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No More Science on the ISS Until Further Notice
Dyna-Soar writes "Discovery Channel News is reporting that NASA is canceling scientific research projects on the International Space Station until construction is complete. This may not happen before 2010 or 2012." From the article: "In addition to beginning development of a new manned launch system, expenses to return the shuttle fleet to flight following the 2003 Columbia disaster and delays completing the International Space Station have left NASA with a projected shortfall of up to $5 billion over the next five years"
If only congress could get the hint and stop castrating Nasa...
Why bother finising the ISS if you are not going to use it to increase scientific knowlegde. I guess filling the pockets of the contractors is the real reason for the ISS, not science.
quis custodiet ipsos custodes
They might as well evacuate the crew and conduct a little SDI test on this money-sucking white elephant.
You'll all probably mod me down for this, but I actually this is a good move on NASA's part. We all realize the purpose of the space station is to provide scientific research, but in light of recent problems plaguing the shuttle program, the safety of the astronauts should be the foremost consideration. Not much point in moving into an appartment building until its been built, and the same thing applies to an orbiting piece of metal.
Considering the ISS hasn't produced any scientific results worthy of the name, I don't regard this as any great loss. I'd even go so far as to call it anti-scientific - the one thing the ISS has managed to do is strangle funding for telescopes and rovers that that might send back actual data. The ISS hasn't sent back anything more interesting than a bit more footage of astronauts chasing globules of tang.
Imagine what the station could have been like if our government hadn't wasted that $300 billion dollars bombing the shit out of another nation based on lies about invisible weapons of mass destruction.
Its funny how we can always come up with money to kill, but there's never enough money for science.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
There are two types of critics of the US space program - the ones who criticize them for the horrible decisions they have been making for the last 30 years (starting with decision to go ahead with the STS system) and hte ones who think the whole thing is a waste of money and should be cancelled. The problem is that when the former group speak out, they give the latter group all the ammunition they could want.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
I think there will be hotels in space befor they finaly finnish the ISS. ISS will be renamed I-DSS and used to house the minimum wage cleaners for the hotels.
Seriously though, people in a space station are very expensive in the long run and although they provide fascility for micro-gravity research ect alot of this could be achived with and un-maned drone.
People on the moon however I think is a much better idea as with a few basic supplies it could become self sufficiant what with all the free water and an ample back yard to stick solar pannels, make hydrogen fuel and grow food stuffs. Plus the added bonus of hulking great lumps of rock to shield from radiation.
In the not too distant future, next Sunday A.D.
The correct headline should be "No More US Science on the ISS". Other ISS participants (Russians, Europeans, etc.) are very likely to conduct scientific experiments, even if limited.
This is just the Bush adinistration trying to go one up on Clinton with the ISS, also to try beat the Chinese back to the moon.
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...is the most expensive toilet in the solar system.
I mean, seriously, with no research going on and barely any construction between now and 2012, all you have is a group of people eating and shitting, no?
I'm glad to see my tax dollars aren't being wasted on something trivial like curing cancer or developing safe, inexpensive, practical sources of energy.
They all volunteered and worked hard to get into that (astronaut) program. Who are you to tell them they can't take the risk? (jeesh more NASCAR drivers have died than astronauts) Heck let's post the risk factor on a display each time and let them go for it. They can quit if they want. Not that I am advocating wasting perfectly good astronauts but once we finish blowing up the rest of the shuttles maybe we can get serious about a real space launch vehicle.
>You'll all probably mod me down for this, but I actually this is a good move on NASA's
>part. We all realize the purpose of the space station is to provide scientific research,
>but in light of recent problems plaguing the shuttle program, the safety of the astronauts
>should be the foremost consideration. Not much point in moving into an appartment building
>until its been built, and the same thing applies to an orbiting piece of metal.
NASA could always charge for experiments to be conducted. Plenty of R&D groups would pay up if it were reasonable, and everyone benefits.
What they really want is to cancel the ISS. It's more acceptable to announce the cancellation only in 2010, when people have mostly forgotten the money that was spent on this.
With China wanting to start building a moon base in 2017, there is a chance that NASA will live. If they could just have spend the enormous budget which is available for war, we would have had a deathstar circling the sun by now.
P.S. The deathstar idea is to keep inline with the most likely project which would make it through the Bush administration.
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
...if you take building the ISS as a goal.
But frankly, why would you? ISS isn't a step forward to anywhere. It doesn't do anything much other than "showcase international cooperation". The science it was doing was of the "train ants to sort tiny screws in space" variety. Even the Wikipedia article can't muster much definitive purpose, beyond the usual vague claim of technical spin-offs.
They should either decide that it's a tool for a task, redesign and build towards that, or de-orbit the whole junkpile into the nearest ocean. To carry on building for the sake of mere inertia would be nuts.
Now we will never know whether ants can sort tiny screws in zero-g.
Hey, Golden Palace Casino...
I don't think there's any orbital gambling laws in place.
Why don't you all just be good folks and build us all a Floating Space Casino.
Who gives a rat about NASA science projects when all we really need is booze and floating space strippers? I bet Space Vegas would finally make us an intergalactic empire!
A quick search on arxiv.org for 'International Space Station' yields four papers.
For comparison, a search for 'Hubble Space Telescope' gives over 200 papers.
Not a definitive result, but it seems to indicate that there's not much science being done anyway.
There is no more science on the ISS because it has been superceded by superior methods and worldviews. Now only Intelligent Design will be studied there. ISS will now stand for "Intelligent Space Station."
... was as a welfare program for underemployed Soviet rocket scientists.
After all, the US developed its own ballistic missile technology with the help of recently-unemployed German rocket scientists, and that actually worked out pretty well from an effectiveness standpoint. So with the fall of Communism, it seemed like a good idea to give the erstwhile bad guys something to do besides designing weapons.
Make no mistake, that is all the ISS was ever going to be good for. It performs no scientific role that either couldn't be handled more economically by longer-duration Shuttle flights and robotic spacecraft, or wasn't already handled by Skylab and Soyuz.
If the goal is to kill it, then why keep spending the money on construction if it's never going to be finished?
:-)
I'd say cut your losses, mothball it now and spend the money on robotic missions to Europa, a prototype asteroid mining mission that actually produces real product (e.g. water for reaction mass), orbiters for Uranus and Neptune, advanced nuclear (ooh, the n-word!) propulsion systems so that deep space missions that don't take decades, and actually get some science done.
I guess it's all a bit moot, though, since by 2020 everyone will be buying elevator tickets from Liftport instead...
Sean Ellis
Follow OfQuack's antics on Twitter.
The idea of doing science at a tourist resort is ridiculous anyway.
Lisp is the Tengwar of programming languages.
Are you sure about "free water"? Last I checked, any significant amount of water on the Moon was still just a hypothesis. Apollo astronauts found none, the Lunar Prospector found none, and the best bet seems to be that it might exist in some of the shaded craters near the poles.
This is quite important, because transporting water to the Moon (from Earth at least) is likely to be very expensive. In the longer term, chances are it would have to be extracted from the Moon somehow if it's there, or obtainted from somewhere else.
i was not a great discocery to bring fresh fruit ... on a ship sailing around ... ... but nothing :P i mean didn't the japanese have some
on board a ship in Columbuses times, just
like it wasn't much of a "discovery" to bring
lemon tress, etc
the globe
my guess is that the ISS has made many small
but important "discoveries" for future
long duration manned space flights
bill board worth like "cure to cancer discovered
on ISS"
neat-o material research in zero-g with results?!
:P
"I'm afraid I can't let you conduct your experiments here, Dave."
Back before we had space stations, Science Fiction always visualized them as a way point for other destinations rather than just for research. Seems scientific research alone can't justify the enormous expense involved, and that the concept of a space station as a jumping off point is not often considered as necessary.
I would like to offer an alternative to completing the ISS, and Pres. Bush's "Moon, Mars, and beyond". How about we make "The Search for Life" the priority instead? For the price of the ISS, we could have had rovers on all the planetary bodies where there is even a remote chance of finding life, and sample return missions as well. The ISS can be used as is, as a quarantine for the returning samples. Put manned exploration on the back burner for now. At the rate technology is always advancing, when we get back to doing manned missions someday, we will have - who knows - space elevators or whatever to make the job much easier. The advantage of the focus as I propose is that it doesn't call for some mega-construction with mega-funding and attendant mega-bureaucracy. By it's nature, it's done in small steps like NASA's "Smaller, cheaper, faster" missions. Just imagine little rovers on the ground, and rovers in the air, all over the Solar System? Scientists will access and guide them via the Internet. Every university in the world will participate. I think it's a good bet were are going to find some microbes somewhere. Even if we don't, we will have learned a tremendous amount of planetary sciences along the way, much more than we ever would as things stand.
what's the news in that?
Seriously, there has been very little science accomplished on the ISS, at least relative to the enormous amounts of money it has consumed.
1. No more science to be done on the ISS. Who noticed? When compared to the Hubble, where is the outcry from the scientific community?
2. If there's no science to be done on the ISS, why is it manned?
3. If it shouldn't be manned and there's no science to be done, why is it there?
It's a matter of time before there's a Survivor: International Space Station, where the losers get flung out of the hatch and make their own way back by hitching a ride on the next Soyuz.
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
With "Science" out of the way, that clears the way to complete construction on the ISS and clearly the ISS is too complex to have evolved in place (and we have found no space "creatures" that show intermediate steps), so clearly the ISS is the result of Intelligent Design.
Game Set Match.
Kansas wins!
Clearly it will be converted to DoD R+D work, aka 'black' projects. The administration has never made a secret of their desire to militarize space.
Gotta spend so much time and effort maintaining it, there's hardly any time left to actually use it for what it was intended!
This is a public ploy by NASA to garner public support and get more money from Congress.
I've tried confirming this story on Google... I see a space probe mission or two cancelled, and some evidence that science operations on station are being somewhat neglected, but nothing as wildly improbable as a total cancellation of payload science operations on the ISS.
TFA seems to misinterpret the administrator's comments before Congress. He speaks of suspending NASA's own research projects in life science and nuclear propulsion.... the kind of cutting edge stuff needed for 9-month trips to Mars (or having the speed to reduce that to a more manageable timeframe).
(It's never too late to join the Renaissance)
I'd like to put in my 2c.
First of all, I'm affected by this because our company experienced some pretty hefty layoffs due to some science cuts at Ames. We had two projects cut prematurely: one that was probably near 90% complete and another just over 50% complete.
Here's my problem with what NASA did: Say what you want about whether NASA should have built the ISS. It was their decision. The issue arises when NASA makes the decision to build the ISS, then years later in the middle of the build, simply quits. Make a decision and stick with it, NASA. Had you completed the ISS, all that money would not have been lost. Had you never started the ISS, all that money would not have been lost. In your current situation, you have royally screwed yourselves.
Go Space Privatization!
IWARS.
People, in general, disappoint me. Politicians even more so.
SO I guess the only way to get funding is to say..ZOMG there is WMD on the ISS !!! Quick let's launch a war !! Spend lots of $$$ I guess Hive cities are next, cause if we don't get off this rock, we are going to be hosed.
Guns are for wimps... Use a crossbow.. this way you can pin them to their chair when you go postal.
I'm tired of hearing things like "we can't afford NASA" when we can clearly afford HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS of dollars blowing people to bits in foreign countries. Hell, we've gone from a 5 Trillion dollar surplus to a projected deficit of 12 Trillion (dubya's projected deficit when leaving office) in just 8 years (a total of 17-18 TRILLION dollars)... What's another 5 Billion? I mean, I recognize that we have to watch where our Billions go when it isn't being given to Halliburton in no-bid contracts, but other than that we should scrutinize every penny! I sure miss the innocent days of $800 hammers. Remember, it's important to have corporate kick-backs and welfare, the Bush Administration just wants to make sure that no money is spent on that there learnin' or science n stuff. Might piss off the extreme fundamentalist Christian terrorists and their crazy ideology in THIS country... They'll have to move from blowing up the soon-to-be closed abortion clinics (thanks Alito!) to blowing up those crazy NASA centers of knowledge. It won't be long now, and Halliburton will be awarded the no-bid contract to build a $3 Trillion Dollar replica of the Ten Commandments to be placed in the White House! I'm so glad that "honor and integrity have been restored to the White House."
For the good of all man kind.. Give nasa the 5billion.. With a Debt in the trillions what's another 5 billion? Chump change.
That was one of the most insightful posts I've read lately.
/. reads like a bunch of luddites complaining and it's getting old. So if any of those actually support an, over time, increasing human presence in space they should get out of their "old grumpy man" act. To put it in a simple way the astronauts sent to ISS are themselves the biggest experiment and the most important one (and if anyone thinks that could be done on earths surface they've reached rock bottom - pun not intended). The ISS serves as a real testbed for hands on technology concerned with keeping humans alive in space for prolonged periods and with increased efficiency and reliability. Yes, it has the potential to be much more over time, personally I hope that at some point in the future when we are actually ready to do so its orbit can be boosted to GEO, but that is of course a long way off and money is actually the least objection to doing it right away: we don't presently have the requisite technology at a sufficient level to make it worthwhile, not even close.
/. doesn't actually contain many readers that seem to be aware of how incrementally and tediously science normally progresses. Many seem to think that science progresses like the technology tree in some C&C-like game and /. is filled with people who think it more important to criticize NASA (or Burt Rutan or anyone else actually trying to do something it seems) than to actually say something enlightened (!=rehashed bickering). I guess we can all blame the armchair for that :)
/. has much clout either politically and scientifically and the ranting doesn't actually affect much except the /. "image".
_ 050818.html
/. lol
For those who, like me, actually support humans in space almost all comments regarding space on
And so what if the ISS program was used for more than just its face value of space science? Why is that such a horror? Isn't it actually better to employ people in science that benefits us than let them languish and in likelihood be employed against us?
For being a supposed "Nerd" site
Anyway I'm not worried as I doubt anyone on
Recommended reading:
http://www.space.com/adastra/adastra_hustle_part1
The danger of that link of course is that it will shame people into shutting up.... what am I saying? this is
this comment is provided "as is" and without any express or implied legibility or congruity [...]
As we've seen by comparing NASA to companies like SpaceX, we can obviously do better with a commercial entity running interplanetary exploration and scientific endeavors. I would like to formally announce my new company dedicated to aerospace and biological research, Union Aerospace Corporation.
Now hiring scientists and Space Marines.
The Russian Mafia will mod you down just to see if the Moderate button works.
All I saw in the article is that NASA won't be funding any of its own research. To me, that just means there will be room open on the ISS for educational institutions to put experiments into microgravity. Heck, NASA could even license their "research space" to commercial entities. I see a lot of people assuming that because the government won't be spending money on research that it won't happen. I think it will continue to happen, and NASA might even make some money out of it.
But it's hard to play roulette or craps in microgravity... I mean, you could velcro your chips to the table to place your bet, but what happens to the dice or the ball?
---GEC
I'm but the humble pupil, seeking to snatch the scratchbuilt pebble from the master's fully articulated hand
"No More Science on the ISS Until Further Notice" - but intelligent intelligent design is good to go?
Seriously, does this mean that time travel, space elevators, cold fusion, zero point energy, and slashdotters contributing to the human gene pool - all this can happen on the space station - because there is no science there?
No really,seriously. They could have made that announcement when they launched it. We've got more science out of the war in Iraq - for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
Also, do you think Saddam had a thing for nuclear and biological scientists? Recruited them just for fun? The real reason is Bush cut off the oil for food embezzlement that France, Germany and Russia was enjoying. That is what all the anti-war stuff is about. Supporting terrorism. Terrorism that is biting France right now, in flames. Some think that France will fall soon. We'll see. Maybe they will ask Germany or Britain to help them.
By the way, it isn't funny the military gets more money than science. Being a scientist I know all about that. If we just had some nice young skirts to send down to Congress to woo them, we could get a lot more money. Geeks don't get funded as well as the macho soldier boys. The unfortunate part is even if we make new advances, the military often takes those advances and uses them to kill people. They even use non-lethal weapons to drive people out to where they can shoot them.
I do know there are those that say the WMDs were not moved to Syria. Those same people are at a loss to explain why there is truck tracks from those suspected sites to Syria. No tracks show up for years before that, then all of a sudden? Seems like only a fool would believe they weren't moved, unless they can show they moved something else. How about it, do any slashdotters know of why those truck tracks from obviously heavy trucks showed up from December to just before the invasion? Truck track fairy maybe? There are pictures of places that show up at the same time in Syria where it is obvious something was burried.
Not trying to be flame bait here. So don't flame. If you know of something that definitively shows they were moved, respond. Same thing if you have something that shows definitively they were not moved respond as well. Note - Newspaper articles don't count as definitive proof. I don't want propaganda either way. Just the facts (play Dragnet tune).
This is the same tactic that NASA has pulled a number of times. It has always worked. Hopefully, it will work here.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The Saturn V used liquid-fuelled rocket engines, which took hours to fuel. Beginning with Polaris and Minuteman I, all military rockets were solid fuelled, for ease of storage and fast launch time. The technologies almost could not be more divergent. So, how is one a cover for the other?
The clearance system sounds logical. It is not. It is completely arbitrary. -- John Bolton
The money had to come from somewhere. Nasa can't afford to work on manned missions, fix the shuttle, AND keep going with science on the space station. What worries me is that the manned missions will suddenly lose funding as well- mainly because of the costs that ISS has incurred.
The whole point of ISS is that discoveries made on it will be available to the public. If companies paid for research, they would own the results of that research and it would become proprietary, intellectional property and no one outside the companies owning the results could invent products based on the research. Thereby defeating the purpose of spending tax payer dollars in the first place.
There's always strings attached to money.
Well, The dictator has been removed from power. There are other nations who have killed their own citizens by the thousands. Iraq hasn't harbored terrorists since the 1970s, there were no Iraqis on the planes that hit the WTC and Pentagon. I don't recall Iraq (or Saddam) bragging about the existence of WMD's nor their plan to use them on the US(that is to say, in the weeks leading up to the invasion). I believe it was Colin Powell (and other WH officials) doing the bragging. We have an administration that appeared to be scheming to invade before Sept. 11, 2001. We have a nation with lots of oil, the extraction of which was run by non-US oil companies (French and Russian, I believe) We have an energy "task force" meeting with the VP, the minutes of which are secret.
It is also economically profitable to deny your competitors of resources, and to provide them through your own companies. This is why we prop up The House of Saud. It is in our interests to keep Saudi oil flowing because the US has a 49% stake in the oil business there. The terrorists on the planes that fateful day were mostly Saudi. How many Iraqi civilians have we killed? I don't know, but I would guess it is more than the approximately 3000 americans who died on 9/11. Hell, we are two thirds there with the number of troops that have been killed (On the US side, that is). We have an administration that has lied to the citizens of this democracy of ours. Tell me again what our purpose is? Usama has said that he wants the infedels out of Saudi. We left Saudi, and invaded Iraq. Who's side is Bush on? I'm beginning to wonder. And I recall that most people in the Middle East have always been wanting to get rid of Israel. The Iranians have STFU because they see a crazy person in the WH with his finger near the button. Smart those Iranians. It is one thing for you opponent to shout "death to America" and it is quite another to actually try and do it. The Iranians have been victims of US interference for a long time. I dare say that they have reason to chant. And how many times have you heard "nuke their ass, take their gas"? There are loonies everywhere. You have been lied to. And you ate it up. Saddam and his government were evil. Their military was already smashed. The insurgents are following the playbook of Sun Tzu. I'm not seeing any good news coming out of Iraq. Unless you count the progress of the puppet government.
seriously, do the level of research on space colonization that a high school student would be equipped to do. its NOT HAPPENING. stop watching star trek. this is where we live and we will always live. there is nowhere for us to go where we can live without a massive external support system. asking us to research interstellar travel is like asking a caveman to research the manufacture of plasma televisions. stop watching star trek.
Next up: A Faith based moon landing, and then on to Mars, God willing!
Since all their time was spent just keeping the station afloat, it wouldn't be suprising if all the science was formally abandonned. This article is based on the cancellation of one experiment due to lack of supplies. That one experiment was probably all they had time to do between paddling.
A casino in a huge dirigible would be fantastic.
Bah, we can destroy all the guns as soon as you make the Saudi Arabias, Irans, North Koreas, and Chinas of the world disappear. If the entire would looked like the EU, Japan, South Korea, and the US, I bet the number of guns in the world would drop like a rock. The reality is that the world is full of strongmen and people more then happy to pick up a gun and enforce their will upon others, and the only defense against that is to have guns of your own. Kuwait didn't have enough guns. Bosnia didn't have enough guns. South Korea didn't have enough guns (though thankfully they knew someone who did). France didn't have enough guns. Poland didn't have enough guns. The list is endless. There is a damn good reason why nations load up on guns, and a quick glance at history reveals why.
It is easy to sit in your cozy chair in Europe or the US and declare that alls we need to do is drop the guns and love each other. Park your ass up and head to South Korea on the border with North Korea, THEN tell me we don't need guns and I'll be impressed.
I know it is hard to deal with the loss of your own (or friends) jobs. However step back a little. The money already spent is a sunk cost, we cannot get it back, so it does not enter into calculations. We have to look at the benefits of continuing. Sometimes the situation changes and it isn't worth spending more money on something 90% done.
As a hypothetical example, if you were building a bridge to an island, and the water level raises, enough to put the island underwater, would you continue to build the bridge because you are almost done? I know that I would leave it going nowhere, or even tear it down, even though it was almost done.
Now I cannot evaluate the science of those projects.