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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"
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.
NASA is setting up the ISS to fail. Watch, in a couple of years they'll announce that they will no longer provide funds to get it built, because it won't be serving any scientific purposes for them.
I don't blame NASA, with the Bush administration's promises (to get people onto the Moon and Mars) that NASA has to desperately keep, while in the same breath the administration announces NASA's funds being cut, they're desperate to do anything. This is because the Bush administration is setting NASA up to fail. I won't be surprised if in 15 years time, NASA simply won't exist anymore. I just hope that by that time, there isn't a need for it.
Whilever the American government's greed and paralyzing fear continues to determine it's policies concerning space, America will continue to fall behind other nations. America just better hope the private space industry takes off, with American corporations at the helm, because at the rate it's going, the government will be useless when it comes to space.
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
Bullshit.
The reason it's a good move though isn't safety or anything like that. The cost of the experiments they run is nothing compared with maintaining the station, and the experiments the astronauts are performing are not dangerous at all. The reason it's a good move is because it's the next best thing to scrapping the whole thing and letting the station fall from the sky (which is what they really want to do, but can't because of contractual agreements, international relations, public backlash, embarrassment, Bush, ...)
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
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.
NASA could always charge for experiments to be conducted. Plenty of R&D groups would pay up if it were reasonable, and everyone benefits.
...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.
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.
Except that nowhere did it state that we wouldn't be sending crew. All it says is that the scientific programs have been cancelled and that they're going to focus on reliably transporting crew to orbit before they try to conduct research. Evidently the ISS is now a multi-billion dollar campsite in space. Maybe we can get a sponsorshop from KOA.
We can't have it both ways (saving money/focusing resources by not conducting research while still expending resources keeping it running), and we shouldn't try. Either fund the fucking thing, hand it over to the Europeans and Japanese and let them worry about it, or deorbit it and be done with it. Or, as they say in some circles: shit or get off the pot.
The US and Europe will increasingly have other concerns, with the political will for expensive space projects generally lacking. While the US will probably be able to claim the "credit" for the militarisation of space, I do not believe the US desire to feed its defense industry with boondoggles like an "anti missile shield" will lead to much useful technology for space exploration, exploitation or eventual colonisation.
Russia, if its economy permits, might remain a power to be reckoned with. Certainly, national pride in its ability to achieve practical results with a lower budget than the Americans is a factor.
Combine those $300 billion dollars with all the other amounts of money spent by other countries for military purposes, plus all other amounts for stupid things (for example paying athletes millions for kicking a ball), and you get the idea of were money is wasted at.
With that amount of money, we could start building the NCC Enterprise and finish it in 100 years, while in the meantime discovering antigravity and antimatter warp drive.
I am a citizen of the world. Everyday I talk to tens of people from all around the globe, thanks to the internet. I feel silly when the world 'war' is mentioned, because I do not have any real differences with other people. All our differences are artificial, introduced by megalomaniac leaders that want to take over the world, but have no more brain that ...Pinky and Brain.
WE /.ERS MUST START AN INTERNATIONAL MOVE FOR STOPPING ALL PRODUCTION OF WEAPONS OF ALL TYPES OF PURPOSES IN ALL COUNTRIES. THINGS ARE GETTING SILLIER BY THE MINUTE, AND IT IS UP TO US TO SAVE THE WORLD!!!
The ISS was another child of the Cold War: originally intended to show the Russians up and provide a permanent American presence in space, then hastily amended as a way to keep the Russian space scientists busy while their economy was falling to pieces. Like the Shuttle, it has been redesigned and reduced in scope so many times that it bears no resemblance to its original conception. Launched in an oblique, low orbit that guarantees its permanent uselessness, it serves as yin to the shuttle's yang, justifying an endless stream of future Shuttle missions through the simple stratagem of being too expensive to abandon.
Of course, the ISS has also been preemptively armed with science, but NASA has found much more effective safeguards against potential budget cuts. The station's inordinately expensive modules have mainly come from foreign space agencies, ensuring that even a NASA administrator foolhardy enough to let the thing drop into the sea would contravene a fistful of international treaties. And the station requires a permanent crew, a trick NASA learned from the Shuttle, so that there can be no question of mothballing it or converting it into an unmanned research platform.
In the thirty years since the last Moon flight, we have succeeded in creating a perfectly self-contained manned space program, in which the Shuttle goes up to save the Space Station (undermanned, incomplete, breaking down, filled with garbage, and dropping at a hundred meters per day), and the Space Station offers the Shuttle a mission and a destination. The Columbia accident has added a beautiful finishing symmetry - the Shuttle is now required to fly to the ISS, which will serve as an inspection station for the fragile thermal tiles, and a lifeboat in case something goes seriously wrong. This closed cycle is so perfect that the last NASA administrator even cancelled the only mission in which there was a compelling need for a manned space flight - the Hubble telescope repair and upgrade - on the grounds that it would be too dangerous to fly the Shuttle away from the ISS, thereby detaching the program from its last connection to reason and leaving it free to float off into its current absurdist theater of backflips, gap fillers, Canadarms and heroic expeditions to the bottom of the spacecraft.