5 Years of Habitation on the ISS

An anonymous reader writes "The International Space Station has marked five years of continuous human habitation. People started living on the station on November 2, 2000. In five years, the station has hosted 97 people from 10 countries, including 3 commercial passengers. It survived through the Columbia accident and the suspension of shuttle flights. The station is a testbed for long-duration missions to live and work on the Moon and Mars."

Comments

Re:Seems like only yesterday they started wasting

[madshot]

Come on now... do you use any Teflon products? Have you ever used a solar powered calculator?

Yes, I agree, NASA does cost a lot of money, however I disagree that it's a waste of my money.

Why would someone build an entire city under sea level knowing full well the ocean might someday come in and destroy it? Ask the residents of New Oreleans.. Any my tax dollars are going to help clean that up.. b.s.

Why would someone continue to give money to the homeless for years and years and the homeless situation not improve? I'm sorry, but if you're still homeless after 2 years of us trying to help you then you should be deported to Canada. Let them deal with your sorry butt instead of my tax dollars.

Why should you keep a person on death row for 30 years before putting them to death? I'm sorry, but their needs to be a time limit on that. Again, why waste my tax dollars.

At leased we have something to show for the space program unless the thousands of other programs that are just draining our system.

Yes, I know.. I'm gonna get bad Karma for this.. Not all people are equal, not all choices are correct, we need to help our fellow man(woman), we need to balance the budget. Remember, the USA wasn't built on political correctness, it was built on us kicking out the brits.

Re:erm..

[mcc]

Actually it would be reasonable to expect the complete suspension of a major nation's space program to have negative effects on a space station. Skylab, for example, can be directly seen as a casualty of the suspension of America's space program which resulted from the transition to the Space Shuttle. Space stations need active upkeep and visits from crew if they're going to remain in orbit at all. In a hypothetical universe where Russia and America weren't allies in this decade, when the Columbia accident occurred it would have been a serious problem for the space station-- because in the absence of space shuttle flights post-Columbia the flights run by the Russian space program were necessary to keep the thing inhabited.

Space Research has done much....

[hcob$]

Think of all the "space-age" technology you have today. Your cell phone, compact radios, great insulation, etc etc. All that was developed from technologies made for the original moon-shot. Expecting benefits from pure research and development in 5 years is insane. Although the station does suck allot of money, it will pay off in the future in new synthesis technologies, habitat sustainability, launch, and commumication technologies.

Re:Space Research has done much....

[Bogtha]

Think of all the "space-age" technology you have today. Your cell phone, compact radios, great insulation, etc etc. All that was developed from technologies made for the original moon-shot.

And think of how much more advanced it would all be if we'd poured the funding for space exploration into those technologies directly instead of waiting for spin-offs.

The spin-off argument is a non-starter. If you want fancy mobile phones, throw the research money into mobile phones. If you want better insulation, throw the research money into insulation. If you want to justify space research, then justify it based on how well it accomplishes its intended goals, not on the tech you might be able to scavenge from it for other purposes.