International Space Station Turns Two

RedWolves2 writes "Today is ISS's second anniversary of Operations. Two years ago today NASA astronaut Bill Shepherd and Russian cosmonauts Yuri Gidzenko and Sergei Krikalev first boarded the ISS. In two years the station has grown to more then 200,000 pounds and has had 112 visitors."

Comments

Whats it for?

[packeteer]

What we need is links describing what they7 are going to DO with it. Im not saying its useless but i dont know much about it but am interested.

Re:Whats it for?

[Paul Komarek]

I don't think we'll know what the Space Station is for until we're done with it, which won't be for many years. I like to think of our space efforts, in general, as

1) Research Investements
2) Engineering Investments
3) Inspirational Exploration
4) Inspirational Art
5) Occasionally Profitable

and for the space station in particular,

6) The one place Americans have restrained themselves and not taken "unilateral action".

-Paul Komarek

So how long

[wmspringer]

So how long until it's the size of Babylon 5? ;-)

Seriously, I wonder how soon the technology will advance enough to make it feasible to establish a permanent station on another planet or moon, one that could be self-supporting?

Learning things that have practical implications here on Earth (such as improving crops) is pretty cool by itself, but don't you want to visit the moons of Jupiter? ;-)

Re:Yea..

[Keebler71]

As a taxpayer in something like the 30% bracket, I would much rather have my money going into the space program than into social security or welfare (including so-called corporate welfare).

Powered by NetBSD

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's not forget that the International Space Station also runs NetBSD. Take a look:

http://www.netbsd.org/gallery/research.html#sams-i i

Yep. The daemon went to space before tux.

Re:Congrats to World!!!

[netsharc]

Hear hear! One early morning I happened to see the station flying across the sky and it was amazing to realize that that little moving "star" was something that mankind managed to brought up there, high in space. For those who can't appreciate it, find out when the ISS is going to fly by and experience it for yourself.

Re:So what good is it?

[Raiford]

On the contrary IMO it is ! Granted this is my opinion, but it is a bit more than a populistic one (check my bio). The scientific benifits cannot be evaluated using the same metric as say an NIH grant. Sure you are going to spend a lot of money in space and what seems like trivial experiment are the things that you see or hear about in the popular press. The benifit from the technology development alone and spin-off effects are amazing. If you could compute the sum total of all research dollars spent on things that just occupy space on the university library shelves you would see that the cost spent on space is a small fraction of total research spending in general.

Is it worth ... what?

[MacAndrew]

I have opposed the ISS all along (gasp) much as I did the shuttle. The manned space program in general, including or perhaps especially Apollo, has been hard to justify. (The foundation of Apollo was not so much science as the Cold War. Note we haven't been back in 30 years and have no plans of doing so. Yes, it was really cool and as a symbol continues to inspire; perhaps that's the best part. But out failure to return suggests we're really not all that interested in voyaging in space.) Manned spaceflight has a great gee-whiz factor which I share and circularly develops our understanding on how to sustain humans in space -- in others words, men in space help put more in space. Yippee.

Unmanned probe programs from Cassini back to the ancient Mariner, on the other hand, have produced reams of data for a fraction of the cost and danger. The 25 y.o. Voyager program is still working, and they were done on a shoestring compared to ISS. That sort of thing makes me go "wow!" more than several people orbiting the Earth in a claustrophobic tin can.

Congress cries poverty at unsexy robotic probes, yet relatively easily goes for the big-ticket man-in-space programs. This is due to the public as much as the politicians; it's hard to care about a ream of data as much as pictures of an astronaut. Yet I know people in the industry who talked a great deal of how the expensive Shuttle devastated virtually all other programs, in a period when our interplanetary probes were at their zenith -- Voyager, Viking, etc.

This is just to speak of pure research. The greatest practical application of spaceflight has been the launching of satellites for communications, weather observation, and so on. If anything the U.S. lags in this area, as more and more launches go to rockets from France, China, and Russia. My engineer friend's American company has several launches planned on Russian rockets of ancient but reliable technology.

Certainly the people who frequent this site appreciate the power of technology. We're moving to a level of computational power, AI, robotics, etc. whose primary emphasis is to relieve humans of repetitive, demanding, or dangerous tasks. And if our technology fails with a probe, we lose a machine and not a life. Why not apply our emphasis here?

I don't discount the amazing achievements of manned spaceflight -- and it's a cheap part our trillion+ budget with lots of bang for the buck -- but I do question the allocation of these funds. I think we are many years behind what we could have achieved, and what the space program might have driven our engineering to achieve. As for interplanetary travel, I would love to see humans do it but know that unmanned missions can get there much sooner and return more information for less money and without the compromises forced by life support. Ultimately, who cares whether man of machine collects the data?

Thoughts?