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?"

Comments

Built by a committee

[erick99]

The space station, which could have been truly great, ended up being something classically accomplished by committee. It is bisected into halves that are almost identical so that the US has it's own half versus the the Russian half. A lot of concessions and compromises have kept the space station from realizing it's potential.

Happy Trails,

Erick

Re:Built by a committee

[mwood]

Awww, come on. I dunno what was originally envisioned, but what we got is clearly a pilot project. It's way too small to be a serious refueling stop. I'm sure that all kinds of good science are being done as manpower and air leaks permit, but it's arguable that the most important thing we're learning from it is how to build space habitats.

(Well, we're also learning that some Russians/Yanks are not so bad after all and that even our governments can get along if they care to try. That's very useful.)

There are some things that we will have to scale up quite a bit in order to make a space station that's more than a floating lab. For one thing, we need a lot more transport capacity: more tonnage per trip and many more trips per year. It takes a *lot of stuff* to build a big space station, and at, what, 4000kg per trip? it's going to take forever.

Obviously the *budget* is going to have to increase quite a bit. Sure, the ISS is already expensive, but ask yourself what it would cost to build lower Manhattan from scratch, from the seabed up, and you'll get a feel for the amount of material, work, and money it takes to build something like what you see in _2001: a Space Odyssey_.

All this scaling suggests something else: *ownership* is going to have to scale up. The ISS is, technically, international since two nations are doing most of it, but what if there were a dozen nations as deeply involved, or a hundred? Of course each nation has its own limits as to what it could reasonably ask itself to contribute to such an effort. (Don't ask me how anyone is going to make the case to governments that are busy figuring out how they're going to pay for enough bullets to settle the score with the tribe next door.)-:

All of these are doable if enough people care, and there are reasons to care. But it's going to be hideously expensive, it's going to take a long time, and it's going to take a lot of steps and leave a lot of pilot projects and outright failures in its wake. The ISS is doing a lot for us, but it's never gonna be that big wheel in the sky -- it never could have been.

when it comes true

[vargul]

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.

Without the Russians it wouldn't BE there

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Don't make me laugh...

[WIAKywbfatw]

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.

Re:Full Text (For the NYT tinfoil hat crew)

[Anonymous Coward]

Some missing context:

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.

...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).

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 Station

[RayBender]

It seems to be fashionable to complain about the space station these days, but the fact is that the current mess in U.S. spaceflight has more to do with funding priorities than any details of the space station design or implementation. IF Congress had been willing to spend a reasonable amount of money up front, so that a number of painful design compromises had been avoided, then we'd have a working, useful Shuttle/Station infrastructure right now. I'm talking about things like the decision to go with solid boosters on the Shuttle, or the decision to abandon Skylab. Remember, after Apollo, NASA saw it's budget drop by 80% and stay there.

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.

diplomatic token.

[QEDog]

As the article says:

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.

Re:High inclination

[ThroatwobblerMangrov]

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.

Re:Space Station

[RayBender]

It's their lack of conservatism that blows up shuttles.

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.