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US Not Getting Money's Worth From ISS
greysky writes "On the 45th anniversary of his first trip into space, astronaut John Glenn says the U.S. is not getting it's money's worth out of the International Space Station. From the article: "Diverting money from the orbiting research outpost to President Bush's goal of sending astronauts back to the moon and eventually on to Mars is preventing some scientific experiments on the space station"."
Tell the President there's oil on the ISS.
It was a bunch of compromises so we could have a presence in space. Its kinda sad that the Hotel in Space dude might actually end up being more successful at it!
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They suck dollars from non-manned (i.e., robotic) missions whose focus IS actually collecting data for research. This is pretty well-known, but here's a recent news link that puts this into perspective -- NYTimes interview with NASA physicist Drew Shindell.
Q 4.t.html?_r=1&ref=magazine&oref=slogin
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/18/magazine/18WWLN
Regarding manned missions: "It's fine to do it for national spirit or exploring the cosmos, but the problem is that it comes at the cost of observing and protecting our home planet."
Oh, yeah, it's not easy to pad these out to 120 characters.
Let me preface this by saying that I have the highest respect for Former Senator and Colonel John Glenn. He was a pioneering figure in a world where manned space travel was only the stuff of dreams. That being said, Former Senator Glenn needs to STFU before he blows another huge hole in the space program.
The International Space Station was a bad idea from the get-go. It was placed in the wrong orbit, with the wrong components, and wrong plans for construction. It was a disaster from the moment it started, and was only conceived because Congress and NASA managed to twist a good plan for a moon-staging point into a useless abomination meant to symbolize international cooperation.
While I'm the first to admit that it's rather cool having a space station flying over our heads, I also know that it's a turkey. Skylab was far more useful than the ISS ever was, and that was launched in a single launch on the back of a Saturn V. In comparison, the ISS has required over a dozen Shuttle flights for construction, and it's still not done yet. Worse yet, the Space Shuttle is required by the plan for the regular reboosts of the station back into a stable orbit. It's just not a good design.
While I understand that Former Senator Glenn is upset that we're not seeing a return on the money we spent on the station, he needs to pay more attention to the economics of Sunk Costs. The money is already spent, and there is little to be gained from investing more money into the station. All that would happen is that NASA would waste further taxpayer funds that would show little to no return.
As a taxpayer myself, I would be extremely unhappy with NASA if they weren't diverting funds to the CEV program rather than the ISS. The development of the Ares V would provide NASA with far less expensive options for building and maintaining space stations. Options that would allow them to use such stations for useful ventures (like staging for moon missions) rather than mere symbolism.
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It doesn't matter how much or how little money the US spills in the ISS, it will never pay off. It's a pointless monument of pork, and should be scrapped. Any experiments it supposedly is needed for, could be performed on normal space flights and/or satellites. How about funding real science instead of this hogwash?
Bush isn't the only President that has had to deal with the Space Station. If anything its doing just fine under him. The best thing he ever did for the space station was to drop the Shuttle as a delivery system. It should have been gone in his father's day.
Diverting? How about focusing on something which grants us more opportunities. A space station is low earth orbit does not provide us with a stepping off platform that something more permanent, like a moon base, would. Besides being more difficult to shield from radiation, heat, and micrometeroites, we have to constantly push it back up. Worse, it is planned to come back within the lifetime of many of these other programs being put forward. In other words, unless we have a plan to keep it up permanently why throw money at it.
Blaming Bush for the space station and state of NASA is really reaching. Don't even try that line that NASA would be better off if all the funds from Iraq didn't get spent as Congress never cares for NASA unless it can bash whomever is in the Adminstration at the time.
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... from a mile away. NASA follows up it's biggest boondoggle to date(the Space Shuttle), with the biggest boondoggle in it's history(the ISS). Both platforms should be scrapped at this point in favor of a truely long term "humans in space" approach. But that would require NASA/Congress to admit they made HUGE mistakes with these two projects, and we all know how likely that is to happen. So we'll jsut continue paying bllions for two POS projects that are killing the space program.
Prof. Farnsworth - "Oh a lesson in not changing history from Mr I'm-My-Own-Grandpa!"
I wonder if we got our money's worth when we sent him back into space on STS-95 so he could relive some former glory.
given the current state of the space shuttle fleet, and the known safety issues with the design, NASA has no choice but to design a successor spacecraft. The only question is what sort of a spacecraft should they design. Should the shuttle successor be a little transit-craft only useful for flying to the iss, or do they do something bold that can go out of low earth orbit? Nasa, at the urging of the president, and many others, decided to build a bold craft, which consequently costs a lot of money, and takes focus off of other things.
Anytime nasa reprioritises money, something gets left behind. It's a careful balancing act of expense vs. return on that investment. There is still some science being done on iss, and will be more in the future. It's just not as much as origonally envisioned. How important is that? How do you prefer to weigh that against going to the moon and preparing to go to mars?
Ideally, we do both, but that means taking money from defense, with which this president isn't likely to go along.
Now we may never know if ants can be trained to sort tiny screws in space!
Last night I was capturing a camcorder video from a talk I went to by some astronauts, who were talking about how they were about to start building Space Station Freedom, and then President Bush had promised them a manned landing on Mars by 2019. Nearly fifteen years ago now.
I just thought it was kind of funny that now we still haven't finished building the International Space Station and while the next President Bush has promised them a manned landing on Mars at some point in the distant future, it's looking less and less likely that even the new 'spam in a can' launcher will reach orbit by 2019, let alone that anyone will be going to Mars.
At this rate, I guess NASA astronauts will be landing on Mars in the year 2300. At least private companies will already have hotels and crazy golf courses set up there for them so they won't need to build huge rockets to get there.
to point. So Shrub is the anti-Midas. What's new? The ISS, shuttle, and Bush's manned mission plans all suck resources from important stuff like interplanetary probes, future propulsion research, and the next space-based telescope. But of course we could have them all for a fraction of the cost of throwing hardware and soldiers into a black hole in the middle east. NASA maybe mostly a welfare program for contractors, but it can't compete with the Pentagon. Does anything make sense? Perhaps a scary asteroid on a collision course with Earth would be the kick we need to build cool stuff and undertake important high-risk missions.
The shuttle and ISS are the 800 pound gorillas in NASA's budget. They've been sucking the life out of any other NASA project of significance for years.
Absent an increase in NASA's budget (unlikely), any significant project is going to have to suck money away from shuttle or ISS.
Additionally, both the shuttle and ISS are flawed on a fundamental level. Shuttle is decades old and significantly more expensive to launch than most expendable launch vehicles (whether the reuseability, excuse me, remanufacturability is worth it is debatable), and ISS is in too high an orbital inclination to be anything other than a research station (that is, it can't be used as a waystation for manned or unmanned lunar or planetary missions for example).
The summary and the article are pretty misleading (here's a better article: http://www.itwire.com.au/content/view/9806/1066/).
What John Glenn is actually saying is that the ISS should be getting more money so that it can fulfill its purpose and reach its true potential. There's been no follow-up with Glenn, but I'd imagine what he's really saying is that instead of cutting the ISS's budget to pay for manned missions to the Moon and Mars, how about increasing NASA's budget so it can make the ISS successful and also go to the moon?
It breaks my pluginses, my precious!
I had the highest respect for John Glenn until he traded political favors to then-president Clinton for a joy-ride on the shuttle. He is in no position to lecture anyone on NASA waste.
You're not going to get money out of the ISS unless you've either got a low gravity mint up there, or are growing hydroponic money trees, both unlikely.
Concerning the relative merits of the Shuttle vs. heavy-lift single-use boosters.
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I had the highest respect for John Glenn until he traded political favors to then-president Clinton for a joy-ride on the shuttle. He is in no position to lecture anyone on NASA waste.
Man, I'd trade a fucking lot more than mere political favors to get a joy-ride on the shuttle.
On the other hand he had already been to space on multiple occasions. He should have traded political favors to get me a ride on the shuttle. Then I'd still respect him.
So Mr. Glen, if you're reading this, re-read my first sentence but with a *wink wink Johnny-boy* at the end.
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- None of the privates have reached orbit. I think that in the next month that spacex will do so, but no guarentee.
- It is COTS and the possibility of cargo and passenger ferry to the ISS that is helping to drive these private enterprise. Only 2 companies won COTS and yet, 2 more have pushed for help from NASA and the possibility of getting work IFF they can make orbit.
- Where did Bigelow get the guts of his space hotel from? From NASA. Likewise, where do you suppose the first he will get the first few contracts from? NASA and DOD. He will almost certainly move on to for his own stations, but the first few sales will be as maskes for DOD satellites as well as an extension for the ISS. And yes, NASA will be buying at least one before 2010.
- Who will do the robotics missions that are the envy of the rest of the world? As it is, EU is really just starting to do these. Do you think that they did not learn from both NASA and Russian space agency? Even now, India is sending up several NASA instruments on chandra.
All in all, NASA is fueling private enterprise, not harming it. There was a time where they got in the way, but no more. Even now, they are in the process of redesigning the replacement for the shuttle knowing that it is possible that private enterprise MAY overtake them. But spacex has already blown up one rocket. How many more before they learn their lessons? Private enterprise is just taking babysteps. NASA is watching out for them. Sit tight and see what happens. As it is, I think that NASA will be back to doing primarly robotics within the next decade. But they still have to push for the moon and mars until private enterprise has proven that they can and will do the job.I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
not another president that needs to be told what ISS is ?
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There are many tongues to talk, and but few heads to think. -Victor Hugo
- The defacto purpose of the ISS is to justify the existence of the space shuttle.
- The defacto purpose of the shuttle is to build the ISS, (and to give fidgety astronauts
something to do with their hands).
Science has nothing to do with it.When I first came to work at JPL in 1987, folks were already gearing up for what they called their "Third Annual Galileo Pre-Launch Picnic", to be held out in the nearby Oak Grove Park (which by the way, has one of the best frisbee golf courses on the planet--but I digress). It might have been the Fourth, but I lost count. Those who worked on the mission would joke about this, but you could always tell that there was some ironic bitterness in their voices. Galileo was neither the first nor the last of the victims of the politically-inspired space shuttle, but for many at the 'lab it became the iconic poster-child for the sacrifice that science has paid on the altar of politics and the almost religious cult of man-in-space hero worship.
This Galileo Page barely scratches the surface of the number of ways in which real scientists, engineers, and mathematicians had to wrack their brains trying to fix, work-around, and ultimately solve technical problems that arose on Galileo -- problems which were entirely avoidable, and were either directly or indirectly caused by the resources that were pulled from the unmanned science missions of JPL, Goddard, and the like.
Galileo was originally supposed to be launched on an unmanned rocket like its esteemed predecessors Voyagers I and II, but JPL was forced to reconfigure the probe to be launched from the shuttle instead, again (like the IIS) to give some justification for building the shuttle. After the Challenger disaster, the cargo bay was redesigned and so again the probe had to be reconfigured. It has never been proved, but was suspected that the reason that the high-gain attenna "umbrella" jammed was due to the loss of lubricant over the many years of storage prior to its final launch. And so it went...
About the only good thing that came out of the decision to launch Galileo from the shuttle was that it forced us to look at new data compression algorithms, so that we could store more data on the mag tape for later broadcast over the low-gain antenna. But, given the choice, I think the unanimous consensus was that if we had to do it all over again, we'd have told Johnson and Kennedy to stuff it, thank you very much, and we'll stick to our plans and launch the damn thing from a nice, reliable, unsexy but technologically sound unmanned rocket.
I feel much better now.
NASA is and always has been about research, not exploitation of space resources. Anything NASA discovers that can benefit a consumer economy/industry should be passed down to private companies that can take full advantage of the discovery.
Then theirs the fact, if we had developed a space infrastructure, that ~90 of the most important usable resources lie in the asteroids. Some what simpler and easier to get to than anything at the bottom of a gravity well. We could easy pay for any and all investments in space research that we have up until today.
And the insects, amphibians, turtles, birds, crocodiles, and placentals all had a space programs of their own, and thus were able to survive, right?
Compared to what, the 200+ billion used with great care in Iraq? Or the dozens of other massive wastes of funding.
One reason for sending people into space is PR, robots can't talk in front of schoolchildren and congress. Also contrary to the beliefs of some doing things in space is not easy (anyone who even thinks mining an asteroid is in any form easy deserves to be laughed at) and robots can't do things as well as humans. If you want a better justification for the manned space program then you can call it hedging the bets, if anything truly important is found up there then we'd as it stands now need to send people to whatever it is (robots are slow and limited) so we at least keep that option open. Similar reason to why we have F-22s when our enemies can't get a single plane into the air.
about the pointlessness of the space programme.
And you sir apparently can't read, he talked about the pointlessness of the MANNED space program not of space exploration itself.
Life as we know it would end. Maybe the human race would survive, or some form of it. But why even go through that? The devestation that would result from a large impact is incredible, far surpassing the amount of money that we spend on the space program. Nice, snarky comment. But you know that isn't the point of what I'm saying.
There are many tongues to talk, and but few heads to think. -Victor Hugo
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"None of the privates have reached orbit."
Yeah but there was this girl I once knew and baby, my privates were in heaven.
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I was at this talk yesterday morning, front row, about 20 or 25 feet from Senator Glenn. The man is as sharp now as he was 45 years ago- completely aware of the world around him, even more so than many younger people. Senator Glenn spoke of his Friendship 7 orbit for about an hour, and in the last 30 minutes or so took questions from the audience.
The ISS was discussed in the course of this Q&A. It came about because someone had asked what Senator Glenn thought about the future of spaceflight. Glenn mentioned President Bush's plans for manned voyages to the Moon and Mars, but how there was no funding created for this purpose. Instead, funds were being diverted from other NASA projects, usually research dollars. This was reminiscent of what happened to the ISS, which repeatedly was improperly funding, causing both self-cannibalization of NASA funds and a reduction in the research potential of the ISS. To paraphrase Glenn, currently, there are only two people up there who are tending to systems [maintainence]. The original station design called for six inhabitants and a rigorous course of experimentation.
So Glenn used the mediocrity of the ISS as a potential warning for what can happen to the Moon/Mars initiative if it is not properly funded by Congress, and is instead forces NASA to shift money around internally. IMO, the AP article doesn't really put Glenn's comments in context enough that one can see the point he was trying to make.
Gov agencies should focus on the next frontier.... the settlement of such frontiers is up to us private folk.
I am sure there are a lot more if someone takes the time to think about it. A case can be made for manned spaceflight being a boondoggle, but space in general has paid off big.
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Actually Glenn had only been into space once, on Friendship 7, for 3 orbits sitting in a crammed tiny capsule. Have you ever SEEN a Mercury capsule in person? Besides having no room to speak of, there's only a minor excuse for a window to see out.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Iraq wasn't a question of if we'd invade but rather when.
And for all you geniuses crying for an immediate withdrawal, remember what you wished for in 20 years.
Duh. ISS has been a disaster from day one and should have never been built, at least once it was watered down from Regean's original vision (where it was a stepping stone to human exploration of the solar system). NASA shouldn't be about ISS, but about exploring. Exploring circles around Earth is quite wasteful and could just as likely be done by the private sector. Hell, at least, they'd be able to do something with the resulting products.
In this poor excuse of an article John Glenn's opinion about the ISS is quoted without any facts to back him up or disprove hime. Of course Glenn is a big name, but just citing an opinion and calling it 'news' is stretching it a bit too far IMO. There's next to nothing of value in this 'article' whatsoever.
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NASA's budget has increase each year under Bush. While it appears mostly inflation type increases.
Other than when the moon program ended the budget only decreased twice, under Carter and Clinton. Bush's dad actually jumped it up a bit more than Reagan, it got decent increases under Clinton till his second term, also when NASA was having problems.
The opportunities are always missed regardless of who is in office. We can only look back and play "what ifs". Congress is more interested in vote buying schemes than real science. If you want to lay the real blame for NASA's lack of funding look no farther than Congress. A Congress which would rather build bridges to nowhere, pay for research into useless areas, and enact new ways of taking our freedoms.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Budget
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Then you would have to explain the concept of a "space station."
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OTOH, share of that budget devoted to manned missions grows even faster at the expense of space science and some other parts (the most recent budget may be different due to the change in Congress).
Of course the dinosaurs didn't have a space program.
Can you imagine how much a space station designed for T Rex habitation would cost???
Sure, the devastation from a impact like that would be enormous.
However, life on Earth would *STILL* be a relative paradise compared to anywhere else in this solar system.
Anyone else read the title as "US Not Getting Money's Worth From IIS"?
It is the 21st century and the time for Klax has passed.
Don't be stupid. How the hell can you be expected to succeed in a new
$250B program mandate with an increase of epsilon on top of $13B yearly???!?
Even by raiding the OTHER programs at NASA (which is what is happening), you
can't do it. So what do we get? We get N years of underfunded science, AND
a failed Mars Program! Good job! Meanwhile, Europe takes the lead on science.
Good people have left NASA because it is so screwed up now. Others
are holding out for a new Administration. The hope is that the damage isn't
too severe by the time things get back to normal. (Granted, normal for NASA isn't
that great, but it is far better than what we have now)
I'm not suggesting colonies on other worlds in the immediate future, but the capability to detect and stop collisions with large objects is definitely within our grasp. We do have to move off this rock sometime. Maybe someday we'll find, or even make, a world that is just as pleasant to live on as Earth.
There are many tongues to talk, and but few heads to think. -Victor Hugo
You're looking at this issue from the viewpoint of 20th century tech.
What you do not account for is a fusion reactor the size of a shipping container, producing several megawatts, running on D/T in a non-radioactive system, designed by Dr. Bussard.
Honestly, you don't think we're going to collect sunlight to generate power do you? Come on - Prometheus might be dead for now, but the tiny fusion reactors in our near future are going to change just about every aspect of life on this planet, and beyond.
Bussard (on spherical containment vessels - as opposed ot the useless ITER/tokomak): "The physics is done. Now it's just engineering, and 200 million dollars will get us there."
How many escape pods are there? "NONE,SIR!" You counted them? "TWICE, SIR!"
The one fucking republican on Slashdot got mod point today...
bottom there was a large, but still finite waste chamber.
This got me to thinking - The major expense of anything in space is pretty much launching it. Storage space is essentially unlimited as long as you're willing to put it outside.
Rather than bringing stuff back, store it up there until you have a use for it. Some recycling tech, even if it ends up limited to making extra shielding, would be good.
I don't read AC A human right
I'm shocked to hear that the ISS provides bad value for its cost. It was a lame idea when NASA first proposed it. It only lived for the politics of the cold war. The US funded a huge portion of the scientists from the former USSR to work on the ISS, so they would not work on selling a "how to" on making nuclear bombs to the bad guys on the planet. It worked for a while. Low Earth Orbit has been done. It had been done. The ISS provided an excuse to have manned flight in LEO rather than doing some real science with robotic explorations of the Earth and planets. Its not science, its a jobs program.
Mir was more than enough to test the effects of weightlessness on humans (we already know as much as needed), and non-medical experiments are better off on autonomous satellites than on huge-high-maintenance-microgravity-killing-inflate d-safety-requirements-because-of-human-presence station (think of MER vs manned Mars mission). We should have built artificial gravity (rotating) station instead, but reason is no contender to industry lobbying...
Well maybe he's just got to polish up his presentation skills but he comes over on media channels as stupid. Anybody who can summarise his country's position on life and death global geopolitical situations to quotes that you'd expect a walk-on extra to use in a bad 50s cowboy movie ("we're going to smoke out the bad guys" etc) is doing his country a disservice. Is it any wonder people from other countries are suspicious of the USA if serious situations are reduced by your leader to such childish language?
I don't think I've met any Yale graduates but I've met enough Oxbridge graduates to understand that there are people who are highly talented in a specific field yet worryingly naive when it comes to broader issues, and shouldn't be in charge of anything bigger than the Physics Society.
fishtop records seems to be the only one who remembers why we really got into the ISS. It was discussed openly but quietly at the time (look at the debates in the House and Senate)--the main purpose of the ISS was to keep the Russian space program up and running and to keep those skilled, experienced Russian engineers--folks with vast knowledge of propulsion systems, fuels, guidance systems, etc.--happily employed at a time when staying in Russia otherwise meant watching their children starve and looking for work overseas meant interviewing in Iran, North Korea, etc. All the nice spreads in Pop Science focused on science and technology, but the articles in the Times about what the people who decided to pay for this thing were talking about made it clear that we weren't spending those billions for science. So what'd we get for our money? Not much science, to be sure. But Iran is only now developing even medium range missiles of any accuracy, and all of North Korea's more ambitious attempts end up either blowing up on the launch pad or falling into the Sea of Japan. As the international situation has changed since construction began on the ISS in the `90s, the real motivation for the project has grown only more compelling, and what we've gotten for our money now seems even more valuable. Lousy science? Of course. Waste of money? Not at all.
While I agree with most what you said, I think the parent poster (in his last post) was argumenting about (and trying to refute) your claim that it's nothing special, because there are thousands of plans on the drawingboard. You didn't actually make a good counterclaim to that (specifically).
...there is a matter of degree when one is to give any objective value to those plans. The space-plan my god-child draws is slightly more unrealistic then mine, for instance, due to the lack of knowledge of physical laws. Yours may be better then mine, but scores almost equally as low when it becomes a matter of actually putting something in space.
While it's true there are thousands of drawings about it, even from you and me, aparently..;-)
However, companies which have actual huge budgets, have actually shown they are capable of at least sub-orbital flight, and have detailed plans to make it economical...well, their papers are a lot better then 98% of all those thousands of other plans you alluded at.
I'm fully aware that it's still a long way to have actual commercial flights in an orbit, let alone going to a space-hotel, but I do think your claim of 'It's nothing to write home about ' is unwarrented, just *because* most never get that far. Whether they bring a person in space may be irrelevant, but the actual requirement of spaceship one was to bring the weight of 3 people above the 100 km boundary - around 250 kg, I guess. and they succeeded in that. Not too long ago, people wouldn't have thought a little private compagny could ever pull such a thing off.
So, yes, most designs never get into orbit, and maybe spaceship 3 will neither. But they DID manage to get somewhere where most designs also never got. One must be intellectually honest, and acknowledge that not all plans/designs are equal, and I think the chances of Scales Composites in conjuction with Virgin Galactic are much higher then the vast majority of those other designplans you speak about.
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That fatuous comment gets +4 and mine gets -2? If anyone thinks that the manned space programme will ever enable mankind to leave this solar system, he's a lunatic. Look, I love science fiction and would really, really love to fly to the stars. But it's simply not doable, anymore than wizards & dragons are likely to show up any time soon.