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

Coincidence...

[Eric_Cartman_South_P]

"In two years... has grown to more then 200,000 pounds and has had 112 visitors."

I thought Slashdot posted a story about my ex-girlfriend.

What do you want for your birthday?

[sam_handelman]

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.

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:Yea..

[Paul Komarek]

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

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.