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Panel Advises Longer Life For Space Station
suraj.sun writes "A presidential panel reviewing the US space program has found that the United States needs to boost NASA's budget by $1.5 billion to fly the last seven shuttle missions and should extend International Space Station operations through 2020. The panel also proposed adding an extra, eighth shuttle flight to help keep the station supplied and narrow an expected 5-7 year gap between the time the shuttle fleet is retired and a new US spaceship is ready to fly."
ladies, get your pussies ready!
Rob Malda has a loose asshole.
"I'm fucking your ass!" he yelled.
There's not a lot between me and my upstairs neighbors, and if I can hear the pitter-patter of their little Chihuahua's claws on their hard wood floors, then they surely--at three in the morning--heard this jagoff yell, "I'm fucking your ass."
To his credit, it was a true statement, that he was having sex with my ass. It was also true to our situation about thirty seconds prior--the situation of the various parts of him that were in the various crevices of me--when he yelled, "My finger is in your ass!" Indeed, his finger was in my ass. His thumb, I guessed. I don't know. You can't really see what's going in and out of your ass on your hands and knees. You have to make a guess, or sleep with a douche like this, who will tell you exactly what's in your ass. Shortly after, when he yelled, "I can feel my finger in your ass on my dick!" I imagined it was because he could probably feel his finger or thumb through my ass on his dick.
But why yell these things out, really? Is it necessary? No, and it's not sexy, either.
To begin this entry, I must explain that I'm balls deep in recovery right now, and I find it absolutely exhausting. Every day is the same bullshit: trying to feel, trying not to let anger rule me, trying to detach from all the things that keep me...me. I can't drink or do drugs. I have to abstain from them, and I'm doing only sort of okay at that, and while I'm abstaining from those vices, I've got to figure out how to manage quitting sex, too. I can't do that. I'm too horny. Sex will have to be the vice I get around to quitting once I've figured out how to abstain from the rest of the nonsense. Perhaps I'll procrastinate on that forever. I am a very sexual person. That's why they call me Bunny, for christ's sake. I'm always humping.
So while I'm procrastinating about sex and allowing myself to have it, I'm also having a difficult time finding it. It's hard to get a good lay in a town where everyone's batshit, lives-in-the-woods crazy or over sixty. There are three attractive single guys in town who bathe, and I've done two of them already.
The first of them went missing, which was not fun. I was sort of into him, but he stood me up and it was a rather embarrassing outcome, not because he did it while I was in public sitting by myself over a glass of wine and a bread basket, waiting for him to show while everybody in town looked at me piteously, but because of who he is, which is a slacker. He does some sort of construction job for a living, can't keep a conversation going, has no college education, is divorced or separated with a kid and isn't particularly good looking. I've never had great taste in guys, but even for me, it was a stretch. He had nice eyes--a cuteness, a quirkiness--and there was something really naughty about him. He had a devious smile. He was a troublemaker; I like that.
He ended up being very good in bed, and I rather enjoyed being with him. Not just sleeping with him, but being around him too, in his presence. I don't know if my being "into" him was desperation so much as a clicking, or a chemistry. Some people...well, you really just ought to have sex with them. It's the right thing to do. You have compatible pheromones. It wouldn't be appropriate to maintain the distance between, according to the rules of nature.
But then he went poof, so what can I say but whatever?
After him came a few trysts with some lesbians. One on vacation with her girlfriends. A girl from New Zealand I wasn't the least bit attracted to. She was very pretty, but I wasn't into her, and I had sex with her anyway, for a reason I'll get to in a bit. It was the wrong and selfish thing to do, and I regret it, because it's not like you can have sex with someone without them figuring out you're apathetic about the act mid-act, and you're faking the moans and the pleasure, and if you do fake it, isn't it irresponsible? You can't just say, in passing, that you entered another body because there was just something interesting about he
The Shuttle/ISS subcommittee headed by Dr Sally Ride has presented three options:
1. Do nothing, let the shuttle stop flying at the end of 2010 and let the station be de-orbited at the end of 2016.
2. Fly 1 more mission, and still de-orbit the station at the end of 2016.
3. Extend station operations through to the end of 2020 and fly more shuttle missions to support it.
The options explain how to do it, what funding will be required, and the consequences on other programs.
The President and the new NASA Administrator will take these options and decide which to implement, depending on what funding they can get from Congress.
The committee is not chartered with making any recommendations, and the options are not final until the report is released, around Aug 31.
You can give your opinions to the committee via the website: http://hsf.nasa.gov/
How we know is more important than what we know.
The ISS is, was, and will continue to be a complete waste of money. As much as I love watching astronauts masturbating in space, we should decommission the station tomorrow and build a new one--a new station that can actually do something for a change. We need a space station that can be used for construction, even if it is only rudimentary, so we can start building the infrastructure necessary to use space travel for more than photo ops.
Why no other country had succeeded yet in developing technologies that could mimic what the space shuttle could do in order to supply the "International" Space station after the United States retire the shuttles. (with the exception of Russia)
In reality the United States space programs are still quite advanced than most of the world (even with such old technologies) and yet you guys are neglecting it.
If they're going to decommission a shuttle, why not leave it at the station? It would provide some redundant facilities, extra living space, and most importantly, engines to boost the orbit periodically (one of the main things the shuttles do now besides delivering supplies and new components).
Almost New - In orbit. Space Station. NR
Shipping - no delivery options. Get there yourself.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Can someone please explain to me why they're spending such vast sums and not taking the necessary steps to insure permanence?
You don't settle something by building tents, you build crude wooden structures, add to them, modernize them, then one day you look around you and its a bustling township.
Space will not become commercially viable until the government funded projects provide permanent way-points.
Imagine building a second ISS nearby, anchoring the two together, and setting them spinning to provide artificial gravity. Then you would have a healthier permanent environment with the capacity to add zero-g modules at the central point for research.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
How about using Russian-made spacecraft to do resupply missions and to ferry people back and forth from the station. The Shuttle fleet is unsafe, every mission becomes closer to failure. And honestly, they are becoming quickly obsolete, they were released what, over 20 years ago? We need a replacement. However, the ISS seems to be doing its job pretty well without any major errors. But really, NASA needs to hurry up to make a new spacecraft fleet, the Space Shuttle relies on a flawed design that seems to only get reviewed after a major disaster (see Challenger and Columbia). Plus, despite how much of it is re-usuable, it is terribly expensive to maintain them compared to other methods of resupply, etc.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
option 4: the US quits participating, and they leave it in orbit and other countries continue to fly to it and to use it, as they currently do.
-- Terry
You do mean former Lockheed Martin CEO Norm Augustine, right? You know, where it says "CHAIRMAN", it lists his name and everything.
Secondly, they haven't presented any options, yet. The report isn't done. This article pretty clearly states some of the constraints under which they've working, but some Slashdot Editing Magic(TM) has turned the panel's statement that ~"NASA needs a bigger budget and slightly longer timeframe to fly the flights already on schedule now" into what you see at the top of your browser.
Well, vast amounts of science, as you say, could possibly be done on it. Thing is, not much of the possible science really started. The substantial delays in construction meant that the crew required to do the science, and many of the modules, didn't arrive until recently. That's why dumping the thing in a few short years is such a crime. $100 Billion, twenty years, and the lives of seven astronauts were given to build the ISS, and NASA wants to dump it to make room in their budget for an unfunded Mars stunt. The very plan is criminal.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Couldn't they attach an ion engine and let the solar panel's power keep it in orbit if by chance it becomes unmanned for a while?
Table-ized A.I.
China had been eager to participate in the ISS, but the Bush admin felt it was a military-technology risk to let them. Maybe upon review it's not risky anymore due to time making technology used less sensitive or because the Bush admin was perhaps unnecessarily paranoid. Russia probably sold China all the ISS secrets anyhow.
Table-ized A.I.
That's one of the major problems with the current Constellation / Orion / Aeries I / Aeries V / Moon / Mars plan. Although it's likely to be quite a bit more reliable (e.g. safer) to fly, the Constellation program doesn't do much to increase access to space. Constellation re-uses the Apollo/Shuttle launch infrastructure, with only two launch pads and two (or possibly 3, there is an unfunded plan to build one more) crawlers, and the constraints of the Vertical Assembly Building (with a limited number of assembly bays, one of which is used for storage of rocket parts). This means the flight rate to orbit tops out at something like a dozen or 18 launches a year, maximum. Flight rates for the heavy lift Aeries V are likely to be so low that the vehicle will never achieve a reasonable per-flight cost, because too few vehicles will be built to get the cost of flight hardware down.
NASA has abandoned the goal of building a reliable, cheaper transportation system. They were hot on the trail with the X-33 / VentureStar program. Like nearly all R&D programs, it went over the original budget and behind schedule. However, the program had the right goals, and the right basic plan for getting to them. If NASA had stayed on course, we would have had a replacement for the Shuttle by now. The planned VentureStar production flight vehicles would be flexible enough to sustain the ISS. It would have a capacity high enough (in terms of payload per flight, which was similar to the Shuttle) and flights per year (which could scale with the addition of vehicles, without the constraints of the expensive and limited Apollo-era launch systems). The modernized vehicle design (lifting body airframe, engines with fewer moving parts, substantially more durable thermal protection system, simplified container-paradigm-based payload integration) would yield shorter turn-around of a single vehicle, from days to a couple weeks, compared to a few months to several months for the Shuttle).
Instead, NASA dabbles in scramjets, with a million here and a million there in loose change. Scramjets are a technology with great potential, but even if aggressively funded (which they are not) they won't be ready for a long, long time. A more modest program like the X-33 / VentureStar could get us to higher flight rates with Shuttle-like capacity and reduction in cost of payload delivery which would be substantial enough to stimulate the space economy. We could get to the Moon and Mars a lot cheaper, and go there more often with a rational approach to building a transportation system. (NASA needs to rethink the in-space transfer vehicles, too. VASIMR is a technology within our reach, and if developed as the inter-planetary engine, can dramatically reduce flight times to Mars, from many months to 1 month.)
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
I don't know how they plan to get this to the ISS, but Ad Astra and NASA agreed to test VASIMR ion engine at ISS. Assuming they can resupply the engine, and the engine parts designed life is sufficient, even this test article could work to keep ISS on station for quite a while. The Russian resupply vehicles (Progress) periodically boost the station, too.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Although a space station as a "construction shack" might be useful for really large projects, the ISS isn't in the right orbit to be used as a way station to anywhere interesting. Smaller projects can be assembled easily in whatever orbit happens to be convenient for the mission. A mobile construction shack with an ion engine and appropriately outfitted for such duty would make more sense and cost less than retooling ISS for this new mission. The real issue is the cost of getting to orbit. It's way too high. If we don't do something to bring the cost down (something realistic like X-33/VentureStar, not over-reaching like NASP et. al.) then we will not see anything other than a series of changing plans, and missions aborted at a succession of funding crises. We might, maybe, see a return to the Moon for a few flights, which would then be terminated prematurely to make room in the budget for a series of flights to Mars, which are then cancelled before flown.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Yes.
No matter how bad anarchy may be, "the rule of law" can be far worse, with the organization to back it up.
This isn't an issue of sunk costs. It's an issue of entirely failing to capitalize upon the investment made, failing to do the science that the ISS was designed to do, the science that the public expected to happen when they funded the construction of the science platform. I merely enumerate the costs to demonstrate the magnitude of the crime that NASA and the Bush administration committed when they suddenly announced, without consulting their international partners, that the ISS would be de-orbited in 2016, far short of its original planned lifespan as a research platform. It was originally intended to be operational for 10 to 20 years, not four or five years, after it was completed.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Actually the program end is in 2015, with the de-orbit in 2016. This end, however, was pulled out of the previous NASA administrator's ass, when they realized the Bush administration wasn't going to come through with promised additional funding for Constellation / Orion / Aeries and flights to the Moon and Mars. NASA cancelled the ISS early, flushing the potential science down the toilet in anticipation of reallocating the projected funding to the Moon and Mars flights. They seriously annoyed their international partners (Japan, Europe, Russia) in the process. Don't let them fool you. I'm all in favor of expanded manned exploration, but I want it done right. Get the science we paid for out of the ISS. Build a launch system to reduce the cost of payload delivery to orbit, so that we can return to the Moon, and explore Mars and beyond with regular, sustained flight rates, not a political stunt once every fifty years or so.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Near the end of 2008, Ad Astra and NASA signed an agreement to build a 200kw flight article and test it at ISS.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
the incremental cost for a shuttle launch is ~$60M.
NASA says the cost per shuttle launch is $450 million.
For those interested, the third and final meeting will be broadcast Thursday, running from 8am - 4pm EDT:
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/NASA-TV-HD
http://www.hobbyspace.com/nucleus/index.php?itemid=14237
http://twitter.com/search?q=%23nasahsf
I think the Thursday meeting will be the most interesting one, as it'll include the presentations from the "Exploration Beyond Low Earth Orbit" subgroup. Some options the subgroup is studying include not just the "Moon Base" plan, but also plans for going directly to Mars ASAP, as well as a "Flexible path" option which would involve manned trips to destinations in shallow gravity wells, like L1, asteroids and Phobos.
The videos from the Tuesday and Wednesday meetings aren't available yet, but you can find out much of what's been discussed already at the following links:
HSF Committee Public Meeting in Alabama - Reviews
HSF Committee Public Meeting in Houston - Reviews
http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=17962.0
Less money means less political power, so you aren't going to find any existing manager, sr manager or chief scientist in NASA that will have the political will to design something that costs 50% less. That means fewer people reporting to them. Fewer people means fewer depends and less internal political power.
Congress is worse. In congress, you become more powerful when more people, not less, are dependent on a government program for a paycheck.
Only canceling NASA will reset everything, sadly.
duh!
It's not their (well, most of it) money!
My view is that we shouldn't consider serious extensions to the ISS's lifespan until we see a demonstration of the value of the ISS. Currently, the prime value of the ISS is as a demonstration of orbital construction techniques. The building process will end some time in 2011 or 2012. Past that, we really only have two uses for the station, scientific research on phenomena in zero gravity and a testbed for space technologies. My view is that NASA needs to enlist some serious participation from private industry to justify either of those two. My view is that private industry would be somewhat more likely to find useful applications for space manufacture (and similar industries) than NASA is.
Moving on, I view the proposal to extent Shuttle launches with some concern. The Shuttle has long been an expensive boondoggle with little benefit for space development or exploration. They aren't proposing to extend the Shuttle's life indefinitely, which is a good win. But if this is the start of many years of extended use of the Shuttle, which could only be rationalized to service the ISS, then it's a heavy weight against continuing to use the ISS. To be blunt, if the price of maintaining the ISS means that the Shuttle continues to fly indefinitely, then by any safe means, deorbit the ISS. The Shuttle is a series of very bad decisions that has by itself greatly delayed manned space exploration. To continue this vehicle at the expense of the US's future in space (the ISS simply doesn't contribute as much as the Shuttle would impair) would be a disaster typical of NASA of the past.
Ok I know the shuttle is getting old and all, but why do they keep insisting that 2010 be the cut off for using it? Is there a sound engineering reason not to keep flying it until Constellation is ready? And what is so magical about 2010?
Seriously, when I was a kid all the books said by the year 2000 we'd all be flying around in jet packs and be living on the moon.
It'd be nice if ISS wasn't the only space station out there, maybe we could set up a trailer park on the moon?
You dropped a word from the phrase you were replying to; "cost" and "incremental cost" are not the same thing.
Example: the cost to produce 10,000,000 DVDs might be $10 per DVD, because the blockbuster movie cost $100,000,000 to make. But once the movie is made you don't have to make 10% more movie to make 10% more DVDs, you just have to print more disks; the incremental cost would be less than $1 per DVD.
With the shuttle things are even more complicated. Do you want the total cost per flight; the amount of money spent on the whole program divided by the number of flights? That's well over $1 billion per launch. What about the operating cost per flight? If the R&D is considered "sunk cost" and you just consider the current budget per flight, that varies widely from year to year depending on how many flights are made, and NASA's $450 million might come from one of those calculations. And the incremental cost is less still. If you cancel a shuttle flight and only fly 3 in a year when you'd planned 4, you save a bit of fuel costs, some operations costs, you don't have to manufacture another external tank... but you don't get to put all your employees on leave for 3 months, you don't get to mothball your facilities for 3 months, and so you don't save nearly as much as you might hope. I thought even the incremental cost was over $100 million per flight, but I wouldn't be too surprised if it was $60 million.
I say it's time to move on. We have to pivot off the ISS and onto the moon and mars because, as they point out in TFA, our resources are limited. ISS is awesome and we learned a lot and yes there's more to learn there, but all of that and more await us on Mars.
I also say we should strap some remote-controlled ion thrusters to the ISS and push it over to the moon where it can orbit indefinitely. That would be so cool.
"Crude and slow, clansman. Your attack was no better than that of a clumsy child."
Do not even try to explain it.
The reason we try to gain high amounts of karma is so that we can blow it on "risky" replies that make us feel better even though they will be modded to hell.
Table-ized A.I.
The reason we try to gain high amounts of karma is so that we can blow it on "risky" replies that make us feel better even though they will be modded to hell.
that's why I added that line....when you point out that you will take a karma hit before making a comment, you get modded up.
I'll probably get modded down for saying this, but this is one /. meme I plan on riding as far as I can.
-I only code in BASIC.-
"2. The US put it up, they're legally required to bring it down."
What's the time limit on that?
I.e.: when will the US be bringing the Viking landers and Mariner and Voyager probes, which the US put up, back down in order to meet their legal requirements to bring down what they put up?
-- Terry
Constant small thrust could push it up
For example, if the Russians threw up a Topaz-2 reactor and a couple spools of copper wire, and unspooled them toward the Earth to cross the Earths magnetic field lines, by pumping energy down the wire they could raise the orbit no problem. We considered a couple spools of copper wire as a means of powering space stations, at the cost of increasing orbital drag, but you could easily run the generator in reverse as a motor, so long as you had enough power to overcome atmospheric drag.
See also http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf82.html.
-- Terry