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Space Station Partners Bicker Over Closure Date
jcdick1 writes "The current partners in the ISS are in discussion regarding the closure date of the space station, even though it still has not been fully assembled. 'The United States insists it will pull out of the station at the end of 2015 while Russia wants its life prolonged, said European Space Agency (ESA) chief Jean-Jacques Dordain at an astronautics congress in Hyderabad, southern India. NASA administrator Michael Griffin has told space station partners that the US agency has no plans for "utilization and exploitation" of the science research lab for more than five years after it is completed, Dordain said.'"
When the US withdraw, the Russians can lower it back down to earth using a rope.
The Russians and the Europeans want NASA to keep paying for the high costs of maintenance of the ISS.
There has to be somebody out there with money enough to buy this thing.
ISS hotel... Nice...
The United States insists it will pull out of the station at the end of 2015
You know, by setting a firm timetable like that, you're only emboldening the Russians.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Heck, if we can stay the course in Iraq, why can't we stay the course in low earth orbit?
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Okay, it'll take until 2010 to finish the station then NASA will use it only for five years before pulling out. With all due respect NASA, are you fucking nuts?
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Makes no sense to own a beachhouse if you dont have a car (and money) to get there. Luckily the Chinese, Japanese, Indians, Russians, Europeans, Iranians,... have their own space programs.
You might have been able to put a man on the moon, but you're not able to finance a constant presence in space...Kennedy must be rotating in his grave!
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Wow blame the republicans. I think it is more of an issue of blaming americans. We have gotten to a point where we no longer Quantify things but Mathitize things. Everything needs a solid number next to it, if not then it isn't there. So for Space we see how much it costs but not the benefit because there is little numbers attached to the benefits. The Russians who are in a far more corrupt nation then we are know the value of space travel. But we just don't we are so focused on the here and now and not to the future.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
According to the article, US pay 70% of the running cost of the station. Could this be a tactic to make ESA pay a larger share?
The sooner the better.
The shuttle / ISS have done only harm to the space program.
(Go read _The Hubble Wars_ if you want to see how bad it was in the 80s. And it only got worse from there).
Any sufficiently advanced technology is insufficiently documented.
Lowball estimates indicate that NASA will spend $53 billion on the ISS from 1993 to the end of its life. This doesn't include the cost of maintaining the space shuttle or R&D from Space Station Freedom (the canned station from the 1980s). So the US will use the station for 5 years after completion -- and what of serious scientific value will be accomplished during that time?
The ISS isn't worth the cost. Think of the probes and orbital observatories NASA could've built using the ISS budget. Those things give us far more insight into the universe. Hell, some of the early ISS literature proclaimed the station would pay for through the leasing of "microgravity manufacturing" compartments to various companies...please.
No one should be surprised about this; the project was a waste before it even started.
Why would you need to replace it for a moon colony? The moon is only a few days away, having a space station stop over doesn't make sense. And as for Mars? Let's take care of the moon first. If we get there and get a colony cooking for a few years before we ever migrate to Mars it will likely be a whole different ballgame as far as landers and transports go. Trying to build a space station for the needs doesn't make a ton of sense yet. And an earth orbiting station may not make sense for Mars but I don't know how the physics and such would work out for a midpoint station. It's a neat question though.
If anyone can think of why a space station would make sense for a moon base let me know. I don't want to speak out of turn here but I just don't see the value of a space station to a colony on the moon. But I've been wrong before.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
Err, my read was the Americans are trying to get Russia and Europe to pick up more of the tab, and using an early withdrawal as a threat. Of course the EUA is already refusing to admit it could scrape together a few more dollars. Regardless the relative financial clout between the partners has changed a lot since the Americans promised to pick up 70% of the tab.
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With Bush spending it all on the War Of Futility, we're not going to have any money to send anyone to the station anyways. It shouldn't come as a shock that NASA's already trying to find some budget wiggle-room, even before Bush has departed.
Is is possible to have a discussion on slashdot without bashing the President? You hate him, I get it. You tout any bad news that you hear and put a negative spin on any good news so that it is bad (the economy is a good example). I did not see Iraq anywhere in the summary, WTF is point of bringing it up. Maybe you should be posting on DailyKos or HuffingtonPost or something where that type of partisanship is acceptable.
Besides, this has nothing to do with Iraq and everything to do with NASA making plans beyond the space station. With the budget required to maintain the space station, NASA has little room for other adventures, such as a permanent base on the moon or a manned mission to Mars.
IMHO, we need to turn the space station into a spaceship assembly plant where parts of space ships can be assembled so we can launch a much larger ship than what we can lift into orbit all at once.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
I dont think its *nessessasry* for a stop over or a *requirement* for a moon base. i think its a requirement for a decent space program.
OTOH (and I don't have any numbers to back this up, so it's totally a theory) ... maybe the subsidies we're providing their space program, along with money they make from space tourism to the ISS, is actually making Russia money??
If 5 years are enough for Babylon 5 and the replicators, they are enough for ISS.
If you plan to not only go to the moon, but to setup permanent bases, then the ISS is largely irrelevant (in its current form). The ISS is complex, hard to maintain, and relatively difficult to live on. The moon, while having a few technical issues, is basically a much more sensible bit of solid ground to base yourself from. The ISS as a floating lab is very expensive - all it brings to the party is all the hassles of space (living in zero g, life support, things going wrong) and none of the benefits (resources, discovery, exploration)
Well, the orbit thing worked out, since for a period of two years, the only way up there was via Soyuz.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Jules' Undersea Lodge is an underwater hotel built in what used to be La Chalup Research Laboratory, a 1970s underweater research station. Whether in the near or far future, there's bound to eventually be a market for a similar concept in space tourism.
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The Russians who are in a far more corrupt nation then we are know the value of space travel.
... space is the military high ground. To not be in space resigns oneself to being a second class military power. Given the history within Russia's living memory this is also a major consideration.
For Russia I think it is more a matter of national pride than future profit. With the collapse of the soviet union and communism several generations have little to look back upon with pride. The soviet space program is about the only prideful accomplishment that can be embraced and the current Russian space program is what remains of soviet program.
And
If you are looking for quantifiable benifit, it is hard to justify any space exploration. How much is studying yeast grow in space worth to your economy? Well if it shows something interesting, and it can be reproduced on earth, or is worth the cost of brewing your beer in space, then it might be "worth it". However, it is much easier to estimate the value of expenditures in reducing hospital wait-times, or sending AIDS medication to Africa or a bunch of other things. The cost of going to space is too prohibitive, you drop 100M on the yeast study simply because of transportation costs, when you could buy 1000 labs a mass spectrometer for that.
Where am I going with this? Well IMHO if you thought that the expensive pure research was worth getting into, it should be worth maintaining. I heard that the ISS is in a decaying orbit, perhaps a big jump in expenditures would be necessary to push it back in place, past the date, not sure. What we have here is very similar to the Superconducting Super Collider project. One administration commits to a hugely expensive project, the next one changes their mind. You end up with a have used, or even worst, a half completed project.
Speaking of which: a man who called himself You-Know-Who just invited you to a secret wink-wink at the you-know-what.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
I can think of a couple, mostly around the idea of a lunar transport, which would dock with the station:
* A lunar transport ship should never need to re-enter the atmosphere. Why would you want to drag re-entry heat shields all the way out to the moon?
* A lunar transport ship would save each supply launch the cost of building (and then discarding) another system to soft-land on the moon.
* Scheduling the docking of a lunar transport with shuttle/progress rocket lifts would be very difficult. If you could, instead, stage the supplies at a station, that would make the scheduling of the lunar transport runs and the supply launches more (not completely) independent.
* If you eventually end up with more than one destination (L5? Please?), you don't have to have separate launches to supply each, just launch one set of supplies and split them up in orbit for each destination.
Can you think of better ways to spend a trillion dollars plus? You could double nasas budget, pick up the entire european and russian tab, and still have enough left over to fund mass wide scale deployment of a variety of new alternative energy projects, like millions and millions of solar panels, starting with every governmental building in existence, local community wind farms, etc., finish bringing broadband to the rural areas,fully fund the OLPC project so it really does get down to being a hundred bucks for a decent little machine, heck, throw in reopening a car plant or two and start pumping out some sort of Model A electric cars for the masses, run by all the new juice that would be out there. Hey, how about paying some public school math and science teachers better? how about guaranteed zero interest student loans for engineering and medical doctors?
That's what you can do with a trillion dollars and counting right now. And, they still could have taken out saddam and his sons, just offer a big enough bounty, no strings attached, some goombah over there woulda offed them skunks for a cool billion in tax free cash. Maybe some of them blackwater types might have done it, prove their macho instead of popping off iraqi peasants.
*Instead*, we've alienated half the world, we look like big stupid drunk redneck bullies, and put ourselves into multigenerational debt and destroyed the worth of the dollar and *increased* the likelihood of more "terrorism".
He and his cronies should be bashed on any thread relating to technology, politics or money, because it ain't offtopic at all.
He's a drool, man, get it? Short bus? "Special needs"? He was picked out because he's malleable and the neocon handlers ran him as their controllable spokesperson, but he went far beyond rationality and now their whole party looks like dunces and probably set back their legitimate old traditional and at least somewhat rational policies by 20 years. His administration can be summed up nicely "no bribe, crime or idiocy left behind". We got retired generals now falling out of the woodwork, breaking the traditional military "no criticism of the da chief" silence, saying essentially the same things.
One of the worst mistakes ever in US politics, letting the out to lunch looney tunes cabal of PNAC and AIPAC supporters get so much concentrated power.
You're spending almost *THREE* fuckin' billion dollars a *DAY* on the war, and yet a mere billion a year for NASA is much money?! Yeah, right! Half of your research is getting done there, imagine with the funding for the war you could have established a permanent base on Mars for less than a year!
And they could be spent on education, or roads, or bridges, or public bathrooms, or whatever. But you know what? They wouldn't be. Saying what you COULD do with the money is meaningless unless you actually plan on doing it. That money stood about as much chance as going to NASA as it did my pocket! Now, if NASA's budget had been cut as a result of the war, then you would have a point. But, as I stated, it wasn't. And even if the war had never happened, NASA's budget would not be any different than it is right now. So when you claim that the reason NASA does not have an unlimited budget is the war in Iraq, you are being completely dishonest. You are trying to turn the debate on NASA's budget into a Bush Bashing session, and I just called you on it.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
I made a similar observation awhile back, and agree that it's rather annoying (even as a strong critic of Bush myself) to see constant off-topic criticisms of Bush. However, this one is actually on-topic--Iraq is Bush's war, Iraq is hideously expensive, and NASA is one of many agencies that could put that money to better use.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
After I learned about the life and death of Project Orion, I came to the conclusion that we (the US) should give up on manned space exploration.
Without cheaper, easier propulsion, and without the ability to get larger loads into space, there's really no point in it. We can keep playing with satellites and the like, but we'll never gain any economic benefits out of going to the Moon, Mars, or anywhere else. The extra weight needed to transport humans is really unnecessary.
Mankind needs to get over its fear of nuclear power. A hybrid fusion/fission Orion design would not release significant amounts of fallout into the atmosphere (especially compared to all the nuclear explosive testing done in the 50s), and who knows; perhaps after we lifted a few hundred thousand tons of equipment into orbit (and perhaps to the moon) we'll be able to build most of what we need in space, where fallout doesn't matter.
Without significant advances in propulsion technology, or a resurrection of Project Orion, there's no point to manned space exploration. We should redirect these billions to propulsion technology, or just take it out of the doomed space program altogether.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
> The Russians who are in a far more corrupt nation then we are
Are you sure?
It seems that the world has been hopelessly broke since the beginning of time, yet there has always seemed to be more than enough money *everywhere* to finance mass murder.