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"."

Comments

Sunk Costs

[AKAImBatman]

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.

Line up your little doggies...

[Shivetya]

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.

Re:Time to reevaluate the whole program

[schnikies79]

Get back to me when SpaceShipOne can reach GEO or even LEO.

Re:Time to reevaluate the whole program

[Chris Burke]

I know I will get modded down for this, but

I know you're using the oldest karma whore trick in the book, but

The launch of SpaceShipOne should have been a wake-up call for the U.S. The future is NOT in NASA.

I agree that private funding is the future of space. I do see a role for NASA in the forseeable future at least for the pure research and exploration roles that they are currently doing a good job at. There's not much impetus to send a probe to Io just to see what the place looks like, unless you have a budget designed around ideas like that. Private interprise wouldn't see the ROI -- certainly not until gathering resources from another body becomes feasible, and even then they'd need some reason to think resources were there. However, for a space station or cheap flights to the moon, I'm looking at the private ventures.

Re:Indeed.

[Rei]

He's hardly alone in that view. The current plan for what to do with the ISS is bloody ridiculous: finish spending a fortune to get it built, and then not fund it for long past there. The components mostly have expected ~40 year lifespans (and judging by other craft, say the MERs, this is probably an underestimate), but once we finally get to the "cheap" part (maintenence of the station), we're just going to let it burn.

And why? Why, so we can go to the moon! And set up a permanent base there, with enough room for half a dozen people To do low-gravity research! In a vaccuum! With three times the cost for delivery of supplies! And we'll spend two decades building it, with huge cost overruns. And opposition to the moon base will grow. And the government will insist on "getting it done", and then divert all funds for operation of it onto some other project that's the "new things". Sound familiar?

It's not the cost overruns on ISS that bothers me. It's not the capabilities of ISS or the kind of science that can be conducted there that bother me (it's actually much better than most peoples' perception of it). It's this whole "lets get it up to full capacity so we can say we built it, then let it crash so that we can move onto our next disturbingly-similar project" attitude that bothers me.

Re:Indeed.

[Rei]

No, it couldn't. Even ignoring the technological hurdles, of the basic elements required for all life (CHONP), the moon only has (in relevant quantities) O -- and it's all locked up in minerals that take a lot of energy to extract. If water is found, add H, but you're still missing CNP.

The moon is very mineral poor. It has huge quantities of certain elements, but is largely devoid in most. It is not a place to build a self-sustaining colony.

Even producing food on the moon with recycled/Earth imported nutrients would be a nightmare, given that you have a choice between only low-angle light all day (and only in very tiny regions of the moon), light for two weeks then darkness for two, or using a huge amount of electric power at an awful efficiency conversion rate (perhaps 2% of the energy you input ending up as food). It'd be easier in space, and as we know, it's not easy in space. Completely closed habitats are nasty for plants in ways that most people wouldn't expect. For example, ethylene. Plants produce it. On Earth, it blows away and breaks down. Harmless to humans. However, to plants, it's many times more deadly than carbon monoxide is to humans. Hard to detect in such tiny quantities, and hard to prevent from accumulating. That is just one of many, many problems that must be addressed.

Not that other aspects of building a self sustaining colony on a more mineral-rich world are any easier. In fact, they're much, much harder. Take any piece of technology essential for running a colony -- let's say, an ore crusher. Pick just one component of that ore crusher, preferably one that gets consumed over time -- let's say, its oil for lubrication. Trace back all of the components (petroleum oils, silicone oils, EP additives to form a film to prevent contact welding, detergents and dispersants to keep particulates in solution, emulsifiers, etc) of that oil back to their natural resources. You're left with a monstrous dependency chain. And no, you can't cut corners without cutting capabilities. Even if you could, just a pure petroleum or silicone oil has a huge dependency chain on a non-Earth planet. And no, you can't just substitute a vegetable oil. It works poorly. You can refine vegetable oils to produce lubricants -- say, polyol esters from soybean oil -- but it's still problematic (vegetable oils and products derived from them oxidize quickly and don't lubricate well and are not suitable for high stress situations).

This is just one component of one device used in one aspect of maintaining a colony. Sci-fi presents far too rosy of a picture of how hard it is to establish even close to resource independence on another planet.