The Device NASA Is Leaving Behind

iminplaya writes "After years of delays, NASA hopes to launch this week a European-built laboratory that will greatly expand the research capability of the international space station. Although some call it a milestone, the launch has focused new attention on the space agency's earlier decision to back out of plans to send up a different, $1.5 billion device — one that many scientists contend would produce far more significant knowledge. "...it would be a true international disgrace if this instrument ends up as a museum piece that never is used.""

Comments

Intersting comment

[2.7182]

Nobel prize winner Steve Weinberg says in the article that it will be the only good science done on the ISS if it goes up!!!

Re:Intersting comment

[Iron Condor]

Nobel prize winner Steve Weinberg says in the article that it will be the only good science done on the ISS if it goes up!!!

...which is slightly misleading, of course. Back in the late eighties, early nineties, cosmic-ray scientists in the US formed a collaboration to conceive pretty much this system. It was called Astromag. It had a certain cost, NASA said it was too expensive, it got canned. Fast forward a couple years and Sam Ting, who has no clue of cosmic-ray science and only now discovers that there's interesting things to be done there drums up financial support in industry and various European partners for a harebrained gizmo that he called AMS that would never do a thing and be horribly expensive. NASA agrees to fly it in complete circumvention of any kind of peer-review that had axed Astromag earlier. In the following years, AMS hits snag after snag, snafu after snafu, redesign after redesign -- and after many, many redesigns finally effectively mimicks what Astromag would've been from the word go.

The reason it took "500 scientists 12 years to build" the piece of junk is because these were scientists who had no clue of space particle research. Who were lacking the simplest background in anything to do with with space radiation. There were major press releases, for example, when a first prototype flew on the shottle and purportedly newly discovered a population of trapped electrons -- i.e. the van Allen belts. Which none of these folks had ever heard of, because they're all particle physicists who've spent their lives in tunnels underground.

So at some point AMS runs our of money, steam, political will to ram an expensive industrial project down the throats of people who proposed to do the same damn thing for 1/10 the cost a decade earlier. I can't say I'm surprised.

All that said, it is definitely an interesting project. It would most certainly be the only worthwhile science on the ISS. But it could've been up there as one of the first functional modules at some fraction of the cost.

(And trust me I am moderating this comment -- go and chat to Ed Stone (PI on Voyager and former director of JPL who retired to head the Space Radiation Lab at Caltech) one of these days for a lesson on how politics drives science).

Re:Intersting comment

[The One and Only]

but I doubt it will make anyone run naked in the streets as, say, discovery of a reaction that makes dark matter could (it is the 30% of the universe after all !)

My physics TA (a doctoral student) used to say that this "dark matter" talk reminded him a lot of how we posited an extra planet between Mercury and the Sun because that was the only way to account for Mercury's orbit. It turned out that there was no planet, Newtonian mechanics were just too imprecise to predict the orbit of Mercury. Likewise, his bet was that the effects attributed to "dark matter" would be accounted for once we developed more precise physical laws.

Do not forget CAM

[WindBourne]

These are 2 devices that require to be in space. The CAM is the centrifuge module. It would allow us to test biologicals systems to long term exposure to low G's. For instance, what would happen with mice over the course of their life time, if exposed to 6/10 G.. This makes all the difference to us as we speak of setting up a colony on mars.

Re:Do not forget CAM

[khallow]

And of course, the CAM is one of the modules that won't make it to space. When I read the title of the story, I immediately thought of the CAM not another cosmic ray detector. At least the Columbus has some small centrifuges (in the "biolab") so we'll be able to get a little low gravity information. I don't know if they can squeeze mice into those things. But even figuring out the effects of low gravity on small shrimp (for example) would be an improvement over the current best information which is medical records for a couple of days on the Moon for 12 people (from the Apollo program) as well as the endpoints, zero G and Earth gravity.

Why does it need to be launched with a shuttle?

[DaleGlass]

And why does it even need the ISS?

Couldn't it be just launched with a rocket, after adding the necessary bits so that it doesn't need the ISS?

Re:Calling Mr Tang

[moosesocks]

The credibility of the US is at stake here? Some needs to write Mr. Ting a memo, reminding him that since that commitment is made, not one but TWO shuttles have been blown to flinders along with their brave crews.

The Challenger blew up in 1986, whereas the commitment was made in 1994. I don't think that anyone has ever questioned the fact that strapping yourself to the top of hundreds of tons of high explosives is inherently dangerous.

If you want to make a more valid point, you could indicate that neither the space shuttle or the ISS are particularly well-suited for the purpose that they were designed to fulfill (and I'd imagine that many of the ISS's woes are stemming from the issues with the fact that the space shuttle is expensive, dangerous, and can't carry very big payloads -- literally the worst of all worlds).

For what it's cost to send the shuttle into orbit umpteen times delivering parts to the ISS, I imagine that we could have designed and built a large rocket that could have delivered most of the payload in one or two trips. We'd already done it twice -- the US had the Saturn vehicles, and Russia more recently had the the Energia platform.

If we had a better platform than the shuttle for sending large parts to the ISS, we might have actually been able to get some legitimate science done on it. The shuttle was *never* an optimal launch vehicle, even before the safety issues came to light.

Private Enterprise?

[Cycloid Torus]

Article states, "Griffin initiated a study last year into alternative ways to deliver the AMS to the station, but they proved to be prohibitively expensive."

Does anyone know if this includes any of the nascent commercial carriers?

If they could get this into a slightly higher orbit, could it be delivered later with a small amount of reaction mass?

Perhaps they should re-open this for bids.

Re:Calling Mr Tang

[canuck57]

The credibility of the US is at stake here? Some needs to write Mr. Ting a memo, reminding him that since that commitment is made, not one but TWO shuttles have been blown to flinders along with their brave crews.

Just think, how many days or is it hours of Iraq does it take to fund a solution to this? Not many.

Think, for what has been spent on Iraq and Afghanistan, we could have a US space station around Mars or Jupiter, maybe both.

Re:Calling Mr Tang

[maxwell demon]

Zero gravity can be simulated on earth, fairly well.

So how do you propose to simulate, say, just one hour of continuous zero gravity?

Frankly, I don't know how useful or useless material science in zero-g is. However I'd strongly question your assertion that zero-g can be adequately simulated on earth.

Share-ware

[bigattichouse]

I remember working in a DoD shop, and we FREQUENTLY built shelf-ware. You'd get involved in the project, and do to the water-fall nature of the requirements, things would change so much (or get finished in time for a better tool to be built). And it went on the shelf. The worst part was you usually found out it was going on a shelf before you completed it, but you HAD to complete it to finish the contract and get some other task that would replace it... it was all very silly.

Not really

[WindBourne]

EU can launch this JUST as much as America can. Why are they or Russia not launching it? In fact, Russia has the ability to put CAM AND AMS into orbit (progress can operate as a tug). Right now, American budget is getting very tight and we have paid for the bulk of the ISS. Russia AND EU are doing good right now.

Re:Huh?

[bigpat]

The option of turning AMS into a free-flyer has been explored and it is prohibitively expensive. Right now it is a precise, sophisticated instrument designed to merge with the ISS infrastructure. Adding propulsion systems, independent power generation, etc. could be done, but is not at all economical. Beyond that, it is probably best that this complicated device be accessible if some unforeseen problem arises. It is not economical to put things in space. Period. The question isn't whether it is prohibitively expensive, because every launch is prohibitively expensive, yet we still keep launching things. The question is how much it costs and whether it is worth doing.

Give our soldiers in Iraq the week off and you save enough to put 5 of these in orbit. The money is there.

Re:Calling Mr Tang

[evanbd]

I don't think that anyone has ever questioned the fact that strapping yourself to the top of hundreds of tons of high explosives is inherently dangerous.

To drag this further off-topic... Plenty of people have questioned that assertion. Or perhaps more accurately, plenty of people have questioned the idea of strapping yourself to a motor that can't be turned off (the SRBs and most solid motors) -- no current manned rocket actually uses high explosives for propellant. Many of these people are very smart and experienced, and many of them are trying to do something about it. Unfortunately, NASA and the current commercial providers don't seem terribly interested in attempts to reduce the risk of spaceflight by more than modest amounts.

I've worked on rocket engines. There's nothing more inherently dangerous about them than there is about a jet engine or even your car engine. All contain high energy chemicals and at least moderately high pressures. The fact that historically rocket engines are more dangerous than modern airplane engines is a result of two things: higher maturity levels in aircraft engine design, and a very curious lack of attention to safety and reliability in historical rocket engine design.

It does not have to be this way. We know how to build rocket engines that fail less often, and fail less catastrophically when they do fail. We know how to build rockets that don't kill their passengers when they fail. We need to stop assuming that space travel will always be as dangerous as it has been, and ask what we can do differently to make it safer from early in the design process. (It won't ever be completely safe, just as air travel will never be completely safe. It can, however, be continually improving in safety, and we can continue searching for ways to make it safer.)