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.

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.