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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."
N*SYNC free since november 2000!
Its a shame it won't last...
You can't take the sky from me...
...and still the people of Earth cannot tell the difference between then and than.
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.
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
200,000 pounds? Nonsense - it is in space, therefore it is weightless.
Meet ISS who says she is being used and abused by men, and indeed women, she says she has entertained over 112 people in the last two years and has gained over 200,000 pounds. ISS says that all of these people leave after a short period of time and never come back. But she says that she still has a positive outlook on life and doesn't feel the weight is a problem, in fact she hardly feels it at all...
Well Lets bring out ISS...
JERRY JERRY JERRY JERRY JERRY JERRY JERRY JERRY JERRY JERRY JERRY JERRY JERRY JERRY JERRY JERRY
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Yes, maybe - but imagine that it took over an half century of space travel to get these guys working together. Ofcourse it is better now that 3 years ago - but just think if for example US and USSR could have co-operated before the USSR space program and the whole country collapsed. We would be much more far away now.
***plug: Here's an analysis of the slashdot effect.
I thought Slashdot posted a story about my ex-girlfriend.
Weight (force due to gravity) = -G*M*m/(r^2)
show me what part of that equation is zero...
For instance, an astronaut is weightless relative to the shuttle or ISS, but still weighs 200lb or so relative to the Earth. The apparent weightless is simply due to the fact that the vehicle and the astronaut are both being accelerated toward the Earth with exactly the same magnitude, thus no RELATIVE acceleration and no perceivable weight.
Another misconception is that object are easy to move around in "zero-g". Not so,... a large object still has the same mass as on Earth which corresponds to a lot of inertia so it is very difficult to get moving and stop again. The big difference is that there is no surface friction so once the object is moving, you don't have to apply a non-conservative force to keep it moving.
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." - Thomas Sowell
http://heavens-above.com/ has location-based information about the flight path of the ISS, among other things. Worth a visit.
"There are already a million monkeys on a million typewriters, and Usenet is NOTHING like Shakespeare." - Blair Houghton
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).
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." - Thomas Sowell
lbs (pounds) are a measure of weight. kgs are a measure of mass, although we use them as a measure of weight for convenience.
Mass is a measurement of the amount of matter something contains, while Weight is the measurement of the pull of gravity on an object.
Therefore, you cannot measure the weight of the ISS in pounds, since the force of gravity exerted upon it is miniscule.. so it doesn't really weigh 200,000 lbs.. it just has a mass of the kilogram equivalent of 200,000 lbs!
The ISS would only weight 200,000 lbs if it were on Earth... but it can be 90,909 kgs in space or on Earth since kgs is a measurement of mass not weight!
mogorific carpentry experiments
If we hope to ever estabilish a permanent moon base or go to Mars (or beyond) we will certainly be building upon the lessons learned in constructing the ISS (pun inteneded).
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." - Thomas Sowell
You wouldn't want to live in a space station for 10 years and go back to earth to find out your bones have dissolved, because you didn't need them.
zero gravoty might sound fun, but it's a killer in the long term
Station: World peace?
Astronaut David A. Wolf: Heh. Yeah, right.
Station: Well.... how about understanding between all peoples and religions?
Wolf: Damn programmers. Filthy hippies.
Station: An end to social injustice?
Wolf: Those pinko bastards programmed you for that! Disregard it!
Station: Could you tell everyone that a sentient computer in orbit has found aliens and carries a message of peace and love from the cosmos?
Wolf: We'd be a laughing stock! Look, why don't you ask for something that we can give you up here, right now?
Station: I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that.
Wolf: Uh-oh.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
At least at one point in 2001, NASA estimated America's portion of the ISS cost to be US$100bn (i.e. how much America will have spent when the station is completed). Let's suppose nasa is wrong, and that it is actually triple that, US$300bn.
GW Bush's propsed 2003 military budget is US$378bn, which is something like US$43bn more than last year.
And what do we have to show for our military spending? We successfully (?) bombed Serbia during peace-time. The Pentagon couldn't even protect itself from relatively slow-moving passenger aircraft, even when given a 30 minute warning. We bombed the hell out of Afghanistan, including first aid warehouses and wedding parties, and it appears that terrorist organizations still have the upper hand.
At least with the space station there are many nations *talking* and *cooperating* to at least some extent. That is, ISS does much more to make friends than the B2 stealth bomber does.
Why do we spend so much money to protect ourselves from enemies when making friends is so cheap? I think the ISS is a damn good investment.
-Paul Komarek
The above is a common misconception. Richard Zubrin's Mars Direct proposal shows how to send humans to mars without the ISS. Of course, ISS keeps earthbound contractors fat, and happy.
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.
What time is it/will be over there? Check with my iPhone app!
click here
...a Wolf 359 cluster of those!
If Bill Clinton had done his job as President, the attacks on the US would not have happened (at least not in 2001). Bill Clinton drastically cut the US military budget. It will take years for the military to recover from that. Thus, it is outrageous for you to blame Bush's 2003 budget for the 2001 attack.
While it is true that $270 billion is drastically less than $380 billion, it does not necessarily follow that $270 billion is insufficient.
Unless it can be demonstrated that another $100 billion would have prevented the destruction of the towers, the point stands.
George's current buget is simply the most recent figure in a long line of military bugets that can best be summarized by the word "large". I think you read too much into the fact that the quoted value was for the current budget.
The enemies of Democracy are
"player 4 hit player 1 with 0 stroms"
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?
you have some incredibly ignorant, right-wing views, my friend. i suggest travelling outside the US and reading some books instead of swallowing CNN and US propaganda.
i lived in denmark for 6 months - it describes itself as a "socialist democracy", which could be best paraphrased as "we look after the people first". seriously, you do not see the poverty and crummy state of civil infrastructure that are commonplace in certain parts of the states, you just don't. everyone has automatic access to health care, noone starves on the streets, violent crime is incredibly low. how is that bad?
the US spends more money on defense than the next 9 in the top ten list combined. i would think that equitable access to healthcare is more important than having the most bombs, wouldn't you agree?
No doubt about that, especially with all the miles they've put on it in just two years!
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.