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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.
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
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.
NASA is cheap. Today NASA costs a fraction of what it did in terms of GDP vs the 60's-early 70's. Even then NASA wasn't so expensive. In fact it terms of percentage of wealth the trip to the moon was a bit cheaper then Christopher Columbus's trip to the new world. Exploration of new boundries has always costs about the same percentage of a nations wealth since the time of the Romans. If we can not foot the bill for even NASA of it's current size what does that say about us as a nation-state? Commercial interests are not always the best ones to partake in dangerous endevors with unforseen profits. Indeed capatalism is by nature risk averse, capatalists put in the bare minimum to get the maximum return. Billionare playboys are not the way to fund a program as their fortunes come and go as does their proclivities. Besides even Bill Gates couldn't have funded the ISS, he doesn't have enough of his wealth in liqued funds to pay for it and it would have been too high a percentage of his wealth if he did. NASA is the way to go but the need to change their current very expensive manned program to be more inline with what they did with the probes, cheaper faster better.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
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?