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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?"
Happy Trails,
Erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
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!
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
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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.
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
Some missing context:
...But now, we have an administration that's 1. desperately in need of new sources of energy and a big public-works project to drive an economic recovery, and 2. not afraid of nuclear rockets. The moon makes a much better staging ground for such devices than an inhabited planet you don't want to pollute, and lower gravity would make launch failures lower-risk (less chance of a nuclear core breaking apart on impact).
So the Clinton administration decided to erect the station at 51.6 degrees, hailing it as a "world orbit" accessible to all spacefaring nations.
Which wasn't a bad way to save the project, when we had no obvious reason (or imaginary cash) to embark outwards.
The Moon, experts say, has now taken on the role of steppingstone. "Lifting heavy spacecraft and fuel out of the Earth's gravity is expensive," Mr. Bush said in his speech. "Spacecraft assembled and provisioned on the Moon could escape its far lower gravity using far less energy, and thus, far less cost."
Many experts are skeptical of those claims, saying Mr. Bush overlooked the large energy costs of getting fuel and rockets to the Moon. 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.
Only trouble is, we need either all the facilities to construct these things on the moon... or to launch them all from Earth, which rather ruins the cost/benefit ratio.
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?
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
It would have been a worse idea to keep the Russians out as they provide the cheapest and most reliable transportation system for supplies and the only human transportation system operable right now.
It was never intended to use the ISS as a starting point for planetary missions.
Ah yes, blame Bush, common argument around here.
The design for the original US space station underwent 7 redesigns in a period of 9 years. From inception in 1984 to 1993 the planned costs of the space station increased. The initial estimate from NASA was $8 billion. The second revision (1987) was caused by changes mandated by congress. By 1990 the cost estimate had grown to $38 billion (including launches). In 1991 congress mandated another redesign, the new redesign by NASA now has a cost estimate of $30 billion (including launches). Late 1992, due to cost growth of the program the white house (for the first time) orders a redesign.
In June of 1993 the white house again asked NASA for redesign options that would significantly shrink the cost (by lowering size and capabilities). NASA presented 3 options (named Option A, B, C). At this point a panel concluded that the new plans would cost less, would require management restructuring at NASA, and would benefit from international participation (ie, spread the costs and make people like us).
The final design of 'American SS Freedom' was still more costly then the Clinton administration was willing to spend. The agreement between the US and Moscow was made in Sept of 1993 between Moscow and NASA negotiators. At this time the US station was a 4-person station design (same design Clinton had just turned down as "too expensive") while the Russian 'Mir-2' was a 6-person design. NASA forced Clinton to decide between the US or Russian design, and thus we have the current conglomerate. The redesign in 1991 called for a price of $30 billion while the newly revised conglomerate would cost $17.4 billion after figuring in contributions from Russia. It's worth noting that 9 years of redesigns cost over $11 billion...
In 1997 NASA admits, after three years, that it can't build it for $17.4 billion after all. In 1998 the Chabrow report gave NASA a 70-30 chance that the space station would be built for $26 billion and be up to three years late. Due to cost overruns and shortages from Russia, money is requested in 1998 and 1999, bringing the US price tag to $19.4 billion (having already spent about $13.4 I believe). In June of 2000 Congress sets a new spending cap at $26 billion.
Jan 2001: $17.9 spent to date, and NASA finds out there is a $4 billion cost overrun (oops)
Feb 2001: George W Bush officially reveals the cost overrun and minor redesign is necessary in order to keep costs to the previously declared levels.
I have seen figures estimating a cost of $26.1 billion for completion of the space station.
Perhaps I missed something here, but it seems the biggest changes to the stations capabilities(granted, for the cause of saving money) were committed in 1993, with a few billion dollars of blunder added in which necessitated removing additional features down the road. I find the dates for the $4 billion overrun to be interesting, but I guess that somone could have just wasted that money (about 20-25% of original budget) AFTER Clinton left office but before it was noticed in Jan 2001.
Anyways, as far as I can see, the only way we could have not had a minor redesign in Feb of 2001 is if either:
a) Bush decided to spend about $4-$5 extra billion to cover for the current set of cost overruns - and I would love to see what people would have said about that
b) Bush asks for minor redesign to try and keep project inside the most recent budget - which by this point was already almost impossible unless we consider the $26 billion spending cap from congress as the budget, although many analysts think this will all get spent anyway
c) At some point during the prior term someone had paid attention to growing costs and the fact that several billion already had to be requested due in part to cost overruns.
sidenote-
Very little to do with the post, but how do you accidentally spend $4 billion????
I mean maybe if your budget was in 100's of billions could I see a slip like that, but when your proposed costs are $19.4 billion (after 98/99 additions) how do you accidentally spend 20% extra? What was this, the NASA/Boeing beer tab for the last decade?
Whee signature.
No, it's the lack of competence that blows up Shuttles. It doesn't matter how conservative you are, if you are too stupid/lazy/ignorant/poor/inexperienced/rushed to properly analyse a problem like a foam impact, you will have bad things happen. Conversely, smart, well-funded and motivated people can pull off some pretty daring things. Take Apollo and lunar orbit rendezvous. That's a very risky approach, where the astronauts can potentially be stranded if it doesn't work. But we did it and it worked...
The idea that suddenly after Challenger it was too dangerous to refuel in LEO is idiotic. Either it was too dangerous to begin with, or it wasn't. What actually happened was that the perceived risk threshold changed, and suddenly it was no longer considered acceptable to do. In other words, we lost our cojones as an agency.
Under political and financial pressure, NASA systematically puts its own objectives ahead of safety.
That's not only insulting, it shows you don't understand the situation. There is a tradeoff between safety and goals; to put safety ahead of everything means you just don't fly. After all, sitting on the launch pad is safer than actually lighting the damned thing. I might have agreed with the statement that "under pressure, NASA took risks that were too big", but I don't even really agree with that. NASA didn't knowingly say "There is a 1:10 chance that the foam will cause a disaster. Do we feel lucky?". Mission managers just missed entirely the danger. That's incompetence and/or bad luck, not recklessness.
Human genome = 3 billion base pairs = 6 GBit. Windows + Office = 20 Gbit. Which is more impressive?
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.