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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."
Slashdot and a space station are almost indistinguishable.
"It survived through the Columbia accident"
You don't generally notice space stations disappearing when a shuttle explodes. You generally see them stay right where they are and continue to be space stations. Very few people would go "oh lets just knock it out the sky, who cares?" when it's the only space based human colony (small though it is).
I like muppets.
I disagree with you, but this is just my opinion: :D
1) Our population is increasing almost exponentially. If we dont get started researching permanent rehabitation now, we may not be able to sustain ourselves in the future
2) assume a cataclysmic event happened on Earth. If we have people in space when it happens (like, colonizing mars or something) then we may survive as a species to see another day
there are more reasons. If I missed some, reply with more
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I'm trying hard to find a solid list of scientific accomplishments for the mission. So far, I'm finding a handful of research articles on microgravity-related changes in human physiology. Hopefully there's more.
I hope the major accomplishment of the ISS isn't just keeping it in orbit.
"The station is a testbed for long-duration missions to live and work on the Moon and Mars."
How is it a test bed for that? Sure, the structure is still up there... I'm pretty sure that isn't the hard part about getting to Mars, or even the moon. The hard part is keeping a human alive in there without resupply, in-gravity exercise, etc. None of which the station helps with.
-Daniel
Jeez... What's taking so long. Five years and it's not done yet. Here is a better article:d _iss_fifthyear.html
http://space.com/businesstechnology/051102_techwe
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
Did you just buy a DVD box set of SeaQuest DSV?
UNIX: A computer user is defined as a programmer. WINDOWS: A computer user is defined as a consumer.
yes, that money should go to the homeless!
Well, that or they should put the homeless in the space station at least. I mean, with all this research how has nobody thought of testing the effects of zero g on the homeless?
That comes out around a cool $1 Billion per visitor. And so much has been accomplished. Such a deal.
I think that if humans don't destroy themselves first something will happen to Earth naturally. Maybe the government already knows what is going to happen and isn't telling anyone. Maybe the sky will start to fall. The movie deep impact comes into mind.
Exploration is key to survival. You never know what we'll find or how many aliens we'll talk to ;-)
Plus, living on the moon could get expensive, especially if you have to lease the land from some old fart that bought their kids land on the moon and actually demand payment for land use. http://www.lunarregistry.com/
Obama = Socialism.
Ask yourself this, when you think of the ISS are you filled with pride, satisfaction, or a general, meh. Yep, it is the most expensive "meh" in history.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
I'm trying hard to find a solid list of scientific accomplishments for the mission.
How about accomplishments outside of the scientific domain?
People of all colors, gender and race from more than a dozen nations have floated above our heads like biblical angels in peace and harmony.
Achieving nothing.
3) The moon has great asset value for a host of purposes.
A) Mineral Mining.
B) Space Observation.
C) Space (well moon) station for resupplying and launching missions into deeper space.
D) Other.
But realistically you don't want to "live" on the moon any more than you'd want to live in a submarine, but sometimes its nessesary.
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.
Obama = Socialism.
"Let's fix the oceans and live in them, that's more feasible than the moon and mars."
Assuming the planet isn't destroyed by asteroids, global warming, or a nuclear war, this would be an awesome idea.
"Derp de derp."
Let's fix the oceans and live in them, that's more feasible than the moon and mars.
Yep, a coat a paint and a new rug and that ocean is in move-in condition!
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
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.
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)
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.
Cliff Claven
K.E.G. Party Chairman
Founding Leader of: Koncerned for Egalitarin Governance
There is absolutely no realistic way that "space colonization" will help with the worlds population problems, at least not in the forseeable future.
Once robots are ubiquitous (definitely in the forseeable future) and "the singularity" (not M$'s) happens, I think humanity will become more like benign pets anyway.
The next replier, who mentions the Moon as a mining source, hits the nail on the head. Also, scientific research in zero-g is the way to go. Thats really what any space station should be about.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
a) We need to learn to use other planets as resources so that when the population of earth is say... 16 billion people and the average life expectancy is say 5 times higher than it is now or even the possibility of death being a thing of the past, that we can ship people off into the universe like its no big deal.
b) Diversify, diversify, diversify. Right now we keep all our eggs in one basket. One meteor, one huge earthquake or mega volcanic eruption could wipe out anywhere from 25% to 95% after all of the side effects are taken into account (i.e. tsunamis and climate changes). By living on other planets the chances of our extinction as a species becomes much smaller.
c) Exploration and knowledge for the sake of knowledge. Sure we can do most of that stuff with robots, but what fun is that... and while living in space we may learn a thing or two about the robustness (or lack thereof) of our bodies and ability to adapt. Perhaps new methods of farming or food creation will become the norm. There are many other benefits but I won't list them now.
d) Like it or not, not only are we an intelligent species, but a moral one. The intelligence factor leads us to dominating our surrounding environment, the problem is we are smart enough to not be happy with what we have and instead modify it to our needs (I see nothing wrong with this, we are a part of nature, whatever we do is natural despite however many animals may die, even if we do it in a viral manner). As a result of this extra level of comfort we tend to take up more space and consume more resources. We also tend to live longer and longer... eventually reaching the point of no death according to many in the sciences. This is where the moral part kicks in... we won't enforce population control, we won't just start killing people for the sake of killing people. Therefore our population is bound to spiral out of control at some point within the next century or so.
Any one of those points is worth sending civilizations into space.
Regards,
Steve
Hey! I wonder if PBS will have a show in 50 yrs or so called "This Old Space Station". Just imagine the tools that the Norm counterpart will have! Mmmmmmmm, power tools.
Evil people don't think they're evil. - George Lucas, Making of Ep III
"Hey human, how about some money so I can buy some Oxygen?"
Evil people don't think they're evil. - George Lucas, Making of Ep III
"International Space Station has marked five years of continuous human habitation."
And I bet it smells like it too.
I think maybe part of the underlying "meh" to the ISS is the fact that it is so fragile. People think of space stations as self sustaining settlements in space and the fact that people are staying over night in space is not enough to fulfill that image. If you are feeling down, just realize that the ISS is a necessary step to that dream of the self-sustained space city.
5 years? Big deal? Chris Kraft (former "Flight" in the early days of NASA) summed it up in his autobiography: the space shuttles, the space stations, they are all a cop-out and pretty much a waste of time. We should be on the moon, on Mars, not wasting time in low orbit! We already know how to stay in orbit with a zillion satellites and launches under our collective belts. We need to get back to the hard stuff.
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.
Money wasted on the space station in no way advances any of the things you are concerned about. Being in LEO and constantly resupplied from the ground, it provides no information on how to build a Martian or Lunar colony, or how to support a crew on a years long mission to Mars.
There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.
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
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Oh yeah, the day after christmas. Good move, faceless DVD company.
*mopes*