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

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

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.