Slashdot Mirror
ISS Construction Resumes
avtchillsboro writes "The NY Times has an article detailing new construction on the International Space Station (ISS) and the additions via coming Space Shuttle missions through 2010. From the article: 'For more than three years, the International Space Station has floated half-built above the Earth. Maintained by a skeleton crew, the station — an assemblage of modules and girders — has not come close to its stated goal of becoming a world-class research outpost. But now construction, which has hung in limbo since NASA's space shuttle fleet was grounded after the 2003 Columbia disaster, is scheduled to resume. The shuttle Atlantis is scheduled to lift off next Sunday carrying a bus-size segment of the station's backbone that includes a new set of solar-power arrays.'"
If the station "has not come close to its stated goal of becoming a world-class research outpost," then what is in said world-class?
There are some things that just should be done, and damn the cost. That is what a government is for, to do the things that are not profitable, that are not returning on investment, to get the ball rolling to get the basics in place, until it does become reasonable to make a profit, for a company to step up and say, yes, we'll foot the initial outlay because NASA has done the boring, unprofitable grunt work, they have tried the thousand ways to do it wrong, and now we know which way will work.
It is the government's job to finance the future potentially useful tasks. To drag out a tired example, it's a modern Columbus. It is a cost that is most likely going to return nothing, but if it does, the potential rewards will make it all worth it.
That really ran on.
When President Kennedy pledged that Washington would put an American on the moon, the pledge captured our imagination. We Americans would do something that had never been done in the past. Further, putting an American on the moon was not an incremental advance in technology but was a huge leap that faced a high risk of failure.
NASA should go back to its adventurous roots by devoting 25% of its budget to exotic, high-risk projects. The remaining 75% would go to run-of-the-mill projects.
NASA, not the American military, should be splurging money on building a prototype of a hyperdrive, enabling faster-than-light travel. Even if the prototype does not work, it would significantly facilitate the breakthroughs that will be necessary for a successful hyperdrive,.
There are some things that just should be done, and damn the cost
You're right, of course. Thing is, the space station isn't one of those things. It may have been had it been built as originally planned, but it's a mere shadow of its aspirational self. When you evicerate a project the way this one has, you're left with a huge bill and no return. If the original plan was to build somewhere for millionaires to holiday while waiting for Branson to get is arse in gear (and, indeed, space), then fine. However, it was build as a science station, and the science it's doing - and will do for the foreseeable future - is negligible.
I'm not a fan of using starving etheopians/national debts/shambolic foreign adventures/whatever to cavil about the cost of any particular project, but there are many, many ways NASA and ESA and everyone else could've spent the money. It's nearly forty years since the moon landings; we should be going to war with Mars now as it declares independence. Instead, we're left with a freefalling white elephant that's got all the utility of a fingerless campanologist.
I agree, you're right. It is not being used the way it was designed, and has turned in to a white elephant.
But, in todays society, if they scrapped the ISS, I could never see them starting a new one. At least, with this white elephant, the bean counters could possibly be swayed with the "we've invested this much, lets invest some more and get something out of it" argument, where I cannot see this mentality starting from nothing. Especially since they will have the "failed white elephant" of the ISS to hold up as an example of why it will never work.
But can anyone tell me what $5 billion of our taxpayer dollars has done for us?
Maybe it's a subtle thing. But there is a practical difference between a crabbed, pessimistic, Can't-Do defeatist culture and a culture full of ambition and daring that does impractical but spectactular things with a spare 0.1% of its GNP: one produces living descendants a thousand years later, and the other merely produces elegant, sardonic essays written in a dead language that are closely studied by scholars of the future.
Man does not live on bread alone, to paraphrase Moses, but perhaps also on dreams that inspire his best efforts and give him a sense of wonder and hope for the future. I mean, if you don't think this way -- if you're not much interested in things unless there's something in it for Number One -- then you don't have children and your genes get edited out of the species. This is perhaps why clever cynicism is more noteable among societies (and individuals) in decline than in ascendacy.
And why is it that construction grinds to a halt when only one of the member nations involved grounds its shuttles?
I think the answer lies in recognition that just because an effort is collaborative doesn't mean any given area of responsibility is equally divisible between contributors. Similarly, it doesn't follow that since an operation didn't take place when the chief surgeon was delayed that the chief surgeon operates alone.
Take for instance my own country -- which is folksy, grease-loving and boreal. We make robot arms that crawl around a fix stuff. Our tax base is smaller than that of the United States, so our humble contribution is proportionately nearly as dear as NASA/JPL's costs to the Americans. Would we be justified in saying, "Why should we continue working on this crumb-bum spacestation when the Yanks can't even do their part and keep the shuttles flying?"
These stories are free but worth money.
As for the ISS expenditures:
Nontrivial, but less than half of the $5B you incorrectly reported.
And while the utility is certainly important, it's not the only measure of value. The experience itself is a value, in that the people involved are gaining experience with constructing things in orbit, and having a continuous human presence in orbit furthers our knowledge of the physiological effects of living in space.
The ISS may be a small step, but it's a step, and that's ultimately how humanity progresses for the most part -- in steps, not in leaps and bounds. The ISS may only be an incremental progression, but it's progress nonetheless.
That's not to say the ISS hasn't been somewhat disappointing, but that's at least in part due to several modules being cancelled due to complaints about cost. It's the typical bureaucratic Catch-22: People want to see results before upping the ante. Unfortunately, it's not rarely possible to work like that. If you fund everything except the wheels of a car, all you've got is a nice air-conditioned box.
And even if you consider the ISS a failure, it's important to remember that science is progressed by failure just as much as success -- at the very least we should have ideas on what to do, or not to do, the next time.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_of_the_Unite d_States:
.robot
The military expenditure of the United States Department of Defense for fiscal year 2006 is:
Total Funding $441.6 Billion
Operations and maintenance $124.3 Bil.
Military Personnel $108.8 Bil.
Procurement $79.1 Bil.
Research, Development, Testing & Evaluation $69.5 Bil.
Military Construction $12.2 Bil.
Department of Energy Defense Activities $17.0 Bil.
ISS doesn't sound very expensive to me. If you want to stop wasting money, stop spending it on lining the pockets of your defense contractors and causing untold grief in the middle east.
And to those who say 'Why are we doing it all? Why aren't there any other countries contributing $$$, vehicles etc?' Think about this:
1. Russia put up the first module.
2. Many countries are constructing ISS modules.
3. The shuttle was designated to transport said modules to ISS. Modules were designed specifically for transportation to ISS -BY_ the shuttle.
4. Many countries supply tech/hardware/people etc.
Ingredients:
1 Bottomless Pit
1 Endless Supply Of Cash
Method:
Being careful to ensure all cash disappears, begin feeding your Endless Supply Of Cash into your Bottomless Pit, making sure to maintain a consistant stream (otherwise someone may notice what's happening and interfere with the integrity of your Endless Supply Of Cash).
The thing is, the trip from the surface to Low Earth Orbit (where the ISS is) is quite a different trip then from LEO to the moon.
AFAIK, the current plan (or one of) is to launch docking stations up to LEO, using existing lifters (such as the Soyez rockets), then launch vehicles from there to moon orbit. A similar floating dock will be put up in moon orbit, and landers will be launched from there to the surface.
Of course, this all has to be lifted from earth, but I reckon they get better utility using craft customised for each leg of the trip, then trying to make a fleet of ships that tries to do the whole lot.
Especially when you think of reuse. A heavy lift can splash land and be reused (or recycled), a transport once already in "space" can be reused many times. Current designs that go all the way in one vehicle do a lot of throwing away.
Why do you expect any science/discovery from any facility or instrument that isn't completed?
it is not totally practical.
First off, W. is running up a defict like there is no tomorrow. This will force us to cut back at some point.
Second, at this time, we have to rebuild our launch capacity. That means that we need to be able to launch what we had back in the 60s. Nixon killed that capability. W. is restoring it. While I know that many folks hate the CEV (and some hate even the launchers), we will have the same launch capacity that Kennedy got us 40 years ago.
Once we have Oriion, I agree with you that it will be time for NASA to return to the interesting ideas that a commercial company can not and will not do. Of course, I have said for a decade the right thing to be doing is a one-way trip to Mars for colonizing. And the only thing that comes back are goods ; Now, Musk is pushing that concept. That is where the real money will be.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
There are some things that just should be done, and damn the cost.
That's an emotional argument, not a logical one. It's little better than "the end justifies the means", and it is very cliche; all the time, the answer to "why are we doing this" is "because it's there!" That's great if you're spending your own bucks to go climb Everest- I wish you the best of luck. But if you're going to spend trillions of dollars, I need something much more concrete. Go google "waggonauts" some time, and read for an INSIDER's view of how stupid human space exploration is. Seriously- it was written by NASA people...
You need to stop and realize that most space exploration hasn't been for research or the betterment of mankind. It's all a bragging rights/land grab game between nations, while lining the pockets of defense contractors. Why do you think Kennedy put people on the moon? Because the Russians were the first to put people in space- dozens of them- before the US put Glen up. The race to put a man in space also helped quite a bit with refining nuclear missile technology. Why do you think Bush got interested in the Moon and Mars? Only because China got interested in the moon, and "the world's greatest superpower" can't be outdone...
Did you ever notice that countries that were not involved in the space and weapons races have remarkably better socities and infrastructure, because they devoted resources to taking care of their people?
To drag out a tired example, it's a modern Columbus. It is a cost that is most likely going to return nothing, but if it does, the potential rewards will make it all worth it.
Spain financed Columbus because he was in search of conquest; gold, shorter trade routes, etc. It was a bit of a crapshoot, but they figured that if he came back at all, they stood a great chance of making a killing, and they were right. The difference here is that we have nothing to gain from exploration of Mars or the Moon; it's a childish pipe-dream to think we'll find anything practical in terms of natural resources on either planets. Putting a couple hundred people on 3 ships for a few months PALES in comparison to the challenges involved in a manned trip to Mars. There is no giant cache of gold on the moon or mars, and even if there was- the economics just don't add up, and they don't get better as you throw more money at the problem. People with a space exploration fetish concoct the most amazing chains of "if we..." arguments to justify exploration...
It's also a common fallacy that space exploration brought us wonders like zero-g pens, velcro, orange tang, and remote medical monitoring. All existed before the manned space program. I know slashdot readers hate to think it, but we've gotten very little out of space "exploration", especially the manned kind.
Please help metamoderate.
Thats the biggest problem, every piece was designed with the space shuttle in mind - to reconfigure it to fly on another rocket even if one was available would probably mean redesigning a lot of it.
There are some things that just should be done, and damn the cost.
In proyects such as the ISS, there are always inventions and advances that are not cost effective in the foreseeable future, but that benefit mankind tremendously in future generations.
To drag out a tired example, it's a modern Columbus.
FWIW, the King of Portugal invested in one fruitless expedition after another to circumnavigate Africa, but sailor's superstitions got in the way every time. I believe it was in the fourteenth attempt that the crew was caught up in a nasty storm and, after it had abated, discovered to their surprise that they were way south of Cape Bojador, according to legend, ends of the Earth. This was the turning point. Every single expedition after that progressed fearlessly further and further, bringing back paydirt each time. In the early XV Century, the King of Portugal set the stage for Columbus.
Here's another example: In medieval times, the alchemical process of creating lenses, perfecting the techniques of polishing them so that they would be as near perfect as possible. Meanwhile, all around, plagues and misery bedeviled society, which made lenses a pointless and costly exercise in trivial matters, according to the pundits of the age.
Little did the pundits know that from this work, among other things, the microscope would come to being, the discovery of the source of diseases was only a matter of time.
For the majority, things always make much more sense in retrospect. For now, in the matter of the ISS, we need faith in the future fruits of peaceful labor on an epic scale.
Yes, bureaucracy inflates expenses so that these things seem like pork barrel proyects. However, isn't the cost still a fraction of the money that goes down the black hole known as the Military Industry, which needs to invent wars in order to dispose of aging weaponry and keep the money-go-round in motion? For the time being, this is what we need to question, instead of peaceful endeavours of knowledge.
Lil' Thindime, lilting a lacrimose lament, krashes the kwaint konfines of Kokonino Kounty
Putting an American on the moon was not an incremental advance in technology but was a huge leap that faced a high risk of failure.
That's because of the approach that was chosen. If the US government had listened to Von Braun, there would have been a permanent space station in orbit since the sixties, a platform for ongoing moon missions by the seventies. We would be reaping the benefits of this today.
Instead, they went for the most expensive, dangerous and least permanent route. Because JFK made the most ridiculous statement, not a man in the Moon in the next fifteen years, but an american by nine. But anyway, what the hell did anyone know back then? Caught in the grip of an ideological travesty known as the Cold War, throwing around buzzwords like evildoer, freedom...oh, wait.
NASA should go back to its adventurous roots by devoting 25% of its budget to exotic, high-risk projects. The remaining 75% would go to run-of-the-mill projects.
I second that motion. But first, NASA should again have a feasible operating budget.
Lil' Thindime, lilting a lacrimose lament, krashes the kwaint konfines of Kokonino Kounty
Are you talking about a permanent station at Earth's L4/5?? Wouldn't we run into the same problems as with a Mars trip then? Ditto for the Moon's L4/5. Putting your first manned station with it's ass hanging in the (solar) wind doesn't seem sane to me.
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
A good example, but still flawed. It's one thing for a few eccentrics (or even a few dozen dozen eccentrics) to play with optics on their own dime. It's quite another to be involved in a massively expensive boondoggle of a concentrated space-lab whose main goal seems to be to be done jointly by several nations rather than to actually advance mankind's knowledge by any amount. All of the experiments proposed for ISS could be done far more cheaply (at least an order of magnitude) separatly on automated mostly independant launches. Eliminating the need for rendezvous would cut that much from the cost by itself.
Someone once said that building things like the supercollider have nothing to do with the defense of the nation, except to make it worth defending. This may be true, but we must not send good money after bad. The superconducting supercollider project was cancelled. If even one superconductiong supercollider project, or space telescope, or very large array of telescopes, or interplanetary space probe at the edge of the solar system is cancelled to provide funding for an excercise in political futility, well that's just sad.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Sooner or later, we will have manned space stations. But the ISS and shuttle fleet are a bottomless pit, draining resources from all the great things we should be doing for space exploration. Well, soon all of that is going to be eclipsed by something even worse: premature attempts at manned trips to Mars.
It has a simple purpose. To stop unemployed Russian rocket scientists from going to Iran or North Korea for money. Think of it is as a welfare program.