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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.
Its the only way to be sure.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
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.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
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.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Get back to me when SpaceShipOne can reach GEO or even LEO.
Gone!
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.
The enemies of Democracy are
... 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!"
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.
And just what does he mean by "Getting our money's worth?"
"To not utilize that station the way [b]I think it ought to be utilized[/b] is just wrong," said Glenn. Thanks for clearing that up, Senator.
Si vis pacem, para bellum
The only thing more annoying than a Libertarian is an (un|mis)informed Libertarian
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!
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
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.
"Who the hell is Nietzche? It's a question stupid people are asking." -- Newscaster, "Jesus Christ Supercop"
- 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.
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.
"Who the hell is Nietzche? It's a question stupid people are asking." -- Newscaster, "Jesus Christ Supercop"
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.
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.
-- Cheers!