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NASA Consider "Demanning" Space Station
Heartbreak writes "James Oberg, in an article for MSNBC, says that NASA is making contingency plans to leave the International Space Station without a permanent crew for up to a year if the Russians can't deliver the required Soyuz and Progress spacecraft to support it. A serviceable Soyuz is required to evacuate the crew in an emergency when the US Shuttle isn't there, and Progress is needed for resupply. The Russian space program is doddering on the edge of financial collapse after several recent setbacks, including the failure of Lance Bass to pay up.
What SF writer could have imagined that humanity's dream of exploring space would be brought to the edge of extinction by the financial irresponsibility of a pop music star? It would be a boring and depressing story, at best." Of course, some would argue that the space station was a boondoogle to start with.
for US Space Station. NASA should never have embarked on a "cooperative" project without having the wherewithal to go it alone should the partners have to bail out. I'm all for cooperation, the Soyuz/Apollo missions were great. US astronauts working on Mir, and Cosmonauts on Spacelab (had it lasted) are great ideas... but someone needs to be in charge, and capable of running the project by themselves if need be.
Reducing the amount of resources devoted to this project should actually benefit other projects in the long run. While the ability to study the long term effects of living in space has been very helpful in documenting what will be needed to support people for long trips, what other real breakthroughs have been made? Maybe now NASA can take a real look at trips to Mars.
Worst. Sig. Ever.
As a docking facility/point-of-departure, the ISS is a great (if premature) idea. As a ground-breaking testing lab for space-related sciences, it was a dud from it's conception; is there anything they can/could do on the ISS (aside from the ol' "how long can someone stay in space" trick) that couldn't/hasn't been done on any one of the NASA/Russian orbital missions?
To put it very briefly - as I already have (puts on fireproof suit) - the sooner we focus on the exploration of space, the sooner we retain the excitement and imagination of exploring, which is what we do best.
This wasn't just plain terrible, this was fancy terrible. This was terrible with raisins in it. - Dorothy Parker
I'm one of those people that didn't think that the space station was a good use of NASA funds to begin with. I am a space buff, having been inspired to promote the exploration of space by the late Carl Sagan, but I just think that the funding would have been better spent in different areas. Having a lab outside of the atmosphere has obvious advantages, true, but spending billions on robotic research, research drones to the outer planets, and/or manned missions to Mars instead would have been more fruitful, IMH-astronomy education coming from Barnes and Nobles-O.
I just dont understand why space flight is so expensive. Is it all the people working on it? Could it be bad budgeting of NASA, you know $400 toilet seats and $200 haircuts, etc.? Do they use some rare materials that are hard to produce. I just don't get it, can anyone that has worked around the space program give some insight.
Space technology is our only answer against all extraterrestrial threats, from comet impact to solar flares to asteroids. Without interstellar space travel, our species is eventually doomed to extinction. Therefore all development of space technology is a step towards survival.
Kill Trolls Dead. Here's
NASA is a wonderful place, they do accomplish a lot, but they have no business running what should be a civilian funded venture. These guys are holding up the works. They should shoot for core complete on the ISS and then sell it to the highest bidder. How much do you think Bill Gates would put up to own his own space-station? You'd have billionaires at each other's throats (always a good thing). It'll get the nitwit Delphi and Oracle CEOs to invest in something useful as opposed to World Cup yachts (losses 1 billion and counting). There are Universities and private materials companies who would sell their souls to use this facility. Better yet, get the government out of it completely and let a non-profit like Battelle administer the program. NASA should be folded imto the DOE and the Air Force, where it belongs. They've been allowed to be a road-block to the exploration of space long enough. Whatever is left of NASA can charge rent for laboratory space on the ISS and the profit will fund the space exploration side. Okay, flame away. [-)
What would Richard Feynman do, if he were here right now? He'd do some math and he'd follow through!
Stepping out on your front porch isn't a significant help to getting half way around the globe
So what do you do, climb out the window?
The ISS may not be the a literal 'stepping stone' in that respect, but there's still a lot of technical hurdles that need to be tackled before manned space exploration becomes really viable... and the ISS is (or was intended to be) a great place to develop that technology.
I say we find a way to make it profitable. Everyone knows that once there's money to be made development takes off (no pun intended). Maybe NASA should consider bringing tourists into space just for the extra revenue!
=Smidge=
the sooner we focus on the exploration of space, the sooner we retain the excitement and imagination of exploring, which is what we do best.
It's not really excitement that's needed. The sooner we focus on the exploitation of space, the sooner we will have a sustainable space program.
The neccessary capital will not be there untill there is obvious potential for profit.
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
But it's not developing any new technology. We've already proven that we can live in space for a period of up to 437 days. We did it on essentially 70's technology. It would probably be possible to do it even on 60's technology, if that had been the focus then. Going up to LEO and sending supplies every so often isn't a big problem in the scheme of things. Making a ship which can actually go somewhere is a very different problem, and something that we've never even tried to tackle.
What the Russian Space Agency ought to do is sell lottery tickets. The winner gets a ride into space (as long as they qualify in terms of health and being able to cope with the training). I'd buy a ticket! I'd bet they would be able to make more than 20 million per trip.
If the ISS were not supported by any more flights from this day on, it would fall from its 250 mile orbit in less than 3 years because it loses altitude at a rate of 2 miles a day. It must be reboosted regularly by either the shuttle or the russian module. If neither the shuttle is scheduled to service it and boost it ( which they do every time) and if the russian service module is not refueld by the Progress modules then the ISS will fall from orbit in a much shorter time than either the Mir took to fall or the US Skylab took to fall.
The very success of the United States proves that capitalism is the only answer.
But what if there is no directly profitable use for space at our current level of technology? Insisting that there must be doesn't make it so. If someone with the resources really saw a profit in space development, there's nothing really stopping them.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
You know its easy to say the space station is a boondoggle and not worth throwing any more money at, after all its a big target that has very little success to shield it from criticisim. I hear many people not to much against bringing the crew home and letting it stay un manned for a while....
So how much money does that save ? The current cost expenditure of space station is not the station crew. The cost of the crew itself is negligible. The majority of the costs are tied up in LAUNCH costs, a small additional cost (realtively speaking) would be the manned operations centers for station ops and hardware production.
However, if station is to ever continue and or be used intermitently these centers and personel are not going anywhere as they will be needed or they will have to be re-trained if they are let go.
Shuttle cunstruction missions would still be going up so no money saved there on the launches OR the hardware. In addition shuttle missions become more complex and less productive because in addition to any construction needs a great deal of time is going to be soaked up in housekeeping chores. The ultimate ability of the shuttle crew to even perform its construction tasks would be placed in serious jepordy if even some very basic difficulites arise in bringing the station back online after being shut down. So not only are shuttle launch costs not decreased they are quite possibly increased and are deffiantly more at risk of being unable to be completed succesfully thus necessitating another launch. Don;t forget almost all of the construction missions are of a sequntial nature and CANNOT be done out of turn thus a construction mission failure would push back all subsequent shuttle launches. God forbid what if it happend twice ?
So about all you really cut are the progess and soyuz launch costs which are very small in comparison to shuttle launches. So the cost savings overall are small and the risk of completly trashing the station are greatly increased without a crew on board to deal with failiing equipment as it occurs. In particular the savings to NASA are NILL NOTHING NADDA ZIP ZERO... the savings only really effect the Russian space agency and its not really even savings since if you take them at their word this isn't a matter of not spending money they have but one of not spending money they do not have. Thats avoidence of debt not saving money.
This is a classic example to me of penny wise and pound foolish. Folks we are past halfway, past the point of no return where station is concerned. The service life of station is listed at 15 years and the clock started ticking in 2000. Extending the service life is HIGHLY linked to keeping up with any possible issues that arise WHEN they happen and that is mostly an ability only a 24/7/365 crew can provide. If you think station is useless and start talking about going to mars instead I point to you the fact that station has barely been in orbit long enough to have even made it to mars and back and it has certainly not survive on its own ( and could not ) without periodic resupply which YOU WILL NOT HAVE ON A MARS MISSION.
Station is a non sexy reality of living in space.. its like the farmers that came after columbus, they made the trip but they got no glory.. just a hard as hell life making it on a frontier. Station probably can't even function as a stand alone outpost. It is reliant on hundreds of ground controlers for its day to day operations, something that simply will not be practical with a mars mission due to comminication delays of 20-30 minutes or more. If station never presents a scientific discovery worth putting it up there for it will still be worthwhile in the aerospace technology of long term survival in space.
As for the science in particular... people are acting like its a surprise that to date ISS has largely been a bust as a science platform. People core complete is not scheduled untill 2006 which is the earliest a 6 man crew was EVER slated to be on station... and it was always stated that science would largely be secondary until such time as there was a sufficient crew on board and the construction phase was complete. Right now running science up there is like running it in a lab before its done being built where the scientists have to do the damn building. So at least don't judge it as compared to a fisnished and established lab here on earth. Perhaps it will never proove to be as important a place of reasearch as say MIT, or CALTECH or the SERBONNE but so far it is the only place where microgravity experiments can take place for durations exceeding a couple of weeks.
Take a long hard REALISTIC look at station. It has its faults, thats given. But bailing on it now would be far worse than biting the bullet and forging ahead. The costs incurred to date will have to be incurred again if we let it go to waste, perhaps it is a limited and unworthy construction but it beats nothing and thats what we have if we let it deteriorate into a useless hunk of junk.
I don't ask you to be me. I only ask you not expect me to be you.
IMHO, carefully allocated government support of the aerospace industry is a good investment since being a leader in any industry is good for the United States' ability to compete in a global economy. The shuttle, the hypersonic "space plane" (abandoned), other launch systems, and remote planetary exploration are examples of truly challenging projects. "We choose to go to the moon... and do other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard."
ISS does not seems to capture the same sense of challenge.
The US seems to be losing its "edge" in the development of space related technologies that it worked so hard to acquire during the 60's. This has allowed Russia, ESA, and now even China, India, and Japan to gain significant ground. Similar things are happening to the US semiconductor, supercomputer, and aircraft industries. That is not good for "our" future economy.
Personally, I am very disappointed by NASA's decision to mostly abandon research on the air-breathing hypersonic "space plane" since it would have led to significant advances in materials, fluid dynamics, computational physics, aerospace engineering, and would ultimately lead to lowered launch costs. (It clearly had a significant utility for military purposes as well.)
ISS keeps many people employed, but a lot of those bright folks could find work on other projects.
What is the feeling about it inside NASA?