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Russia's Role in the ISS in Trouble
Uhh_Duh writes "cnn.com is reporting that the Russian space program has fallen on hard times and is no longer capable of launching independent missions due to budget problems. The article touches on the fact that their annual funding is about 309 million versus the U.S. budget of 15 billion. They've also announced that they will not be meeting most of their future deliverables for the international space station." (corrected, the title originally said "IIS" instead of "ISS)
So is NASA planning on writing off Russia totally? Do they get to use the Internation Space Station later on if they get funding (economy improves, etc)?
Their money is probably better spent feeding their people and counting their nukes at this point anyway.
(/local/home/curiosity)-#who -u|grep thecat|cut -c 44-49|xargs kill -9
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I guess that this will louden the cry for billionaire space tourism. IMHO the russians should make that stuff their top priority !
:-)
Let the russians handle the tourist part, let the yanks handle the military sillyness and we europeans will do the real stuff
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
The space program has become ridiculous, between failed attempts to launch boy bands into space and new projects like virtual planets http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&cid=96&ncid =96&e=1&u=/space/20021210/sc_space/cyber_planets__ building_virtual_worlds_to_explore_signs_of_real_l ife it seems to have drifted far from actual space exploration. If they ever want public support for government dollars, they need to start looking at sending someone to Mars, or at least back to the moon,
Worst. Sig. Ever.
So aside from all the typos and joking, does anyone else have an opinion on the fact that the US is now THE power in space? Although the article mentions India spending $500 mil on space, it doesn't come close to our spending or our expertise. Personally I think it's a good thing. Space is the next military battleground, or so it is said. So what are your thoughts?
Friends help you move. Real friends help you move bodies.
To a degree all of this was just to help keep Soviet scientists around in Russia and not heading to the mid-east to develop nasty weapons. Further the military clearly had motives in keeping the Space Shuttle running. However now the Russians can't do much and haven't been able to move into commercial projects. Even in NASA the shuttles are wearing out with no replacements on the horizon.
The big question is whether all of these problems are a good thing or a bad thing. When you consider the BILLIONS AND BILLIONS of dollars spent on all this, one can ask what the return has been. (Say it in a Carl Sagan voice) There are plenty of good scientific projects. Further R&D on making space flight cheaper is a big deal. But space research itself needs to be seriously rethought.
Russia seems to be having all sorts of problems these days. I saw a blurb on CNN the other day about a Russian rocket failing to make orbit and falling back into the atmosphere, destroying the satellite it was carrying. I feel like we hear about something like this in Russia every few months lately. But it makes me wonder-- does the US have this kind of problem (maybe not NASA, but commercial satellites going up, or military stuff), and the media just doesn't make a big deal of it?
Really! They should go totally commercial - build a moon station and fill it with $20M/week tourists. One the infrastructure was in place maybe they could up the volume, lower the price, and start ferrying the rest of us poor schmucks up there too.
One of my lifetime goals is to fuck in space.
Originally (according to a 1998 issue of Popular Science), the ISS was to be completed by 2003.
If you think about it, we need more scientists working to develop new technology. If the Russian space program, or that of any nation, tanks, then those scientists and skilled workers will be forced to seek employment elsewhere, and progress will surely suffer.
went to spacecamp as a kid, and therefore an authority on the matters of the space program, I can say that until we progress past the "Lets see what this will do if we take it into space" way of exploration, we're going to wallow in this outdated space program for decades to come. We need research and development, not morale boosters. Almost every dollar spent on feelgood space is wasted in the race (which we still must continue to run) for world dominance and superiority. Remember the tortaise and the hare?
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Okay, let's go from a bankrupt space program to one which despises us and will steal every bit of technology it can get to reinforce a non-democratically elected regime that is in many ways much worse than Soviet Russia in terms of human rights.
Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it. -Samuel Johns
I'm a former NASA nut, used to research the Soviet space program, etc., and so was very forgiving...
This ISS program is a turkey, though, and we should cut our losses.
The problem is simply that the ONLY reason for the existence of the ISS is to KEEP PEOPLE EMPLOYED. First of all, NASA itself as a beaurocracy has pushed and pushed for the only mega-project that it could keep getting funding for because a beaurocracy wants to EAT. They couldn't get funding for more sensible programs like a shuttle replacement, or other more mundane but necessary things, so they push for funding for the incredibly wasteful ISS because $15 billion a year wasted is $15 billion a year they WANT, no matter what it's for.
If they can't have $15 billion a year for sensible things, they'll take $15 billion for non-sensible things, just so long as no one loses their job.
As far as the Russian's involvement, it was actually the PLAN to get them involved simply to keep them employed! The Clinton administration changed the ISS from a US program, space station Freedom, to the ISS, almost exclusively to keep former soviet rocket scientists at their jobs instead of following money to other, more threatening sources. That was almost the sole reason for it.
That, actually, made a least a LITTLE bit of sense. Sort of.
Anyway, you could argue that with the Russian's participation the ISS has been more successful that it would have been otherwise, even WITH them dragging the program down - because with billions thrown down a rathole in either case, at least this way it was a bit more interesting, and did at least give the US and Russia something to strengthen our ties.
This space available.
It's about people trying to improve their lot in life. Money is simply a medium of exchange that makes an economy work well. Read Mises' _Human Action_.
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The wrong idea that sending people into space is science and research goes all back to the Apollo program, when after the first landing on the moon NASA tried to sell subsequent missions as "scientific missions".
IMHO, sending a man to the moon was the highest cultural achievement of mankind in history so far, but as a piece of art, there is no much value in repeating it, and as nobody had the balls to admit that hundred billion dollars were spent for art, it had to be science.
There is plenty of important science that happens in space, but you don't need people hanging around for that.
Manned Space Exploration is about beeing there, and to feel how it feels to be there. It is about living there. It is about building houses, planting trees and fathering children out there. And cruising around with a cool car, if you are american.
After Apollo 17 all space programs world started to decline, and there is no end in sight. The Space Shuttle program started by crippling Wernherr von Braun's original design that had a piloted, horizontal landing reuasable first stage by using a cheap throw-away fuel tank and reusable solid fuel boosters, ending up with a Space Shuttle with more expensive payload than using throw-away rockets. The buerocrats way of wasting money by budget cutting. And every news I heard about the ISS the last twenty years was about budget cuts and delays. I heard you need 2.5 people just to operate it, and there are three guys up there. SNAFU.
It is sad, and I hope I will be wrong, but within a decade we will see:
- The ISS will be abandoned a finally reenter the atmosphere
- The last Space Shuttle will go out of service
- There will be no more capabilities to send humans into orbit any more
I just hope mankind will regain manned space travel before we will have depleted our natural resources here down on earth.Without order, nothing can exist. Without chaos, nothing can be created.
Exactly, and moreover the boy bands would pay for the space program through voluntary trade, in contrast to your tax dollars which are collected by force. The more the space program is funded through voluntary trade, the more the space program is representative of the market (the people) rather than government.