacement. Sometimes NASA gets it. Note that this is NOT a BSD-vs.-GPL dispute, not by a long shot. The contracts are often designed more to promote current office-holders than to promote governmental affairs.
The time between when Columbus "discovered" the new world and Magellen circumnavigated the globe was 30 years. It has now been 30 years since Apollo 17, the last time man visited the moon, the last time man left low earth orbit. I think it's a great failure of our race that we've dragged our feet such.
To think that technological advance is blazingly fast in this day in age is misleading. We're not doing too well at hitting the important targets. NASA might just now be waking up to this, but it's yet to be seen if their budget wakes up to it. (Nasa funding was 4% of the national budget at the height of the Apollo program, it's less than 1% now)
So I applaud their very recent efforts to finally mention some vague goals away from Low Earth Orbit. L1 is a fine stepping stone, but Mars is where the public eye is. Nasa administrator Daniel Goldin had some brave words about the possibility of sending men to Mars in this decade or the next, but Bush put a bean counter in charge of Nasa pretty quickly to throttle cost overruns from the ISS.
What we really need is a president giving NASA a kick in the pants, and the funding to follow, as Kennedy did. Either that or wait around for private space exploration to become worthwhile, and we're going to be waiting quite a while in that case. Another space race? maybe China? I hope so. Because the current NASA schedule is anything but ambitious.
Why can't we mod articles as redundant again?
I am unamerican, and proud of it!
We'll call it Deep Space Nine!
This, uh, these things I bleive.
1. Trolling is awesome
2. Crapflooding is aesthetically pleasing
3. Wide posts force my browser to behave
4. Racism is mind-expanding
5. Racist trolling+crapflooding+page widening = brain explosion
6. Natalie Portman had sex with Stephen King's corpse
7. CowboyKneel sucked my cock once for a 5min perl tutorial. I had no idea who he was.
8. You are likely jewish and/or homosexual, if not black
9. Slashdot is comparable to a shithole wherein people take shits and admire them
10. Cmdr.Taco has a digital penis
Can we accept that? Yes? Woo-hoo!
Just so you know, from the parent's comments on propulsion systems it's clear that he is a crackpot.
-A physicist
In an era where government seems to be doing everything in it's power to render itself meaningless, a project like this will never happen. Our government has has lost any reason to pretend to have an interest in further the future of humanity now that we have no cold war competition. So, NASA will slowly shrivel away into insignificance. Until private companies develop an interest in space, there will be no going forward for us.
The sad thing is that with this development, the short term financial return will be what all space exploration is measured by. A private corporation isn't going to put the risk into a decade or longer effort to develop a space station or any sort of space travel because the risk involved in such a venture isn't worth it.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
I can't find it anywhere, but there was a story about the construction of a Russian module for the International Space Station that was being made out of wood to cut costs. Their budget was about 4 dollars, but some homeless guy pissed inside it, and they had to resand the floorboards.
"It took ages to get the smell out"
http://pcblues.com - Digits and Wood
So, this'll be like the NEXT Step in space colonization, right?
---- I'll take you in a Hunt deathmatch any day.
Does anyone think this looks a little like the (early) history of the Gundam series? Sure people only conjecturing about building space stations at the Lagrange points now, but in 43 years, when the Universal Century began in the series (by the building of the first colony), we could definitely be building colonies at the Lagrange points. Also, the plans for the colonies used in the Gundam series were based on plans developed in the 1800s, so the ideas seem sound. In addition, the Earth's population might definitely be at 20 billion like it was when the UC began. If I am is correct, perhaps we could (possibly) be living in space colonies in about half a century (to supplant the earth's population woes). Also if it proves true, it would not be too far of a leap to suggest one of the colonies might demand independence from the Earth. Note: The UN seems an awful lot like an Earth Federation inasmuch as (con)Federation means a league of independent states. If it shows anything, it just goes to show that Anime writers do their homework before writing SciFi! Just my $0.02.
Is any of this online that I could have a look at? future proposed NASA missions? (and does anybody have links to other countries bluesky missions?). Cheers.
But the astronauts might get carried away, build cool mechs and attack the earth! We better start developing gundamium now! I hear it can only be made in space however, so we will finally have a use for the ISS...
I think this would be just another short sighted adventure and waste of money (ie providing very little in return). What I would like my tax dollars spent on in this area is to like a previous poster suggested, was to mine asteroids. Or my true desire to see the Orion space craft built. With this kind of space ship we could expand a human presence throught the solar system fairly quickly and relatively cheaply. Just a thought ;)
Having figuratively seen Skylab and Mir tumble and burn while the Apollo gantries rusted in the sun, I now know their game. The $8 billion spent before 1 kilogram of the ISS made it into orbit more than illustrates the game. The game is to remain well employed and supplied with cool aerospace toys. As for the return of value to the taxpayer
The article talks critically and comparatively about "politically motivated Apollo missions of the 1970s, or the aimless, cash-guzzling International Space Station". This reminds me of the push for Network Computers some years ago, in which the very providers of software and hardware used their own high cost-of-ownership as a marketing reason for changing the installed plant over to NCs. If Apollo, the ISS, and the (implied and obvious) Space Shuttle were such fiascos, then of what good is NASA's next project? Irony abounds from this; irrelevant politics and outrageous expenses are the invisible bywords written into NASA's mission statement.
"This time the science will come first, promises Gary Martin, NASA's Future Technology Architect and head of NEXT." Oh, god! That's the very problem about the American space program: Science comes 1st; politics comes 2nd; and economics is in a very distant 378th place. The average Kuiper Belt object is nearer to NASA than considerations of economics and ROI.
Don't you think that we should put an end to this "jobs program for PhDs"? Don't you think that we should get manufacturing and energy returns from the public investment in a space program? Why do we continue to explore space without making real plans to go there to exploit the resources we find?
I have an idea. NASA should stop being some sort of "research agency on crack". It should be trimmed down to be a rocket agency, devoted to tranportation only, and more cheaply than what we have now. Its mission will be to lift cargo off the Earth, into 5 standard deliveries in increasing order of expense:
- Low Earth Orbit (LEO) is for temporary satellites.
- HEO is for long-term sats.
- Geosynchronous is for sats that require such a position.
- Cislunar is for reaching the Lagrange positions and Luna herself.
- Escape is simply a push beyond about 7 miles per second, in order to escape the Earth and reach all other points beyond (although to escape Sol requires about 618 km/s).
Once NASA is there to transport stuff according to rate sheets and schedules, then we'll see what private industry can do to make a buck off of manufacturing and energy.- how much money can I steal this quarter?
- how many poor people can I put into jail?
Reducing NASA to a cheap launcher has nothing to do with promoting white-collar crime and blue-collar imprisonment. The future of Humankind in space is Chinese. They will probably get it done before their empire surrenders to the inevitable self-immolation.[also misbehaves on Kuro5hin as Peahippo]
Every space station we build is one step closer to getting hilary rosen back to her home planet.
Unless this thing is designed to be as self-supporting and self-reliant as an Aircraft Carrier, it'll be nothing but a death-trap. Remember Apollo 13 people. Don't ever count on being that lucky again.
Escape is simply a push beyond about 7 miles per second, in order to escape the Earth and reach all other points beyond (although to escape Sol requires about 618 km/s).
Solar escape velocity from Earth's vicinity (1 AU) is about 42 km/s. Perhaps 618 km/s is the escape velocity from the Sun's surface -- something that isn't likely to be of much direct concern to us for the foreseeable future.
.... before we start making ny more plans.
I hate when people complain about giving nasa money. Most of these people are the same ignorant people who still think there is some magical guy names Jesus who will make everything ok. Well wake up people, theres not. In order for humans to survive we have to expand. (yes agent smith we are exactly like a virus) So if you want to stay on the crowded earth and breathe in the pollution YOU caused from driving your shity car to work everyday dont complain when the rest of us actauly want to live.
If it doesn't have Kirk and Spock, it doesn't have me. Besides, I liked it better the first time, when it was called Deep Space Nine.
Being redundant is when you post something that has alread been said.. When I posted this there were 2 comments.. after I posted it. There was mine and another post also commenting on this being a repeat.. yet I get modded down.. Gotta love /. modders... Thanks guys..
"A fool finds no pleasure in understanding but delights in airing his own opinions." Proverbs 18 : 2
Methinks if not because of the announcement by the "Chinese Space Agency" that they are going to the moon by 2010 (perhaps as early as 2008) and establish a moonbase there, with a longer-term plan of having a base on Mars by 2040, perhaps we won't even hear any "new ideas" from NASA.
Competition is indeed good !
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
NASA stick to non-complicated tasks until they can return to a more logical mode of operation. The ISS just seems like some sort of symbolic political endeavor. And such things have their uses, but for God's sake, can't such political structures be ground-based rather than going through the expense of orbiting them around the planet?
I wonder if they could have constructed a space based optical interferometer with the resources sent towards the ISS. Such a thing would have allowed breathtaking discoveries, where the ISS has just allowed people to be blasted by the radiation caused by the project's debut during solar maximum in it's vulnerable orbit.
So who was rejected in favor of this repeat story?
I think I can summarize some problems that others have seen, with no real good answer.
.... stealing! Then we expect to make progress, and when those with assets are more concerned about protecting their money from theft, we look to another solution: tax-supported programs (stealing!). Then, when those agencies, devoted to living off theft, turn out to be inefficient, we think that there is another answer?!??
More than that, I think I can point out the source of the problems.
As some slashdotters have pointed out, NASA doesn't fulfill its plans.
As others have pointed out, government agencies can't stay on budget.
These problems are inherent with an agency that seizes its assets: nothing is real to them; therefore they get nothing real done.
Well, what about companies? Unfortunately, as yet other slashdotters have pointed out, companies won't see the short-term returns, and therefore won't do this.
Hold on!!! I think we can now see the problem in a better light.
There are tons of companies, some with lots of free assets (like M$), and some with an interest in space (like Gates). Then WHY won't companies invest in this?
Companies look for the short term profits, because the long term profits are by no means guaranteed. More specifically, if they do invest a huge amount for a sudden advancement, they have the following to look forward to: even if they make the long term profits, they care likely to have those long-term profits taken away, either through governmental seizure, or revolution, or theft.
Considering this, one might realize that we are being held back by our own individual and collective lack of character. We steal (in oh so many ways, both as companies and as individuals against companies, and as governmental aid recipients, and as software pirates, and as ebay thieves), and then expect the government to mitigate those losses through
It was for this reason that I did not mind too much to leave aerospace engineering, and become involved in prepublishing technical books. At least that way, I was sure that I wasn't stealing or benefitting from theft. My market is real. But more than that, I started to realize that the answers to the technology problems are not always within technology.
In this case, I would argue that the answers lie in Christian faith. The more -- Christians first -- we start to actually obey those commandments (like, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not steal thy neighbor's wife, thou shalt not want to steal thy neighbor's cow or wife, thou shalt not steal another man's life, etc., etc., etc.,) completely, the sooner we will actually get into space.
Of course, if we start to do that, the nature of our need to get into space changes; doesn't it? Because part of that "thou shalt not steal" also involves such things as taking care of the environment, not committing mass-murder (by either terrorist or government action), having respect for life, and so on.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Or at least, why Mars as first/second choice ?
much easier and cheaper to build colonies in space. Either mine the asteroids exclusively or create a lunar mining base, but once you have a stream of resources from either, real-estate and energy is MUCH cheaper in orbit.
Also transportation is cheaper (just one gravity well instead of 2)
(this is the third time I ask the question in
Working for necessity's mother.
regardless of the ISS subject, this kind of thinking is counter-productive.
One should try to choose the best path at all times. Resources spent are not important, only resources you will spend, as oposed to your projected return and probability of success.
as for plans, one should always make other plans and think ahead, so that decision making will be more effective.
Working for necessity's mother.
Ya until we run out of hydrocarbon to fuel all those toys. More likely it is "Perscute other countries to sell us all their oil, until no one has any fuel left"
/.................../ \\