Slashdot Mirror
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"."
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 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.