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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.
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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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.
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.