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

It's still not done yet????

[technoextreme]

Jeez... What's taking so long. Five years and it's not done yet. Here is a better article:
http://space.com/businesstechnology/051102_techwed _iss_fifthyear.html

Re:Why?

[Trigun]

When the Sun goes supernova, all you water suckers are going to be boiled to death, and us space rats will just freeze to death. How do you want to go? I'd rather be frozen than boiled alive myself.

Population Growth Slowing

[MushMouth]

Actually population growth is slowing quite dramatically and there is an expectation that the world population will hit a maximum of about 9 billion people (only 50% higher than today). The easiest/cheapest way to deal with over population is to educate women in the third world. Then the next best way would be for humans to populate the arctic and oceans (more than 2/3rds of the world surface)

Re:erm..

[dubiago]

I'm pretty sure what they mean is that it's amazing the station is still up there and running after some pretty substantial backsteps in manned spaceflight.

After Apollo ended, there wasn't much going on. They had Skylab, but in the end no one cared about that and it burned in the atmosphere.

Then came the shuttle, essentially a pickup truck to ferry parts back and forth to-and-from orbit, including parts for the space station. In many ways, it was a couple of steps backward from Apollo.

In this case in our time, the space station is up there and functioning. Despite the fact that no construction has proceeded because of the grounded shuttle fleet, people are still up there.

Re:Could someone please post accomplishments?

[hitmark]

from what i understand the building of it is going slower then planed, or is more or less on ice as the shuttle was going to do the majority of the bulk lifts.

therefor most of the lab space isnt in place yet.

hell, its running on a skeleton crew right now...

Re:lossage

[dasunt]

Lets assume that we want to remove 6 billion people from the face of the planet into space. We'll give a timespan of 20 years. That is 300,000,000 people a year. About 800,000 people a day, over 34,000 an hour, 570 people a minute, or 9 people a second.

9 people a second, day and night, for 20 years. That is a lot of bandwidth, even for a group of space elevators.

Other infrastructure scales up about as poorly.

If we look at the timeframe, we probably won't have a working space elevator in 20 years. :( Its probably more likely that a space elevator is 30 - 50 years down the road.

Re:lossage

[networkBoy]

About option "A", mineral mining is fine on the moon. Either fission or solar power to run refinaries, etc. So long as the value of the finished and/or intermediate goods you are going to send back to the earth (or mars, or whatever) is greater than the cost of production and transportation, then it is worth it. If it is possible to move near earth asteroids and such to a parking orbit around the moon, where it can be "chunked" and dropped into the gravity well for a landing, you can harvest vast ammounts of mineral resources.

I know the arguments against a lunar base (mostly pertaining to the gravity well), but it has some real benifits as to radiation shielding, and gravity on human phisiology that makes it worth it.
-nB