US to Pay to go to ISS

forgotten_my_nick writes "According to BBC News, Russia has announced that it will no longer ferry US astronauts to space for free (It has been doing so for two years). From 2006 the US will be expected to pay."

Comments

Repaid already?

[irving47]

Did they already repay us for the huge amount of money we spent to pay for their parts of the station? IIRC, they claimed a few times they couldn't finish their pieces because of lack of funding, so we footed the bill...

Re:Repaid already?

[hughk]

That was quite a rant, but you have forgotten to remind the USians that without French help, then the war of independence would have failed. I know, that it was done out of the French love of the English (neignbours and so on). Anyway, I find it particularly hypocritical when this is forgotten.

Actually a lot of the problems comes down to the trenches of WWI. The US entered particularly late into that one but it was a common and appalling experience for the rest of Europe.

Re:Repaid already?

[smchris]

My wife still shudders at the Perrier embargo of '03 when all things French were evil and products weren't making it to our local grocery.

Basically, the U.S. is a brain, heart and soul dead shell with a lot of weapons. Even at our local metropolitan Mensa gathering we have to avoid the "Rush Limbaugh is God" table. This has all been analyzed and put on the bookshelves already. Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death. Berman's Twilight of American Culture.

Personally, I've decided I don't care. A purposeful Nazi or a pig-ignorant Nazi, they are both repugnant and I'm ashamed of my countrymen. But you have to realize that the American people are pig-ignorant. Forget quality public education, we don't even have free media. I gave up on so-called "liberal" public radio after the drumbeat to war in March of '03 when one of their shows headlined some guy from a military college on "Socrates, the soldiering years!" Talk about pseudo-intellectual target market warmongering taken to the ridiculous. If it weren't for the meager checks and balances of the internet, Clear Channel would probably be telling the U.S. heartland that most of the world has been taken over by aliens, so to speak.

And they'd believe it.

Re:WTG Russia.

[BoomerSooner]

They aren't trying to profit they are trying to break even. If Russia had the budget NASA has I would be willing to bet they could create a reusable shuttle. How the hell does Bush think we can get to Mars when we need to borrow Russia's space fleet to get to ISS? What a joke.

White Elephant

[FiReaNGeL]

In the beginning, the ISS was supposed to be a great international effort to promote science in orbit, among other things.

We all know the 'great' and 'international' part got scrapped (well, not entirely, but still)... what about the science? With a crew of 2 members and troubles with reapprovisionment, is there any (real) science getting done on the ISS? Or is it only kept up because we already invested too much in it?

Re:International relations

[demachina]

I certainly wouldn't be surprised if Russia didn't lob this little missile at the U.S. at this particular component because Putin is royally pissed at the outcome of the elections in Ukraine. It appears the Moscow backed thugs that were in power were thoroughly bad but I'm not sure the new government is exactly going to be a pillar of Democracy. Putin was equally unhappy about Serbia, and Star Wars(Russia is building new warheads to defeat it) and in general that the U.S. and Europe is trying slowly suffocate Russia on the world stage.

A couple of days ago at a Collin Powell press conference Powell was talking about how important it was Ukraine get a democraticly elected government without outside interference. The reporter being especially smart, informed and ballsy pointed out the U.S. was funding Yuschenko's party through the National Endowment for Democracy and was in fact interfering in the election just as much as Moscow was. It wouldn't be suprising if the CIA was helping fuel the uprising after the previous election too, they do that sort of thing, all the time. You see "National Endowment for Democracy" is one of those big brotherisms. They don't actually promote democracy where people in a country pick the leader of their choice, they work to bend and twist countries so that only governments friendly to U.S. win, even if that outcome runs counter to the actual democratic will of the people that live there.

It will be interesting to see how deeply the relationship between the U.S. and Russia fractures. It appears poised for a really deep schism that could lead to a new cold war. I'm wondering what will happen to ISS if the U.S. and Russia return to a true adverserial relationship. I'm pretty sure the Russians could with some work, undock the pieces they built and have a functional space station core they could use to build a new MIR while the rest of ISS eventually ends up in cinders.

Re:Well then.

[khrtt]

How did we end up with such an expensive system, and how did Communists build such a cheap one?

They couldn't afford an expensive system. They tried, too, but had to stop for lack of funds. Then they had no choice but to keep updating their old Soyuz system. In the meanwhile we abandoned ours, because we had the shuttle.

The whole story shows that you shouldn't put all your eggs in one basket, even if you have a lot of eggs, which is a well known fact outside of the context of space programs:-).

Besides, the shuttle is a much bigger ship than Soyuz, and it can do a lot more than just take people in and out of orbit, so they are not really comparable. Just try to imagine a Soyuz-based mission to fix the Hubble.

RTFA

[Mock]

Sigh.
As usual we get the slew of high moderated posts about how the americans built everything, and how the russians are now gouging them.
Some people blame the americans, others the russians. All didn't read the article.

Fact: The russians are currently ferrying everything to the station.
Fact: NASA is grounded.
Fact: The russians are very low on funds, and can't afford to keep doing this.

They've stated that they'll wait to see if NASA meets its May deadline to get their shuttles going again.
They've stated that they want to negotiate something to ease the burden (such as bartering for the man hours they currently owe for other work).
America's response hasn't been made clear yet.

Is this gouging? No. They haven't even entered negotiations yet.

Should they gouge? Some of you "capitalist or die" affictionados may think so, but that kind of thinking is what drives the CEOs who only look to the next quarter's earnings, and what they can get out of it before the thing collapses.

This doesn't work in world politics, as can be seen from the fallout of Iraq.