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A Brief History of the Space Station
HyperbolicParabaloid writes "A story about the history of the International Space Station, and its utility or non-utility for space exploration. One interesting insight: after the Challenger explosion it became obvious that we would never refuel a rocket with volatile fuel at a space station because the threat to the station would be so great. And did you know that to accomodate the Russians, the space station is in an orbit that makes it almost useless as a jumping off point to anywhere?"
I have worked at NASA since before the first shuttle launch. I will post in my journal some added insight to this after work. Obviously, I can not post from work.
What I post will be my opinion only, and not that of Nasa or my employer. Look this evening, around 8 pm central time.
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.
From Glory to Sideshow: The Space Station's Story
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
Published: February 3, 2004
In 1989, when the first President George Bush announced his plan to send American astronauts back to the Moon and on to Mars, he called the proposed space station "our critical next step in all our space endeavors." It would be a base in the weightlessness of space where big rockets would be assembled and blast off on voyages of exploration: "a new bridge between the worlds."
Now, with the outpost hurtling through space 240 miles above Earth and with 16 nations struggling to complete the most challenging engineering project of all time, the station has suddenly become a $100 billion dead end.
The current President Bush made no mention of it as a steppingstone in his speech on Jan. 14 reviving the call for missions to the Moon and Mars. Instead, he spoke of it as a site of biomedical research and an "obligation" that the United States had to help finish.
Mr. Bush gave no clear indication how, or whether, the United States planned to use the station after its prospective completion in 2010. With NASA focusing its efforts and its budget on the Moon and Mars, the station's prospects are uncertain.
"I'm worried that they're going to cut off the space shuttle before we have another vehicle that can fly," said Senator Bill Nelson, a Florida Democrat who is the only current member of Congress to have flown in space. "And that will drastically reduce space station use."
What happened? How did the station go from star to sideshow? Experts cite a litany of factors: cost overruns, design changes, new perceptions of technical risk after the shuttle disasters and shifting national priorities. For instance, orbital changes to accommodate Russia after the cold war made it harder to use the station as a launching pad.
The tale has no real bad guys, the experts say, but many false promises.
"It was always a steppingstone to the stars," said Dr. Howard E. McCurdy, a space historian at American University. "It was sold as all things to all people."
Dr. Alex Roland, a former NASA historian now at Duke University, said a moral of the story was that Congress and the public needed to work harder to hold the space agency accountable for its dreams.
"They keep getting trapped in their own rhetoric," he said. "They're willing victims of it. But as public policy it's a disaster because it feeds unrealistic expectations."
At the start of the space age, visionaries invariably saw outposts in earth orbit as jumping-off points. Dr. Wernher von Braun, in a famous 1952 article, told of a huge inhabited wheel. "From this platform," he said, "a trip to the Moon itself will be just a step."
In 1968, Stanley Kubrick's movie "2001: A Space Odyssey" featured a giant outpost in Earth orbit that was a way station to the Moon and Jupiter.
Finally, after decades of fantasies, President Ronald Reagan proposed in 1984 that the United States actually build a space station. It too was envisioned as a hub for colonies on the Moon and Mars. For Mr. Reagan, the station also represented a way to challenge the Soviet Union. In the cold war, Moscow made human outposts a hallmark of its space activities.
But Congress did not vote construction money to pay for either Mr. Reagan's vision or that of the first President Bush. Not until 1993 did a new a new vision for space take shape, this one emphasizing harmony over rivalry. That September, President Bill Clinton announced that Russia had joined the station effort as a full partner. Its giant rockets were seen as a boon for the project and a good backup if the shuttles should again fail catastrophically, as the Challenger did in 1986.
"One world, one station," said Daniel S. Goldin, NASA's administrator at the time.
There was just one problem. For the Russian rockets to reach the grand unified station, it would need a different orbit.
Shuttles flying out of Florida usually go into an or
Organic free-range music... yum!
Happy Trails,
Erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
Hmm, it's in near earth orbit to accomodate the Russians.
I thought they needed extra fans to accomodate the wind passed by the Russian cosmonots after eating all that dodgy Pizza hut grub.
Jumping off the space station will not take you very far very fast. You will pretty much just stay in orbit with the ISS. By definition, it is in orbit. If per chance you DID jump off, in the direction of earth, then it would probably take about a year or so for your orbit to decay enough to re-enter earth's atmosphere.
gus
.. if only.
do you people recall those many sci-fi movies and books made during the cold war which feature teams coined of american and russian heroes usually working together on a spacecraft or such...?
obviously, it is not that easy.
Aure entuluva!
Here.
I am one of many. My idea is not unique, nor do I expect my voice alone to sway you. I speak in a chorus of opinion.
The first thing I built wasn't a scale model of the Effiel tower or a working crane.
The space station can run longterm experiments in microgravity while we teach ourselves about working *really* high iron.
In my own life I too look at how things might be perfect all the time. But I don't expect them to be so. And so it is with all endevours. But somehow this one alone should stand out in singular fortuitious perfection?
Less crack more science.
The station is in an inclined orbit of 50 degrees, because Baikonur, the Russians launch site, lies at about that latitude. It takes a lot more energy to launch a shuttle to that inclination than its normal 30 degrees. There are also fewer launch opportunities. One benefit of having the station at a high inclination is for earth observation. It flies over a lot of ground. But it is an expensive way to take pictures isn't it? The station was a bad idea pursued to the bitter end. Credit George W. Bush for changing NASA's focus on it.
an ill wind that blows no good
Why doesn't NASA just go one step further and establish something on the moon. Surely that would be an even better jumping off point.
Rus
CPanel + Root from $35/mo - 10% off with discount code SLASHDOT
I enjoyed reading this piece over on Pravda about how America faked moon landing & how Russia is just The Best!(tm)
Well excuse me, but as the Russians are about the only reason we have the ISS in the first place, it seems a little stupid to go complaining about having to accommodate them.
One interesting insight: after the Challenger explosion it became obvious that we would never refuel a rocket with volatile fuel at a space station because the threat to the station would be so great.
Presumably, refueling tanks would be tacked on the ISS, not kept inside the pressurized sections for storage. Therefore, unless the tank violently busts apart (unlikely, a steady leak is far more probable, even in case of a collision), there's no danger of the fuel leaking out and roasting the space station to oblivion. More likely, there'd be a leak, frozen fuel would be dumped in space, and the tank would empty more or less fast, possibly forcing the controllers to stop the ISS from spinning and/or reorient it. There is no such thing as volatile fuel in an atmosphere-less environment.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Eh. And the russians keep the ISS supplied, while the US has put their manned space flight program on hiatus - once again because they managed to blow up seven people due to criminal neglience.
Really, get a grip, man.
Russian parts, American parts... ALL MADE IN TAIWAN
Ok back to work.
You need sarcasim tags? A diagram? The ability to beable to browse the internet from the familiar setting of a pop-up book?
So can you mod both him and me up? Thanks. I want to post more - LOTS more.
Whores.
nytimes.com/2004/...partner=GOOGLE
GO NOW!
Slashdhwores.
And did you know that to accomodate the Russians, the space station is in an orbit that makes it almost useless as a jumping off point to anywhere?
While this may be true, the ISS was already to be in a horribly useless orbit to begin with, Russians or not.
Because of a weakness in the shuttle and the immense weight of the station, the station is in a perpetually decaying orbit. That is, to say that the shuttle, each time it docks with the station, has to fire its boosters while docked in order to push it back to a higher orbit. If the shuttle doesn't go back to the statio within the next few years, the ISS will go the way of SkyLab. (The Progress and Soyez ships do not have enough power to push the ISS high enough.)
Why put the station in such a poor, low orbit? Because the shuttle can't fly that high.
A recipe for disaster if I ever heard one.
"We can't get up there right now because guess who doesn't have their own Shuttle"
No they just have the Soyuz rockets that take like 90% of all stuff to and from ISS.
Wasn't it NASA who kept on cancelling flights (Hubble?) because they could not guarantee the safetee of the passengers?
If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.
"Why put the station in such a poor, low orbit? Because the shuttle can't fly that high."
It's not in a low orbit because of the shuttle, it's in a low orbit because it's manned and therefore cannot go higher without being either in or beyond the Van Allen belts: in the belts you'll kill the crew real fast, outside the belts you'll kill the crew the next time there's a solar eruption that emits a lot of radiation. No manned station is going to be much higher than ISS without a lot of radiation shielding.
"And did you know that to accomodate the Russians, the space station is in an orbit that makes it almost useless as a jumping off point to anywhere?"
I'm sure the astronauts currently living on the station are quite thankful for this as the United States does not have another vehicle and they would all be dead if Russia could not reach them now that the shuttle has been grounded for a year. Should China and/or Japan enter into this endeavor from a launch vehicle point of view, being accessible is hardly a detriment to the utility of the station.
Clearly, the utility of being able to reach the station from Asia for existing missions far outweighs the utility of using the station as a departure point for missions that have yet to be defined. Besides, the station design is that of a scientific laboratory, not of an orbital drydock. Having already ruled out refueling, can you imagine constructing a transport vehicle in the middle of that tangle of trusses and solar panels? If both construction and refueling are out of the picture, what's left? A snack bar? Seriously, that thing isn't even designed to handle an espresso machine.
A lot of concessions and compromises have kept the space station from realizing it's potential.
Yeah, "concessions and compromises" like, say, allowing redundancy in the type of supply vehicles so that if, say, the shuttle fleet was grounded, Russian Soyuz supply ships would still be able to get supplies and replacement crews to the ISS, as well as getting them back.
Yeah, I can see how those "concessions and compromises" are a major bummer. Not.
If you want to blame that shit on someone blame it on the penny-pinching politicians who scaled back the ISS's scope to cut costs.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
OK. I have a question, that is sort of related, to this space shuttle issue.
What is terminal velocity? I mean, what is the concept?
If I put up a very tall ladder that reached all the way too... ohhh... low earth orbit, and walked up it, then surely I would manage it without ever reaching terminal velocity.
Help required please!
--- My dad's political betting
Thanks for watching.
-Brad
You sure they're a bunch of rocket scientists with cold, hard facts and plenty of good data and insight, and not just complaining because of a political agenda - ie; it's election time and they're running a slurry of "look how the conservatives are wasting our money for broken stuff when they could be giving prescriptions to old people" articles?
Who cares if its a jumping off point for anywhere? It was never intended to be, AFAIK. It was never meant to be an interplanetary gas station. It's an orbiting research laboratory, plain and simple.
It's value to the scientific community is tremendous, it allows a ton of research into weightlessness, living in space, etc. That's its purpose.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Space development is a big bootstrap problem, and the only way to get a virtuous cycle of development and payoff going is to prime the pump with lots of cash. What happened was that funding levels stayed at a level below "critical mass", but have been maintained long enough that it still adds up to a lot of money. Unfortunatly it's been frittered away in a long string of abortive, wasted efforts (Skylab, Freedom, NASP, X-33, X-34, SLI, OSP, etc etc.) If they had just STUCK with any one of those long enough to actually make it work, instead of abandoning it as soon as the first development challenge came along, MAYBE we'd actually be somewhere by now...
As for the decision to work with the Russians on ISS; if we hadn't done that there wouldn't BE a space station. We'd still be on the ground. Notice how the Russians currently supply: the core module, propulsive attitude control, orbit maintenance, life support functions (O2, CO2 removal, water, food, sleep locations), crew transport, the EVA equipment being used, a major part of the power, basic telecom, and some other things. The U.S. supplies: a mostly unused lab module (complete with air leak), some power, a $700 million connector node, high data-rate comm and a lot of paperwork requirements.
As for NASA's progressively more and more conservative attitude; that spells the death knell for actually doing anything. If you can't transfer fuel in space because it might be danegrous, then you won't actually ever go anywhere beyond LEO or maybe the Moon (in limited cases). Captain Obvious says: space has risks. You have to just learn how to deal with them, not just sit back and decree you won't ever run them. At least not if you want to actually accomplish something... duh.
Human genome = 3 billion base pairs = 6 GBit. Windows + Office = 20 Gbit. Which is more impressive?
Bitch and moan about the influence of the Russians, but if it weren't for them the space station would have been abandoned by now.
The Russians *do* have a shuttle, or at least they did, but they never scraped up enough money to fly it. What ever happened to Buran?
(I'll be mildly amused if it turns out to be Russians who create the materials needed for an orbital tower. Hmmm, it *was* their idea....)
This is what happens when governments stick their oars in on scientific projects, you end up with something completely useless when originally it would have been very useful. As scientists we should learn to become a lot more force full and point out to the politicians how messing about with certain projects will destroy them.
Politics has no place in science.
To escape the Earth's gravity and not be forcibly pulled back, you would have to leave at about 25,000 MPH, or about 7 mi/sec. That's a lot of energy to move a moon shuttle from Earth orbit. Note that it took the entire, very large third stage of the Saturn V rocket just to move the LM and CSM to the moon. If you have small payloads, like space probes, it's not so bad. But economically, there's a way to spread things around.
A space station still works great as a waypoint. It just wouldn't be practical to start your adventure to anywhere except the Moon from there. So, create a new shuttle that can better move men and supplies with much greater abort options (hint: Fly the shuttle by a new next-gen plane to near-space [62 mi) then pop the bastard from there with far less needed fuel and still keep an abort option as both orbiter and booster plane are glideable or have powered-flight capacity).
Such a station would indeed have at least two (backups, remember?) moon shuttles, flyable only in space. What? Fuel? Who says you need to use liquid fuels? Try solids that can be lit and relit in space. The fuel cores could be sent on shuttles without as much worry about volatility than liquids. There is one way to stop a burn in space--stop the oxidizer (you're in vacuum, figure it out). Hypogolic fuels (ones that dont need an igniter--they burn when two substances touch) are still a nice bet as well, and may be safer to upload in separate trips.
Let the moon itself be the fuel depot, optionally--there is probably a way to produce what is needed there.
From the moon, with its puny 1.47 mi/sec escape velocity, trips to anywhere work great and require less energy to achieve. Most importantly, astronauts would have TWO in-space safe-haven return locales in case things get ratty somewhere along the Earth-Moon transits.
Once you're in route to Mars, however, you better be able to make oxygen from a can of Spam, because rescue options would be pretty sparse.
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
It's real easy...paste the title into Google News search and it always comes up.... link
If its is too undermanned for science experiements and in a too inclined orbit for moon launches, perhaps there is another use for this white elephant.
"And did you know that to accomodate the Russians, the space station is in an orbit that makes it almost useless as a jumping off point to anywhere?"
Since THIS space station was never intended to be a "jumping off point", why is that a problem? Since the Russian capsule is the only way to get people there and back for now, accomodating thems seems like a good decision at this point. If we get to build a space station intended for "jumping off" in the future, it will be built in the required orbit, and I hope Russia, Japan, China, and lots of European countries join in on it!
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced. - Geek's corollary to Clarke's law
True, and now they have a monopoly in ISS Service and Transport, Inc.
...and he grinned, like a fox eating shit out of a wire brush.
This was posted after another Google mirror link (by the way, you can replace Google with slashdot in the bar), which was given a -1 for Redundancy... but this guy gets 4 more points for a SCO Signature? Yeah, this place is pretty fair.
Why are you assigning "Moon is Best" to "Escape Velocities"? That's always going to return true, you know.
For instance, orbital changes to accommodate Russia after the cold war made it harder to use the station as a launching pad.
Originally the ISS was going to serve as the garage for exploration of the solar system. But, political reasons for collaborating with the russians ("let's be friends to show everyone that the cold war is over") forced to change the orbit four out of the sola system plane to let the russians, from their higher latitude launch pads, reach it and help a bit. The ISS became from one of the greatest scientific endevours to one of the most expensive diplomatic tokens ever.
"There is no teacher but the enemy."-Mazer Rackham
you forgot to add "*reprinted without permission from.... [source]"
How does the Challenger explosion connect with orbital refuelling? I suppose the ISS is a lousy place to store SRBs on cold days, but (a) the SRBs are thrown away before you reach orbit, and (b) one day in vacuum is as cold as another. Naturally fuel storage and transfer wouldn't take place inside the habitat, anymore than the corner gas station keeps its gasoline in jugs stacked in the office. Of course, the gas station is surrounded by oxidizer and the space station isn't, so fuel safety is a somewhat different proposition in orbit....
Why are people questioning the energy cost of hauling fuel and interplanetary spacecraft to the moon for launching? That's the dumb way to do it. You make the fuel and the spacecraft *on the moon*. The whole point of starting from orbit, or from the moon, is to avoid hauling hundreds of tons of stuff up from ground level in the first place. It's been the plan for 50 years or more.
1) Once the U.S. congress cut the funding for the habitaion module, the ISS officially became an orbiting pork barrel. It takes 2.5 people to maintain the station, and with 3 aboard that's .5 peopple for science. The hab module would have accomodated 7 scientists.
2) On fuel-in-space and There is no such thing as volatile fuel in an atmosphere-less environment.
Let's keep looking at this: Volatility doesn't mean simply explosive, and it is true that fuel requires an oxidizer in space, however, here are some problems:
a) Fuel is "sticky". Not sticky like glue, but when it comes into contact with things in microgravity, it stays there.
b) Fuel is caustic and corrosive. There are so many things that we do not want fuel sticking to, such as gaskets, joints of mechanisms, windows, experiments, instruments, and space suits because
c) Much of the fuel for satellites and such are not simply liquid oxigen and nitrogen, but stuff like Hydrazine, which has too many immediate dangers to list. In short, a small amount coming in through an air lock after an EVA could asphyxiate everyone on the station, be ignited by static, etc.
d) In case all that wasn't enough - just how can we approach the ISS if there is a cloud of fuel around it*? We can't fire any thrusters (with their own oxidizers) into a cloud like that.
Ok I'll zip it now.
kulakovich
* Yes, I know, there is already a cloud of bits and pieces and ice and etc. But that is nothing compared to a fuel leak.
I have worked at [company name] since before the first [product name]. I will post in [promotion location] some added insight to this after work. Obviously, I can not post from work.
What I post will be my opinion only, and not that of [company name] or my employer. Look this evening, around [promotion event time].
Okay, Mir was, towards the end, practically falling apart. But... it worked. It had guidance systems, attitude control, life support, power systems, everything you need for a long-term space vehicle. It also had mould, dents, leaks and a shredded solar panel, but we're not that bothered about that.
Start building the ISS as a set of add-on modules to Mir. Take advantage of Mir's facilities until you get the chance to replace them: run off the existing power bus until you get the replacement solar panels sent up (or, preferably, some RTGs). Use Mir's life support until the air recycler is installed. etc.
Eventually the new modules will be supplying all the functionality and the old parts of Mir will be unused. At which stage, you can either use them as living space, or depressurise them and mothball them. Maybe one day you can recycle the raw materials; even as scrap, Mir was ludicrously valuable.
But no, Mir went down in flames and the ISS went down in budget. All for annoying political reasons. IMO it's highly unlikely that the ISS will ever do anything useful. By the time it gets large enough, the commercial stations will be eclipsing it.
Progress ship _can_ support the station for as long as needed. They are doing it for more than a year already (remember that the last Shuttle flew more than a year ago). I guess you're confused by how much propellant can Progress carry vs. Shuttle. Of course Shuttle can carry more, but that only means that you need more Progresses than Shuttles to support the station's orbit.
One interesting insight: after the Challenger explosion it became obvious that we would never refuel a rocket with volatile fuel at a space station because the threat to the station would be so great.
Volatile fuels like, say, liquid hydrogen and oxygen? Yeah, that's scary. Really 'volatile' stuff.
Everyone who saw Challenger's loss--remember what it looked like? Try here if not. No huge fireball (for the size of the vehicle, anyway) like you'd expect from truly 'volatile' fuels. There was a good amount of fire, but I believe most of the fuels were converted to steam. Even the fuel in the solid rocket boosters (ammonium perchlorate and aluminum) isn't what I'd call 'volatile'--it's designed to burn steadily. The hydrazine used for the OMS engines (and RCS thrusters, IIRC) is another issue--hypergolic fuels are quite dangerous (remember those old WWII videos of German V-2 rockets falling over and exploding?), but there's not all that much of them.
At any rate, the cause of Challenger's loss was the destruction of the external tank's structural integrity, which allowed the liquid hydrogen (and oxygen) to escape and ignite. I'm relatively certain the ISS already has LOX and liquid H2 tanks for the fuel cells (unless all power comes from the solar panels) and oxygen/water generation. What's the issue?
Granted, if we're talking about the shuttle, it doesn't use its main engines after orbit insertion (as the fuel tank is jettisoned), so all it's got is the OMS engines, and like I said--hydrazine is nasty shit. I can understand not wanting a bunch of it stored on the station. Linking that to Challenger doesn't make sense, though--it wasn't hydrazine that killed them.
Of course, they could park a few tanks a safe distance away if they could keep them in the same orbit. Maybe at the L1 point that would work, but we're into a whole new argument there...
--Ty
"Pravda" is Russian for 'truth', the funny thing is that this paper is the most untrustworthy and only serves as goverment propaganda!
I am a viral sig. Please help me spread.
> It's value to the scientific community is tremendous, it allows a ton of research into weightlessness, living in space, etc.
Prove it. Cite the scientific papers that are streaming out of the ISS research labs. You can't, because there are practically none.
Forgive me for sounding thick, but in space so long as you keep the fuel and oxidizer separate, where's the explosion risk?
http://blog.nexusuk.org
It is widely known, but little commented on, that the manned space program being conducted by the U.S. and Russia is a collosal waste of money that is producing little in the way of meaningful scientific or technological research. Rather the I.S.S. is primarily justified within the policy making organs of the U.S. government as a means to keep experienced Russian engineers employed and thus minimize the risk of them being employed by a nation with a desire for interconinental balistic missile technology and who are reckless enough to use it.
Basically, the manned space program in the U.S. and the USSR has become a giant welfare project for aerospace engineers.
While in the short term this is a cheap way to slow the inevitable acquisition of nuclear weapons and their delivery systems by increasinlg underdeveloped and recklessly led nation states, in the long run it is a losing game:
First, because the spread of technology is inevitable, and secondly because the field of aerospace engineering is distorted, with many more engineers seeking training in schools than there is a true economic demand for. These people are not only diverted from turning their talents to more productive areas, but later in life will lobby to keep the pork coming.
President Bush's proposals are an even bigger waste. I wouldn't mind if they were to be funded by voluntary donations, but the thought that people will be taxed to fund this boondogle when they already have to work so hard to make ends meet irritates me. I would like to see government getting out of the fields of scientific research & space travel. Let us keep our tax dollars and spend it on the charities that we want to fund. Let us pick our priorities. I think the results would be quite surprising to people who think that government support is required for these projects.
"...the Soyuz rockets that take like 90% of all stuff to and from ISS."
This is a significant problem. According to this NPR feature, bringing things DOWN is harder that bringing them UP, and some kind of shuttle (not necesarily manned) is the only way to that. The Soyuz does not have nearly enough RETURN capacity for what they want to do in the future.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced. - Geek's corollary to Clarke's law
From the NYT reading regarding
the space station several leitmotifs
emerge:
Manned spaceflights are too danegrous
Manned spaceflights are too expensive
We tend to believe that we have technology
to make and orbital rendevezvous a trip
to the groceries but a simple angle shift
causes mayhem with our puny technology
The mars mission is succesful because our
communication and robotic technologie is ripe
for the endeavour at hand(including co$t).
The whole equation brakes with human cargo.
Our rocket and materials technology makes each
human space flight a dangerous proposition
- these are not the droids you are looking for -
Click
:-(
ISS was never intended to be a "jumping off point" to anywhere. The move to 51.6 to accomodate the russians was a political move. Thank Clinton, it was his bright idea to bring in the russians as full partners in the hope their missle techs wouldn't go somewhere else...like say Iran. Given ISS' mission (microgravity research, NOT a spacedock quit watching star trek) any orbit will do, but KSC's due east 28 degrees would be best case in terms of payload.
I actually turned down a chance to tour ISS elements in the processing facility.
Amusing ISS historical anecdote: While preparing to close the payload bay doors for the launch of Destiny (the US lab), it was discovered the camera on the elbow of the shuttle's robot arm came within an *inch* of the labs hull. Much hemming and hawwing, and I forget what the final solution was, but I think it's a little amusing that after all the billions had been spent, all the test had been done, they got an "awwwwwwcrap" at literally the 11th hour.
Mix the failings of Usenet with the shortcomings of the World Wide Web and the result is slashdot.
I dont think the ISS orbit was chosen to accomodate Russians.
It takes the least amount of fuel to put something in orbit if said orbit at the the same angle as lattitude of the place you are launching from.
51.6 degrees (ISS orbit) is lattitude of Baikonur, Russian space port. The space station was started by launching large building blocks by Russian D1 boosters. I do not think there is an equivalent to those in US. So the choice of orbit was natural to maximize the available technology.
One Buran is currently located in Gorky Park as a tourist attraction.
Second Buran was stored in it's hangar on Baikonur, where it was to be sold at an auction. 2 years ago, right after the announcement that it was going to be sold, the roof of hangar has collapsed burying Buran. My hat's off to people who did it.
thats what NASA stands for no ?
I have always failed to understand why the ISS was built in the first place! It is like a large floating airport in the middle of the ocean! (take some time to see how aptly the analogy fits)
If it was supposed to be a "jumping off point" for space shuttles, as the senior Mr. Bush had envisaged, then the best location for it would have been on the Moon. In any case, I dunno how much reduction in size of the spacecraft or an increase in its speed could be gained by having a refueling base so close to the earth!
The energy and the money spent on this white elephant would have been better utilized in setting up a base on the moon!
But then of course, hindsight is a wonderful thing!
"Fund the stuff *I* want instead. Oh, and people who work in careers I don't approve of are unproductive."
On a Mars trip you'd be carrying hundreds of tons of fuel for the return journey, and quite a few tons of supplies of various kinds. That alone makes a half-decent radiation shield for the trip from Earth to Mars... shielding on the way back would be more complicated.
The Buran was basically a shuttle clone anyway, only with minor additional Russian "Wow I never would have thought of THAT!" features. A while ago one was sold on Ebay, but it had no computers, and was basically gutted.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Heh. It would have ended up as part of the Boeing Museaum of flight or the Smithsonian Air and Space Museaum I bet.
Since I live near one of those, I am 50% disappointed.
Actually, this site is run by some ex-staff of the eponymous paper after its collapse. They are no more overtly pro-Communist, and they're hardly pro-government, even if they declare their stance as "pro-Russian". In fact, they're as independent as you can get.
Here's what they tell about themselves.
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
Given its high orbital inclination, ISS isn't the ideal first stop, but it's still possible to go places. In a simulator, I've gone from ISS's orbit to the moon without changing inclination. It looks scary, but really it's no worse than any other trans-lunar-injection. As for fuel cost, well, the simulator gives you a huge fuel budget but the non-coplanar transfer orbit is still WAY cheaper than changing inclination before heading out! I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the cost is the same.
For a lunar-orbit-rondezvous mission, I can see one potential problem: the possibility of having to wait longer for a launch window from the surface to the command module.
All that said, I kind of like GWB's plan of jumping out of our commitment to ISS as soon as possible. Consider it an experiment in international space cooperation, more than a scientific platform. The experiment is over, lets learn what we can from it and move on.
I find it interesting the way that the station was designed due to politicol reasons as much as technical reasons. Also, I think it makes Clinton shine for what I always complimented him for.
Clinton decided to sacrifice a lot of technical advantage to stick the station over Russia, which seriously aided international relations. I've always said that Clinton did wonders for international relations.
Bush, by contrast, pushes a mars mission with the idea of a jump from the moon which the experts say is crap. Bush is clearly only pushing his plans as a way to vitalize the populace. Not that this is unimportant, I just think he should have done it in a technologically realistic manner, or at least plausibly accomplishable manner.
--Carl Sandburg, "Washington
Monument by Night," from Slabs of the Sunburnt West
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
The Buran flew once, 100% automated and unmanned from launch to landing, at the start of the 1990as iirc. After that, they decided that it was too costly and mothballed the 2 completed and 3 under construction. One is at the Russian National Space Museum, one is in Australia, and the 3 in construction were dismantled. The Energia booster flew a further 3 times, and hasnt been used since due to no need for it (It could have launched the ISS as it stands in 2 or 3 boosts, it could carry a lot.)
Its all very nice talking about space stations the moon and mars etc but really , its all a bit pointless until a type of propulsion technology is
created than can get people off this planet as easily as an airliner taking off AND be used in space. Chemical fueled systems just don't cut
it and Ion engines are so underpowered as to be useless even in space (15 MONTHS just to get to the moon! Gimme a break!). What the solution is I don't know but
currently we're still at the space vehicle equivalent of a canoe , not even a 16th century galleon, and if we wish to start exploring space then we're going
to need something a damn site more useful than what we have at the moment.
The ISS was pure folly to begin with. It is simply not in our nature to cooperate. We are still animals, not unlike any other on this planet. As such our greatest acheivements (and our most horrifying mistakes) have come from competition, not cooperation. Through the politics that shaped the final ISS project and (politics in general), we acheive comfortable mediocrity, nothing more.
Didn't Bruce Willis help that Russian guy refuel 2 space shuttles before blowing up that asteroid?
For interplanetary travel you do not need a combustable fuel. Just mass to chuck in the direction opposite to that you want to travel in.
A nice big block of water ice would be perfect.
Heat it (solar heat radiation) and use the steam as thrust to get to mars.
When there split it (solar power) into hydrogen and oxygen for the landing.
No muss no fuss no exploding space stations during re-fueling.
Also if you wrap the ice around the ship then you have an instant radiation shield.
Simple technology is proven to be the best as far as space exploration goes.
Worst
"i like ISS" t-shirt for sale ...
...
...
i don't know what there is on the moon? it's
prolly a really cool place to build a kindda
hubbel telescope thinggy.
but i can't really imagine having a smelt on the
moon churning out pieces for an interplanetary
spacecraft.
also there doesn't seem to be alot of fuel
availabel on the moon.
further me doesn't understand why you have to
transport fuels (liquiod hydrogen, liquid oxygen)
to the waiting interplanetary spacecraft.
if you just shot up a pool load of water and
"cracK" it in low earth orbit via solar-power you
could save some bucks on your energy bill,
considering that solarpanels work much more
effiecient in outer space (earth orbit that is).
also liqudifying hydrogen and oxygen is very
energy consumming ON the surface of earth. now
consider a liquidfying "plant"/maschine in
low-earth orbit with the cold temps up there
cheaper.
also methinks a reusable ferry kindda
interplanetary spacecraft will be more sustainable
then a one way "plant the flag" spacecraft.
the ferry could be used for many different
kindda mission: moon, mars and (my favourit)
to the astoroid belt between earth and mars.
maybe getting some humans to one of those
'ol astoroids and transforming it into the hule
of a even bigger interplanetary space craft, maybe.
basically what we need is a sh#t load of
liquid water and some descent solarpanels to
go sunday driving around the solarsystem
some thoughts here: emptyempty2.tripod.com/small_step.htm
the space elevator can't work, sorry.
In its new life, the station was to be a research post, with it and any offspring captive to the planet.
Can this explain why Russia never made it to the Moon?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Okay, Motif was, towards the end, practically falling apart. But... it worked. It has widgets, programmers who know it, stability, and attitude (or was that altitude? I forget...) control too. It also has mould, dents, leaks, and a shredded-looking user interface, but we're not that bothered about that.
Start building GNOME as a set of add-on modules to Motif. Take advantage of Motif's facilities until you get the chance to replace them. Run off the existing codebase until you get the replacement interface set up. Use Motif's technical support pool until the documentation recycler is installed. etc.
Eventually the new modules will be supplying all the functionality and the old parts of Motif will be unused. At which stage, you can either use them as scratch space, or depressurise them and mothball them. Maybe one day you can recycle the raw materials; even as scrap, those ancient electrons are ludicrously valuable.
But no, Motif went down in flames and GNOME went down in budget. All for annoying political reasons. IMO it's highly unlikely that GNOME will ever do anything useful. By the time it gets large enough (as if it isn't already), other commercial products will be eclipsing it.
Without the Russians this past year, those folks up there would have had to jump down for food?
You're a dumbass.
You mean to tell me you can't get to any where else in space from the space station. How the hell do you do that.
An American and a Soviet citizen are arguing about their respective forms of government. The American proclaims loudly, "In America, if we don't like the way something is being done, we can walk up the steps to the House of Representatives and complain without fear of retribution."
The Soviet isn't impressed; "We can do the same thing."
The American is surprised at this statement and the Soviet citizen continues with, "We too can walk into the Kremlin and complain all we want about America."
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
ISS serves no scientific purpose with its current staff level. ISS serves no functional purpose with its current staff level. The crew has one job - keep it from falling apart. They are in fact custodians.
It doesn't matter that ISS is a failure in the conventional sense - it is a huge plus for Boeing who I am sure is billing the govt 2x or 3x on every billable task, since there is no meaningful competitor. Mars and the Moon projects will similarly sit alongside missile defense as the pet projects to keep military contractors in the black for the next half century.
Actually the problem limiting the station to 3 people wasn't so much the hab module (there have been as many as 10 people on board at one time before, when a shuttle was visiting) as the lack of escape for more than 3 people - there's only one Soyuz escape capsule. There was supposed to be a US vehicle for return that could accomodate 6 or 7, but it never happened.
Also, I think you're exaggerating the fuel issue. The main fuels likely to be used for major missions staged at the ISS (if that were ever to happen) would be liquid hydrogen, liquid oxygen, and kerosene - possibly also xenon for ion engines. The problem is probably the cryogenics in the constant sun/shade alternations of low earth orbit. I don't think your cloud of vapor scenario is very likely with those fuels; also it would dissipate quickly.
Energy: time to change the picture.
Whenever several nations decide to make decisions the process is slow and compromises must be made. This is not new.
The mission to Mars is suppose to be an international effort. Great, we'll never get there!! Sometimes we have to do it alone. I may cost more but we will have it our way with no compromises.
What ever happened to the successfull Ion engines that were used on the deep space probe(s). Load up the shuttle with supplies, truck it up to ISS, use a little remote controlled or pre-programmed Ion powered craft to relay the payload to the Moon and reduce the risk/money/time of building a craft to go from ground to the moon. Funny how you never hear much about the successfull projects from NASA... And I think before we talk about going to mars, we spend our time building our moon station that is a much more viable location for science, and more habitable. I never understood what the whole importance/facination with going to mars as if the moon never existed. Must be the "been there don that" mentality. Funding wise, NASA needs to be corp funded, not gov funded, that way its independent of tax cuts and budget restrictions which are the main contributer to all the malfuntions of late...
Several studies supported the ISF, and some even pointed out that a manned presence (even a heart beating) in a microgravity environment would contaminate the microgravity environment.
It turned out that the desigh was so sensible, that many of the big aerospace contractors percieved it as a threat. An ISF could be placed into orbit for a cost of about $700 million (vs the billions for the station) and would be an inexpensive (compared to the ISS) paltform to screen processes for space manufacturing. If and when an application was found, the operation would become self financing.
To make a long story short, there are dangers when trying to find a place among the hogs feeding at the federal money trough. The new company was stomped to the ground and eventually went away.
There is now talk about abandoning the ISS to redirect big $$$ for the mood and Mars exploration. A permanent manned predence in space is too dangerous and expensive to maintain.
Wherever you go, there you are.
...and many many tax dollars have been wasted, perhaps there will be less down the nose talk about ESA's small (and cheap!) module which apparently never seemed big enough for the Americans?
I'm not cliaming ESA really foresaw this desaster and consequently minimized their contribution, but whatever the reason, more tax USD than tax EUR burnt in the process.
This is my sig. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Human sacrifices on mars.
Sure, you laugh, but what are astronauts burned up in billion dollar bottle rockets if not human sacrifices to NASA's stupidity? Intrepid explorers? Baah, you're part of the problem set then, not the solution set.
Burn down NASA before they blow themselves up, or send up another rover with 8 year old technology.
WEEK 1 - Cost estimate: $3 Billion
WEEK 3 - Cost estimate: $20 Billion
WEEK 6 - Something breaks
WEEK 7 - Fixed problem, Cost estimate: $130 Billion
WEEK 9 - Running out of air
WEEK 12 - Cost esimtate: $200 Billion, still low on air
WEEK 15 - Got more air
WEEK 17 - Sent most humans home, Cost estimate $420 Billion
WEEK 22 - Redesigned entire station so it does less than half what it was going to do, Cost estimate: $600 Billion
WEEK 23 - Something broke, Cost estimate $1.2 Trillion
WEEK 24 - Fixed it, running out of air, something else broke, scaled down design a bit more, Cost estimate $2.8 Trillion
Anyone ever have a really bad date? Did you try to make it work out, or did you take her home and put the date out of its misery? I think that's the problem - most guys at NASA haven't ever had A date. Thus, when they finally have a "bad date", (aka the ISS), they not only take it to the movies, dinner, and mini golf, they take it on a Carribbean cruise, trip to Europe, flight on the Concord, and finally propose marriage.
Fellas, let's see if we can figure out if there's another woman we can try with, eh?
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
It's obvious to me that there are plenty of safety precautions that can be used to allow refueling of spacecraft at a space station.
(1) Use binary fuels. E.G, LH/LOX. On Earth liquid hydrogen is seriously flammable, and liquid oxygen will make other things ignite. In space, liquid hydrogen will find no oxidizer to make it burn, and liquid oxygen will disperse into vacuum too quickly to make objects around it burn very well.
(2) Use breakaway tethers. The other major hazard with using volatile fuels is that fuel components from a punctured tank may jet away, imparting kinetic energy to its source. An incident like this with a spacecraft or fuel storage tank hard-docked to a space station might potentially deorbit both. By attaching both fuel reservoir and spacecraft (while fueling) to the station with a breakaway tether, this danger is significantly reduced.
Dear President Bush,
Thank you for changing NASA's focus on the ISS. I am sure glad that you found time to research, plan and engineer an alternative approach to our involvement with the ISS.
Now, I agree that crushing the middle class, preventing satanic homosexual marriages, and leaking the identities of covert CIA operatives are all right-thinking, patriotic enterprises. However, I'd just like to remind you that a badly designed space initiative can hurt a nation as much as a well implemented one can help it.
So please, put away the spinner and hang up on Karl Rove, then ask the scientific community what the most expedient and efficacious method would be to create a sustainable presence in space would be. And "wait until China nearly beats us to having a station on the moon, then spend 100 times as much" is not an acceptable answer.
Waitaminute... what am I saying... Bush doesn't give a damn about space except what the military tells him... He allocated 1.5 Billion to encourage marriage, and 1.0 Billion to increase NASA's budget (we're not sending men to f*ing Mars with an additional 1 bil).
Where oh where could his priorities be....
Although the ISS has been marketed from time to time as a "jumping off point", it's not really designed to be one.
Even if we did have a properly designed way station, in the right orbit, at the right inclination, there's an entire infrastructure that doesn't exist. To truly get good use out of a way station, you need specialized space craft, rather than a general purpose pickup truck.
For example, there are very different mission requirements for getting personnel into low earth orbit as opposed to material. It doesn't make any sense to try and use one vehicle, like the shuttle, for both. Material can withstand greater acceleration than people, without the need for life support. So why not have different lifters for people and parts?
Also, any craft that travel from the earth to orbit have certain needs based on the fact that they travel through the atmosphere, and have to reenter that atmosphere. Aerodynamic design, heat shields, etc. These are design features that aren't really anything except for dead weight when you're trying to go from low earth orbit to high earth orbit.
A space tug designed specifically to go from low orbits to high orbits could probably do the job a lot better, and more safely.
High earth orbit also makes a lot more sense as an assembly point. Why would you want to put all your goodies together over the course of time when you still have so much gravity well to climb up out of?
Low earth orbit is also full of junk. I don't know how many pieces of space garbage they're currently tracking in LEO, but I know there's a bunch of it. Why not have your assembly point a little farther out where there's less stuff to put a hole in your mars spaceship?
Of course, if you go out a useful distance, you'll need radiation shielding, a lot more than what the ISS has.
If you're going to be assembling larger craft for manned interplanetary missions, you'll need room to store all your stuff, whether it be vehicle components, reaction mass, consumables, construction crew, whatever. The ISS doesn't have room for any of that junk, even if you through a bunch of inflatable hab modules at it.
The ISS is a laboratory, and it's serving that purpose pretty darn well, despite the fact that it's not even fully staffed or supplied.
Imho, we need a way station, but the ISS isn't it, never was, and never will be.
I may read too much science fiction, but isn't it kind of a natural selection thing to try to spread human habitation beyond earth? Earth is currently a single point of failure. If it gets whacked, no more human race. You might not personally care, but science shows that species generally try to continue existence. Anything we can do to learn how to live away from earth seems like a good thing. All this simpering about obstacles and costs seems pretty short sighted.
to accomodate the Russians, the space station is in an orbit that makes it almost useless as a jumping off point to anywhere
:-P
If we let them have Afhganastan like they wanted during the cold war, then they would have a more equitorial launching point. Silly Americans
Table-ized A.I.
Early versions of The Gimp were Motif-based (and useful enough to draw Tux), then people decided to write their own Motif replacement, and thus GTK was born.
That was Mir that they refueled from. It was treated as "generic Russian space station" but everything was too rickety to be ISS.
Read the article, it's by an American Nut Case. Frankly it was probably pretty funny in the original language!
The high inclination of the ISS does not prevent you from going to anywhere. All it means is that you need to do a slingshot flyby of our moon first. That can take you off in just about any direction, including a retrograde Earth orbit.
:v)
Vik
You know your right. But J-Lo did break up the engagement between Ben and Liv Tyler once they got back.
Boy I bet he's rethinking how that worked out.
was the idea of using nuc-u-lar bombs to power a spacecraft. Not suprisingly, some of the inventors, mainly Freeman Dyson, had some qualms about setting off large quanitities of fissile material in the atmosphere. But as an interplanetary drive, it's hard to beat. I can't recall the numbers, but I think it's possible to build an Orion-type ship that would reach Mars in a few weeks. Walt
Pity you got modded as flamebait, I agree with you. The article states:
But Russian rockets blast off in Kazakhstan, much higher on the globe than Florida. They cannot fly much lower than 51.6 degrees latitude without running the risk of dropping spent rocket stages or astronauts during an emergency re-entry on Mongolia or northern China. So the Clinton administration decided to erect the station at 51.6 degrees, hailing it as a "world orbit" accessible to all spacefaring nations.
Let's not forget the Russians are the only ones with experience of making and running a spacestation, nor lets forget it is the Russians who are doing the bulk of the construction and running it (the article does go on to acknowledge this).
The whole idea the present station could be a 'jumping off' point really is crazy - it has no command capacity, it is 100% dependent on supplies (fuel, parts, etc) taking supplies by shuttle or shortrange capsule and then loading them on something else is much more inefficient than sticking them on that something else and skipping the middle-man (this is only a conventional engine, not a warp drive!), it is extremely fragile. But it does allow applied research into space-based technology - a vital stepping stone in the international space effort.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/03/science/space/03 STAT.html?ex=1076389200&en=9f97461fa48be3e6&ei=506 2&partner=BITCH
Is it just me, or does that seem all wrong to you?
A: What corps are going to be interested?
B: The statement was made that this would free NASA from budget cuts. How do you figure? Companies cut projects, subcompanies, people all the time. Why would they be any more stable on this issue?
C: The same companies that need govt oversight to respect human life and safety issues? ( Please dont tell me this is not an issue. Look at some history ( industrial revolution esp ) to see what "capital" will do to make a buck. ( And, no, humans have not changed that much in the interval between, see Enron, et al for some enlightenment ( no, no humans lost lives, due to the regulations against ) ) If you dont agree, then I would suggest you have been living with the guard rails so long you dont see them anymore. Consider moving to other parts of the world, and experience it for yourself ).
D: Can you imagine the corporate intrigue? The politics? The govt funding and governance has it's problems, to be sure, but I cant see corp funding doing the trick.
emt 377 emt 4
Oh? I thought that became obvious after this thought-proving documentary covered the same issue. It even tied in the Russians.
CT
...thats a wayyyy overpriced friggin tin can.nasa(and whoever else) engineers should be ashamed of themselves for raping that much money out of society for such an underwhelming project.I will piss on your graves....count on it.
That "kind of pablum" comes directly from George Bush's own strategery.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/01/20 040114-1.html
I'm sure the astronauts currently living on the station are quite thankful for this as the United States does not have another vehicle and they would all be dead if Russia could not reach them now that the shuttle has been grounded for a year.
One of the requirements for ISS is that they have to have enough crew return vehicles on hand at all times to get all the people staying on the station back to earth.
The crew currently on the station have a Soyuz capsule to return in.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
...specifically orbital mechanics.
"And did you know that to accomodate the Russians, the space station is in an orbit that makes it almost useless as a jumping off point to anywhere?"
It's only inconvenient for a high burn, one shot thrust at an arbitrary point in time to an arbitrary target.
Twice per orbit ISS is flying parallel to the ecliptic. A burn from that orbit at the appropriate time will send a craft out towards the planets' orbits. So maybe you have to wait until that trajectory lines up with the direction you want to go. You have to do the same from the ground. Any trajectory less than the orbital inclination can be had, with just a matter of timing.
Throw in slingshot trajectories around the moon and the sun, and you can get anywhere. Maybe you have to time it carefully, and maybe it takes a little bit more fuel, but not as much as the "you can't get there from here" that article tries to imply.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
With the statement:
What, Boeing and Lockhead aren't private companies?
What a load of shit.
Debunking the "59 Deceits"
For example, that means that if the US currently has a population growth of 1% (from births only) the amount of resources this birth rate consumes is equivalent to a birth rate of 33% in the third world!
There is no third world nation that has such a birth rate so the real issue is the developed nations drain on world resources rather than the population growth of third world nations.
Debunking the "59 Deceits"
Refueling rockets at the ISS is crazy, but they happilly refuel the ISS itself with volatile propellants?
Solid fuel and liquid, throttleable oxidizer. Restartable, too. Read all about it here.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
It was never intended to use the ISS as a starting point for planetary missions.
You must be too young to remember: the original Reagan-era vision for the station was that "after 2000, the Space Station would evolve into a space harbour in low Earth orbit for lunar and planetary missions as well as commercial exploitation of space resources." The design included a hangar for on-orbit assembly of large interplanetary spacecraft. Here is one of the sources that will back me up on this.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Previous NASA studies for Mars missions have seldom if ever used the Moon as a launching pad because that would take about twice as much energy as going from the Earth or an Earth outpost.
Here we have a NYT reporter overstepping his limited technical knowledge and making stuff up again.
The best place from which to embark on a Mars mission, in terms of lowest delta-V (i.e. least amount of fuel required), is a high earth orbit. Second best is from the moon's surface. The worst, by far, is from Earth's surface.
For the NYT to say both earth and an earth-orbiting station are superior launch points to the moon is quite ignorant.
IAAOA (I am an orbital analyst).
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
This is my sig. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
It's the size of the organization and not because they're associated with the "evil government".
That attitude is nothing more than superstition.
Debunking the "59 Deceits"
Last time I checked the facilities for building the componets of the space station were several orders of magnitude larger than the space station itself. Furthermore, the material that is there is in a very raw form. How are you going to make fabrics or plastics in space? How about electronics, and sensitive intraments? There isn't very much dumb mass on the space station. Likewise, the number of people that worked on the components for the space station is several orders of magnitude higher than the astronauts that use it, and had veried skills and talents. How much is it going to cost to send these people into space? Where are they going to live? What are they going to eat? How many more years will it take to complete the project due to facilities in space being less productive and cumbersome. Lastly, there isn't a bunch of material floating around in space. How much money will it cost to gather rocks from hither and yon, rather than building them here on earth?
The major cost of the space station was not getting it into orbit, but designing and manufacturing it. These costs will be greatly multiplied by having to do the work in space.
What would *YOU* do you save NASA if *YOU* were in charge?
(Minus the fact that we need a cheaper way to get in space, since fuel is really the limiting factor?)
It would seem to be that the ISS is nothing more than a dead end project, so here is what I would do: (don't know if it'd be that great of a deal, and would prolly never make it past congress, but hey, this is slashdot, and I'm allowed the right to dream...)
* Get rid of ISS, or at least make it much smaller, and try and return the focus to research.
* Build a station at one of the Lagrange Points (again, minus the whole fuel issue) for building ships in space (instead of the moon, where, as I understand it, the cost of launching rockets off of the moon is actually much more than just building units in zero gravity and firin' 'em up) and focus on using ion engines, with focus on Mars and such
* Build a small moonbase with focus on an observartory, and maybe for some kind of mining use (maybe use it to haul raw materials to one of the stations in L point?)
* MARS! MARS! MARS!
* Focus again more on the tech, instead of the problems with beaucracy...
Thats just my take on it; what would you guys do if you were in charge of NASA? (again, minus all the huge $$$ involved in maintaining such a tremendous fleet)
Try not to let life get in the way of living.
"And did you know that to accomodate the Russians..."
Well that's an odd statement. You make it sound like the US is doing Russia a favor or something. Funny how it's easy to forget that Russia has had its own space station for a decade (!) before the International Space Station was put in space. Not even to speak about the fact that Russia was the first country to put a person in space and has contributed an enormous amount to math, physics and other research relevant to space. So saying "to accomodate Russians" is a bit insulting.
Seriously,
it is up now (mostly). When NASA gets a new bird what about tugging it higher?
What would it take?
The Singularity is closer than you think
Quant
Explain, if you can- oh, you're an AC, never mind..back to playing with your own excrement.
...and he grinned, like a fox eating shit out of a wire brush.
The idea that the moon is a better launching point than earth seems silly. Unless you can get the resources you need on the moon, you need to ship them from earth. If you can't get 100% efficiency out of every process you use to build your new ships, you'll need to ship more raw materials to the moon than you would have used on Earth. More raw materials = more weight.
So, unless I missed something Bush handed everyone yet another pile of dung to get a lunar base going. I guess I shouldn't be surprised.
Well I guess I'll have to spell it out for you because it seems your having some problems.
The implied argument in the original post was that the "evil" government was corrupting Boeing and Lockheed with inefficiency and stupidity.
It's the same old tired canard that gets trotted out whenever NASA gets discussed on Slashdot. The lame and unproven catechism that "market forces insure accountability and efficiency no matter what the size of the organization" that sophmoric libertarians like to recite.
It's patently false as solid research has shown. But gee, I only teach graduate level classes in the sociology of organization and have spent a dozen years doing on site research in the subject so what would I know compared to some Slashdottie?
Problems like the original grandpost cited are endemic to ALL large organizations, public (i.e., governmental) or private. Hence why I stated that once Armadillo becomes as large as Boeing they will have the same types of problems.
As far as the rest of your argument is concerned, let me give you a ticket for the clue train kiddo, Armadilo hasn't launched a single vehicle let alone won the X-prize!.
All they've done so far are tests on the rocket system's components. They HAVE NOT HAD A SINGLE INTEGRATION TEST yet. But Boeing, Lockheed and NASA have all had hundreds of successful flights BEYOND THE GOALS OF THE X-PRIZE.
When Robert Zubrin puts humans on Mars and brings them home for $10 billion then I'll believe you.
Otherwise your operating on nothing more than religious faith and blowing a lot of smoke.
Debunking the "59 Deceits"