Russian Supply Ship Docks At ISS

CryptoJoe writes "Space.com and CNN report a successful docking between the Russian-built cargo ship Progress 16 and the International Space Station (ISS). NASA had indicated that a failure of Progress 16 would lead to the evacuation of the ISS because food supplies are critically low."

Comments

The truth

[gulfan]

The real truth is that all the members of the ISS team are actually on a weight loss program and are currently fasting.

Re:The truth

[Irashtar]

they used the most effective weight loss program by going into orbit!

Man...

[Icarus1919]

Man, it's a slow news day. Next headline: Man eats christmas dinner, says it's pretty good.

Re:Man...

[gulfan]

Oh, let me guess - someone is killed in Iraq too? I don't even bother with the news anymore. It's way too predictable.

Re:Man...

[Wakkow]

Just ask the previous ISS crew.. They really enjoyed this crew's Christmas dinner a while ago. =P

Source:
"Russian officials accused the previous crew of overeating during their 6-month mission, leaving a deficit of meat and milk and a surplus of juice and confectionery."

Re:Man...

[SoLO]

Don't forget that our shuttle fleet is grounded.

Re:Man...

[arivanov]

Not if Atkins is to be believed on the merits of healthy and balanced diet of lard and lard.

Not to sound like an ass

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to sound like an ass but how could food supplies ever get that low.

Every detail/mission about the ISS is planned from start to finish. Including food stocks. Was there not a red flag somewhere that said "okay, we are going to be there for x days but have y amount of food?" No stays are "overextended" moreso that their food stores should be able to cover them in the event they can't make it back to earth (weather or other prohibiting factors)

Sure they've remedy'd it now but I'm scared at what could go wrong with something like a Mars mission where you can't just send up a supply ship...

Re:Not to sound like an ass

[Phil246]

remember the shuttle burning up? Thats a major cause to why the supplies ever got that low in the first place.
nasa grounded all shuttle flights if you remember, and relied on the russians to send things up there.

Re:Not to sound like an ass

[yobbo]

Well at least the crew had plenty of alcohol. Remind me what the problem was?

Re:Not to sound like an ass

[Phil246]

not really. theres an emergency escape module which is perminately docked with the ISS. if push came to shove they could use that to return to earth

Re:Not to sound like an ass

[cyclone96]

Caveat: I work for NASA.

Actually, you don't sound like an ass at all. It's a good question.

Yes, things are planned to great detail on ISS. However, the devil is always in the details. Assumptions are made (sometimes over a year in advance)on how much the crew eats, when resupply comes up, when the shuttle is going to fly, and how to parcel out limited upmass between food, water, and spare parts, etc. It's tough when you only have Progress for resupply. This time, we got bit.

And yeah, we gotta figure this sort of stuff out before we can go to Mars. Which ISS is useful for. Forgetting about the pure science for a moment (which a lot of folks question), ISS is a great engineering platform for how (or how not) to build things and manage humans in space. And we're learning from it.

As time goes on, NASA is going to try to make ISS more automatic and less dependent on the ground. NASA is going to try to wring out hardware that could be used on the way to Mars in an environment on ISS where a breakdown won't lead to death of the crew. And NASA is going to try to find flaws in logistics and planning (like this) and not allow it to happen where the stakes are higher.

Re:Not to sound like an ass

[Keeper]

Indeed. But they should have evac'd or done something ASAP about it.

That's like saying you should turn around and go home because you see traffic stopped 2 miles ahead.

They knew how much food they had. They still had some left when the supply ship docked. Ergo, it wasn't an emergency that required evacuating the station.

I mean, what would have happened if the Russian Supply Ship (god forbid) went down?

My guess is that they'd do whatever it is they need to do to make sure the thing doesn't fall apart with nobody on it and go back to earth on the escape module. I doubt it was a coincidence that they had 7 days of food remaining when the supply capsule docked.

The crew aboard ISS would have been royally SOL (Shit Outta Luck).

They wouldn't have. The ISS itself would be SOL, but that's another story entirely.

Re:Not to sound like an ass

[tftp]

Well, I am not cyclone96, but why not to reply anyway... not that there is anything else to do :-)

The Moon is not colonized because nobody was willing to pay for it. There are many places on Earth that are not colonized, and still are more comfortable to live in than Moon. Look at most of Canada, for example :-)

The whole Moon exercise was only a competition between two countries. Once the finish line was crossed, it became apparent that there is nothing for humans on the Moon.

With regard to "far simpler than ISS", you must be joking. Launch to LEO lasts 10 minutes; flight to the Moon takes three days. If your oxygen fails on LEO (or if you run out of food) you simply fire the engine and descend, even ballistically if need be; if anything fails on the way to the Moon, or while there, your chances of survival are minimal.

A colony on the Moon is not practical now simply because there is nothing for colonists to do there. We do not have skintight spacesuits, we do not have portable fusion batteries, we don't have anything that would help the colony there. Imagine 10 people dumped on the surface, maybe with a portable tent. What are they going to do there? You can give them only so much of supplies, and what happens after they run out?

A proper colony needs to build the base first, and for that they need very good tunneling equipment, sealants and plenty of machinery like airlocks. They need a source of energy, and nothing short of nuclear will do. They need a source of oxygen and water, and though that can be mined, they need to be given tools for such mining (some robots, most likely.) We are talking about hundreds (if not thousands) of tons of materials and supplies just to get started. Today's technology can deliver maybe half a ton, maybe more - but we are still two orders of magnitude below what's needed, and we don't have the payload anyway (where are those robots who would be mining the rocks for He(3) ?)

So ISS is something that we can do, here and now. It is relatively safe, uses technology that is within our reach, and allows us to build and test new devices and new methods. Colonization of other planets will become possible only after some major advances in technology, primarily in propulsion and then in robotics. You just can not colonize a hostile world without robots, and our existing robots are not even close to what is needed.

Re:Merry Christmas?

[Morlark]

I would wonder if scrapping this project really will get us back to the moon any quicker. Interest in space is nowhere near as high as it was back in the days of the Apollo landings, and it's efforts like the ISS that are keeping space in the headlines. Without headlines like this, most people would be entirely content to have humanity remain on Earth indefinitely. Or until a huge comet hits and wipes us all out.

Re:Merry Christmas?

[benna]

I'm sick of people not seeing the good science that is being done by NASA as it is. Just because it may be more science-fictiony to go to the moon doesn't make it more valuable. We will go to mars (which would be alot more benificial than going to the moon) in good time. Until then let's work on the ISS.

"Government doesn't create wealth".

[Grendel Drago]

I take issue with this. I know, libertarians say this like neocons say "why do you hate America so much?". But I'd like you to explain how the first following scenario creates wealth, whereas the second only redistributes it.

ResearchCo solicits investment from the public. ResearchCo develops Velcro with this money. Velcro is then marketed and sold to the public, with a portion of the costs paid back to the investors.

NASA taxes the public. NASA develops Velcro with this money. Velcro is then marketed and sold to the public; however, there are no licensing fees, so the cost is equivalent to (in the first example) the cost of ResearchCo velcro less the costs paid back to the investors.

No, they're not precisely equivalent cases, but the flow of things is the same. Why the difference? Can you explain it to me?

--grendel drago

Re:"Government doesn't create wealth".

[Anonymous Coward]

You've obviously never received a paycheck. If you did, you'd see that a 28% tax by the federal government, followed by a 10% one by the state, and another 5% by local governments means that you spend almost half your working time paying off the taxes. And that's not including sales tax, gasoline tax, etc, which when added together often mean that in any given pay period, you pay more than 50% in taxes!

Now, the concept behind taxation is that you get something for your money. What have you gotten? I haven't gotten much. Basically, the government takes money from one group of people, keeps some, and gives the rest to other people. (Dave Barry was accurate when he said that.)

Libertarians aren't like anything you say; they merely suggest that people could get along with much less government. If you did any research whatsoever, you'd realise that the government is the world's largets polluter, has made the public school system useless (while spending billions!), been running a "War On Drugs" it can't win (and putting pot smokers in jail needlessly) and started a "war" in Iraq. And who pays for all this? We do! If you enjoy paying for all that without having been given any choice as to whether or not to pay, and then no choice as to what it gets spent on, continue to do so - the rest of us would like a choice on both matters!

Re:"Government doesn't create wealth".

[Anonymous Coward]

The difference is simple. It's largely a matter of risk; in the first case, the investors willingly take risks with money of their own or money they've raised; in the second instance the risk is assumed by the taxpayers. In the first instance the transaction is entered into freely by both parties; in the second, the government makes a decision to invest with other peoples' money. While some of those people may indeed want that - others may not, and the government is essentially forcing those people to enter into an investment they don't want.

Furthermore, when private parties invest, there is an incentive to use the money wisely; when the government is involved, there is only the incentive to spend the money. (You budget only stays the same or grows if you spend everything you got the year before!)

It is always more likely that individuals and companies will create wealth. The government does not have an incentive to create wealth - the government has an incentive to please as many people as possible, and offend as few as possible. The government also has little accountability (by being accountable to everyone - literally millions), and accountability is much more direct in a private company or investment.

Your velcro example is very narrow; I don't know the specifics of its creation, but if it was indeed created by NASA, and returned to the people, I suspect that to be one of few. Even if NASA has a record of providing the American people with good technology, it is quite likely to be the only branch of government that does. In fact, I would challenge you to name two others! And before you say "The FDA", I would point out the recent scandals. For further evidence, there was a very good special on PBS that showed that the FDA was aware that certain drugs caused heart problems - and they still approved them!

Libertarians do not say that no government is the answer - less government is the answer. By having less government, people are freer to do more, and that's what this country was and should be about.

Re:"Government doesn't create wealth".

[bm_luethke]

FWIW, I'll start that I am generally a die hard conservative and now am usually considered a neocon (though actions speak louder than words, can't say how many times I've seen people lie about thier political affiliation in order to have thier arguments contain more wieght).

In general I agree with the statement you have issue with. Many many things the govt gets involved with they should not - private industry will do much better. Even in your example I think that private industry would be better at spreading that wealth in that less goes into "red tape". Though I think you are taking too hard a line on that philiosophy, the govt can create wealth just not as good as private industry.

That being said, it isn't universally true. There are things that almost nothing but a govt entity can do because of thier resources available and little to no interest in profits. NASA being one of those (nationl defense being another). Do I think that a private corp could do it better? Sure. Do I think a private corp would do it better? Probably not.

Take for instance my last job (now layed off, so you can't think I'm peddling for money :) ). I did what would be called basic comp sci research. Not that it was easy, but that it was not domain specific. Phizer, Shell oil, Los Alamos, almost any place that does high performance computing has rolled thier own versions of the software we worked on. That had *a lot* of duplicate effort with little profit to a company that would produce a package to deal with maintenance of thier clusters. Thus private companies would most likely never release thier own versions - in steps the deep pockets of the federal govt. I made around 30k a year but with the federal govt's overhead I cost over 100k - private industry rarely has that over head.

Think of this as an x-prize vs federal contract for space flight. Right there epitomises the philosophy - who do you go to for a robust cheap system? It's *much* better than the lowest bidder or internal funding system the govt has.

Still, I would like to see the govt (and NASA) offer a *huge* prize along with a contract along the lines of the x-prize as only the govt has the resources to do the work needed. I think it could marry the best of both worlds.

Re:"Government doesn't create wealth".

[mcc]

His example is false, in that the government in and of itself can not pay for an investment; rather it has to take money from the citizens to pay for the investment. So the government owes a debt to the citizens to pay for Velcro. If indeed Velcro turns out to be worth more than was invested, unless the government has returned the money it took from the citizens, and given them extra, no wealth has been created.

This is nothing more than playing games with the definition of "wealth"; your argument is effectively tautological. You are not making a statement here about the government's ability to influence the degree of affluence within an economic system, which is what I would say people usually mean when they discuss "wealth" as if it were some sort of discrete quantifiable thing. Instead you are just redefining "wealth" in such a way that it magically disappears when taxation is in some way involved.

This doesn't really work. No one outside the circle of those that have already bought into the libertarian premises is likely to share this definition of wealth. Therefore using this definition of wealth you are attempting to construct is worthless if you wish to justify the libertarian premises to others-- which, in theory, is the point of this entire discussion.

If the original statement had been "government doesn't increase the wealth of individuals", your argument might at least be ontopic, since somewhere in there you have correctly observed that in the Velcro example way back near the top of this thread the direct beneficiaries of the hypothetical government Velcro development are not necessarily the same people as those who provided the capital for the Velcro development; this would mean the wealth of many of these individual providers of capital can be said to have not increased. However, there's still a catch there; somewhere there's an individual that did benefit, and his wealth certainly increased. You would probably say that this is just "redistribution". Here's the thing though: Let's say the government, in its supreme arbitrariness, takes wealth away from individual A, then does something with it, then "redistributes" it to individual B. What if the amount of wealth given to individual B at the end of all this is greater than the amount of wealth taken from individual A-- as it would have been in the Velcro example? If no wealth is created by the government in this transaction, then where exactly did it come from? Elves?

Re:"Government doesn't create wealth".

[Richard_at_work]

Im surprised that noones pointed this out yet, but NASA never discovered or really developed velcro, or teflon or most of the other stuff usually accredited to NASA and the space program. NASAs true positive purpose was and is the employment of hundreds of thousands of americans through contractors, subcontractors etc. Yes, thats right, the $100million they spend on a rocket launch isnt converted to Gold bricks and sent up, it goes home in peoples pockets. By making people work for this money, instead of handing it out, they encourage skills and personal development.

Re:"Government doesn't create wealth".

[symbolset]

The purpose of government is, beyond defense, to deplete the surplus productivity. In an age where workers become ever more productive their exceess leisure would otherwise lead to great unhappiness and unrest.

While research ventures like NASA seem to be unlimited sinkholes to pour excess productivity into, actually the reverse is true. In the long term research always pays off, producing results which make people more productive.

To balance this we need even more bureaucracy and middle management in NASA, several layers of oversight for funding, safety and artistic merit, and that's still not enough.

As a beginning solution to the excess productivity problem I suggest we expend more public funds in the care and nurturing of feral cats.

More accurate headline

[Zenmonkeycat]

"Russian ICBM Accidentally Fails to Destroy Space Station: Next Attempt Will Carry Live Warhead Instead of Food."

Re:More accurate headline

[HermanAB]

About 105 years ago during the Anglo South African War, the ZAR forces fired a single bomb into the besieged town of Maffeking on Christmas day. This was odd, since the Brits and Boers never fought on religious days - never on Sundays and Christmas was unthinkable. When the British soldiers went to investigate and defuse the apparently dud bomb, they found that the shell had a traditional English Christmas pudding in its casing.

Re:More accurate headline

[Anonymous Coward]

Having tried English pudding, the true evil of this plot by the ZAR is exposed...

That is one of the most inhuman war stories I've ever heard. A moment of silence for their tastebuds......

Re:Priorities

[traveyes]

well... they got the food there. they must've done something right.

.

Re:Merry Christmas?

[HermanAB]

"When will they scrap this project"

You don't understand the real purpose of the space station - it is there to have a real pair of human eyeballs watching for a missile launch. It is a final confirmation for the super powers that somebody is up to no-good, before they launch a counter strike and kill millions. The scientific stuff is secondary and to keep the guys from getting bored out of their skulls.

Re:Merry Christmas?

[westyx]

what are they going to do if the missiles are launched - "hey houston, you're fucked. over"

Good for You

[darthdavid]

Nasa and other such organizations are essential to the survival of the human race. Without a proper space program then people will never leaver Earth/ The Solar System and then when something goes awry you can wave bye to the human race. Now, seeing as you obviously have moral objection to NASA, let's make a deal. If earth is ever under threat of destruction and NASA offers you tickets on any life boat they may think up you have to give them to me so you don't violate your moral objection to a government funded space program. Agree?

Re:Priorities

[DM9290]

If this is how we are going to do it, we should not be doing it. We should either commit the resources to do the project correctly or we move on to other needs.

Are you talking about the ISS or are you talking about the space shuttle?

Because the critical design flaw in the space shuttle, which has resulted in the grounding of the fleet, was NOT part of the plan.

But in the real world you overcome problems when they occur. If everyone always gave up and moved on to "other needs" at the slightest hickup, we would always be moving on the other needs without ever satisfying any of them.

Space travel is dangerous. No one is putting a gun to those astronauts' heads.

Missing element in your equation.....

[idiotnot]

Money that's taken by government inevitably has a sizable portion skimmed off the top to support bureaucracy. And there is little personal incentive in government for innovation and top performance.

So, the equations aren't equal.

Time and time again, the private sector has shown itself to be more efficient than the government (or any other monopoly, for that matter).

Even elements of government "run as businesses" don't function as efficiently as their private counterparts. If I have to get a package somewhere in two days, I'm not going to the US Postal Service -- I'm going to UPS or FedEx.

Re:Missing element in your equation.....

[mcc]

> > > Money that's taken by government inevitably has a sizable portion skimmed off the top to support bureaucracy.
> > How is this different from in a corporation?
> It is different from a corporation in that a corporation has an incentive to skim as little as possible off the top to support its "bureacracy" - the government has no incentive to keep its costs low.

But corporations are not autonomous entities. They are run by people.

Specifically they are run by the very "bureacracy" that we are discussing.

So an "incentive" given to the corporation may or may not translate to actual actions-- since the "bureacracy" makes the decisions, not the corporation, the bureaucracy has the capacity to make decisions which serve the interests of the bureaucracy, not the corporation.

In theory this might lead to the corporation not surviving, freeing up resources for other, more efficient corporations. In practice the corporation can probably survive this and continue bogging down its sector of the market, especially if all the other corporations in the same market space-- since they are all also run by people-- are behaving in the same manner. And since the bureaucracies running all these companies have no personal incentive to put the interests of the company over that of their own-- the corporation is who will suffer if they do so, not them-- chances are good that in practice they will all behave in that manner, all the time.

The remainder of your post is merely situationals. They may combine to increase the probability that private enterprise will efficiently perform a task but if we're talking about actual real life and not models they aren't going to hold all the time. There may be government-sector programs which do have incentives to watch their costs, though this likely doesn't happen often. There may be Corporations A which have no corresponding Corporations B, and this does happen often. In fact, it happens to at least a small extent the majority of the time, since there are many different ways to compete and it is not hard to carve out a market niche; almost no businesses compete purely on price except in those markets that are truly commodities, and these markets are probably not interesting enough to justify discussion. Innovation and top performance are one way to get customers but they are not the only, and possibly not even the best way. Your statements do work as a model, but so many assumptions must be met for the model to hold I would question their utility for decisionmaking except in those cases that are so clear-cut and unambiguous that it would be obvious what to do even without the model. And even in those cases, this just means that the market can do a better job than the government could. It doesn't mean the market does or is going to do a good job.

The reason why the government can "get money regardless" isn't systemic. It comes into play becuase the government, like corporations are, is run by people, and these people have the capability to act on their own interests rather than those of the government. And while the systemic advantages to capitalism work great in a vacuum, they don't provide much more protection from this once you start allowing in people than those advantages that government posesses do. Corporations at heart have the same flaw as government-- that the people making the decisions are eternally spending other people's money. In one case they're spending the incorporated entity's money and in the other they're spending the public's money, but the only really important difference is that the public has a lot more money.

The checks and "incentives" in capitalism do provide some protection against the kinds of bureaucratic complacency that plague the efficiency of government programs. But bureaucracies are self-sustaining, and most often they can find ways to brush these "incentives" aside when it suits them, the same way that bureaucracies in government brush aside th

Re:Missing element in your equation.....

[datastalker]

You obviously do not know about government budgets. If you do not spend your budget by the end of the year, you do not get the same amount of money next year. My father worked for a government agency for fifteen years, and I worked for a state government for five, so I know that which of I speak. The budgets, therefore, are the same or more the following year. There is no saving there.

Efficiency, however, means that you eventually pay less for something that you originally paid a certain price for. If I pay X for a process to make widgets, but I then find a way to do it more efficiently, it will cost me Y less. (Either through spending less on machinery or on labour savings.) If X - Y then equals Z, I can lower prices and/or sell more widgets. In either instance, if people then buy those widgets, I make more money. (Either by saving Y, or the increase in sales, or both.)

Efficiency translates into savings which can create wealth - the government can not create wealth.

For that matter, the government can't create anything other than more government - any goods and/or services the government uses from the private sector is that much less that the private sector has for the rest of the private sector.

Here is a very simple fact - people pay taxes. Unless the government is exactly repaying those taxes, and giving the people more money than they took in taxes, they are not creating wealth. It's that simple. If you can sit there and say that the government provides goods and services in larger amount then they take in all the taxes from the citizenry, then you are living in a dream world.

Re:the difference

[datastalker]

Governments do not exist to enrich society. They exist to protect rights. The Declaration of Independence says it best:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,"

It doesn't say "to enrich society". It doesn't say that in the Constitution, either. It's strange that you attribute a function (enriching society) to government that it was never created to do. Society should enrich society. So your definition of government is flawed.

How is the government accountable? By voting? Surely you would not suggest such a thing, when most races end in ties and most politicians are 'bipartisan" to everyone's detriment.

What has the Department of Defense provided the private sector? How silly! Most DoD stuff is private sector built (Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, etc.) for the government. That shows how little you know!

As for the Department of Education, we have spent TRILLIONS on public schools, and they are arguably the worst in the world. The Japanese, Europeans, and Canadians all have higher standards of education than the US and spend far less per student than we do. If that's "enriching society", you have a WARPED definition of enriching.

You do realise that it was the FDA that prevented companies from seeing the European trial results of most drugs? Obviously not. There should be de-regulation. Not everything will be perfect all the time. But when the government approves a medicine it knows to be harmful, and prevents private companies from seeing evidence to the contrary, no one wins. And companies don't sell posion when there is profit to be made - killing your customers is the quickest way to losing them.

Heh, and your accountability argument is laughable. The reason people are not held accountable now is because they're able to utilise donations to political parties to curry favours - in a government that serves only its legitimate purpose that couldn't happen.

The prinicipal of mutual exclusivity is where it's bad. If loggers want to cut down trees, and environmentalists want to save the spotted owl, whom should the government please? The government offends the loggers to please the environmentalists - they offend the environmentalists to please the loggers.

A logging company has incentive to provide for the owls - it doesn't want to lose environmentally conscious customers.

Re:Priorities

[tftp]

commit the resources to do the project correctly

This never happened before in humanity's recorded history :-)

And besides, how do you apply the word "correctly" to the art of spaceflight? There is no single correct way to do things. There is no even a single correct way to cross the street, as far as I know. If you require perfection then I guess you should remain dirtside until some [supposedly] benevolent extraterrestrials, like Qax, offer you a free ride in one of their ships. Anything else involves risk and uncertainty, and most definitely something somewhere will be done incorrectly, even if you throw resources at the problem. To err is human.

Re:They could learn from Japan's 7-11

[maligor]

Outside:
Temperature: Unknown
Pressure: 0
Humidity: Divide by Zero Error!

It'd probably freak out and order shuttles full of vodka.

Embarrassment for the US

[EzInKy]

It shouldn't have fallen on Russia, Europe, or even China to be the "space rescuers", it should have been the US. It is really sad how far America has backslid in space exploration since the '80s.

Re:Embarrassment for the US

[-kertrats-]

Yeah, you're a bit slow on the concept of 'international', aren't you. Too used to the US paying all the bills for the UN?

Re:They could learn from Japan's 7-11

[cypherwise]

It'd probably freak out and order shuttles full of vodka.

And the problem with that is.... ;-)

Re:Priorities

[Chandon Seldon]

I'm sure the Russians are less putting guns to people's heads and more laughing their ass off that they're owning the USA at space on a fraction of our budget and with technology from the 60's.