Is the ISS Really Worth $100 Billion?

Ponca City writes "JR Minkel writes on Space.com that as NASA celebrates the 10th anniversary of astronauts living on the space station — and with construction essentially complete — the question remains: will the International Space Station ever really pay off scientifically? The space agency contends that the weightless environment provided by the station offers a unique way of unmasking processes of cell growth and chemistry that are hidden on Earth, but some critics don't see a zero gravity laboratory as filling a crucial scientific need. Gregory Petsko, a biochemist at Brandeis University, says the only basic science justification he has ever heard for the station is that protein molecules form superior crystals in the microgravity of space than they do on Earth and a best-case scenario, in terms of return on investment, would be if a space-grown crystal were used to design a blockbuster pharmaceutical drug that worked by precisely targeting one of those proteins. Naturally NASA sees things differently. 'I think those who are naysayers haven't given us a chance — haven't given us enough time to show what we can do. We're just now turning the path to be able to go full force on our science. In the past we had to fit it in around assembly, we didn't have the facilities available, and the crew was always busy.'"

Comments

I hear they are coming out with a new flavor ..

[fkx]

I hear they are coming out with a new flavor .. of tang.

That has to be worth something.

Re:I hear they are coming out with a new flavor ..

[Anonymous Coward]

I hear they are coming out with a new flavor .. of tang.

My favorite is Poon.

Re:I hear they are coming out with a new flavor ..

[shugah]

Oh wait, I thought it said IIS.

Look at it this way

[schnikies79]

$100 billion for space-based research or $100 billion for Welfare and War.

Not really a touch decision.

Re:Look at it this way

[bhcompy]

Bingo

Re:Look at it this way

[treeves]

It's easy to see it's not a tough decision, since we have both!

Re:Look at it this way

[Darkness404]

How about 100 billion that could still be in the pocketbooks of millions?

There is a third choice, letting the people keep the money they earn.

Re:Look at it this way

[francium de neobie]

Divide it by the US's population, that's a bit more than $300 for each person... you can eat a nice meal with that but it's not a lot.

In that case, I'd choose science.

Re:Look at it this way

[cheater512]

If you dont think we should research, then please go back to using fire.
You dont get to moan and complain and benefit from it at the same time.

Re:Look at it this way

[Anonymous Coward]

So it's OK to waste 100 billion because it's not as bad as war? That's the best justification you can come up with to defend half a century of Space Nuttery? War at least gave us technology; re WWII, which in turn led to Space Nuttery.

Re:Look at it this way

[Darkness404]

It may not be "a lot" to you, but that equals out to be about $600 per couple, enough to cover a month's rent in many cases. Enough to buy a few months of groceries.

Re:Look at it this way

[jdgeorge]

My gut agrees, but my brain thinks things are more complex than that.
I'm not convinced it's wasteful to spend money stabilizing the economic group most likely to become dangerous criminals or vectors for disease.
War is wasteful by definition, but may be needed to provide social stability.
The value of the ISS is part PR for science, part PR for international collaboration, part potentially monetizable research, and part curiosity research.

Generally, I think the value of the ISS isn't reasonably measured in whether it "turns a profit". The value seems to me high enough to justify it's function, given the alternatives. And even other alternatives.

Re:Look at it this way

[Anonymous Coward]

It's an american type of question. Considering they're now starting to lose their lead in research, it's easy to see it's a dumb attitude.

Re:Look at it this way

[Goaway]

So, a month's rent, spent over more than ten years. Would that really have made a noticeable difference in your life?

Re:Look at it this way

[Darkness404]

There is a huge difference between research and wealth distribution.

There is nothing about research that makes me pay for a non-existent product. If GE wants to research a new refrigeration technology, it doesn't take money out of my paycheck, rather it can use surpluses given to it in a competitive (and the word competitive is important) market to go towards R&D. When I buy a GE fridge, I want a fridge that does what its supposed to do. What GE does with that money is up to them. However, with the government there is no say in it. There is no competitive market and there can not legally be one.

Research can be done ethically, not by stealing my money.

Re:Look at it this way

[Bigjeff5]

For $300 it had better be one hell of a nice meal.

But yeah.

Re:Look at it this way

[anyGould]

Divide it by the US's population, that's a bit more than $300 for each person... you can eat a nice meal with that but it's not a lot. In that case, I'd choose science.

Less, actually - TFA says the US only paid half (us lesser countries paid the rest). So, $150 per US citizen over 10 years. Or, $15 per person per year.

(As an aside, is there anywhere that shows the US budget on a per-person basis like this?)

Re:Look at it this way

[Darkness404]

Would a roommate who stole $2.50 from you every month out of your wallet bug you? Sure, its not much but you'd sure as hell rather him keep his hands off of your wallet.

Re:Look at it this way

[JorDan Clock]

Actually, $300 right now would make a huge difference in my life. I have a few debts from when I was unemployed and $300 would make the difference between always worrying about overdrafts and just being broke.

Re:Look at it this way

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh please. You and I both know it would be more like 1 billion in the pockets of 100, and not a penny would filter its way down to regular citizens.

Re:Look at it this way

[Fluffeh]

Jerry Espensen, is that you?

Re:Look at it this way

[MightyMartian]

You wouldn't be typing your message out and transmitting it if the US Government hadn't underwritten much of the key R&D that went into it, not to mention the infrastructure.

Or, to put it another way, you're an ignorant hypocrite.

Re:Look at it this way

[cheater512]

Are you using a wifi network right now or in the last 6 months?

If so bugger off. Australian taxes paid for the CSIRO to do their excellent work. Not even your own tax money.

Your moaning, yet you still benefit.

Re:Look at it this way

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps you should ask the unborn, the sick, the dying or those who sought shelter in some form of refuge, the need for which may have been obviated had the funds been spent on public health, technology for sustainable living, energy efficiency or research into modeling a sustainable (rather than predatory) economy.

Personally, I don't believe that the money spent trying to get off the only viable ecosystem man will know in the foreseeable future is well-spent. But then my job doesn't depend upon believing otherwise, so I'm freer than most to think that.

Re:Look at it this way

[Ecuador]

Actually it is not even like that. $100 billion is over an estimated 30 years for ISS, while just the war in Iraq costs over $100 billion per year, ON TOP of the $600+ billion per year for the base US army budget. The ISS and everything that has been spent in space exploration over the last 2-3 decades is peanuts compared to military spending.

Re:Look at it this way

[Anonymous Coward]

Multiply that one-month's rent by the number of pet projects each member of Congress says are only costing each person x dollars. Pretty soon you're really putting a strain on the average family's budget.

"I place economy among the first and important virtues, and public debt as the greatest of dangers. To preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our choice between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude. If we run into such debts, we must be taxed in our meat and drink, in our necessities and in our comforts, in our labors and in our amusements. If we can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of caring for them, they will be happy."
-Thomas Jefferson

Re:Look at it this way

[Darkness404]

But there wasn't anything special about governments that made it possible. It was simply that in the late 60s no one but the US government had enough computers and the like to make it be possible.

If the internet had not been born from the government, I have little doubt I'd still be typing this message on it, it simply would have been born from a corporation, perhaps with better features and the like.

Re:Look at it this way

[Nadaka]

Advanced research is and always has been funded by governments.

Right now, the average corporation is barely looking past next quarters returns. Anything that can't turn a profit this fiscal year is not done by average corporations.

Even long term investments expect a return within 5 to 10 years at the most. If it wont produce profit in that timeframe, it won't be done.

Government needs to finance theoretical and advanced research, otherwise new opportunities for applied research that private orgs are willing to invest in will rapidly dry up.

Re:Look at it this way

[the gnat]

There is nothing about research that makes me pay for a non-existent product.

Most basic research takes decades to turn into a marketable product. To take my favorite example, X-ray crystallography, it took 25 years from the first experiments with protein crystals to actually determine a structure, then another 25 years for the method to mature enough for pharmaceutical companies to use it. Simultaneously, it also took 25 years for a particular type of particle accelerator to be recognized as useful for crystallography. There is simply no profit to be had in a reasonable amount of time from this kind of fundamental groundwork. The particle accelerators in particular cost hundreds of millions of dollars to build. Only a handful of companies in the world have enough money to spend on blind research like this. Even some of those would probably be at risk of shareholder lawsuits if they were devoting hundreds of millions on research of questionable use.

I won't get into the issue of morality, because it's simply impossible to argue with someone who claims that "taxation is theft." Strictly from a free market standpoint, there is no financial incentive to invest in basic research without any hint of a future product. I personally think that the ISS has been a waste of time and money that has detracted from more promising space exploration projects, but none of this would happen if left to companies like, say, GE. (Private charities? I wish - only a handful of those can afford mega-projects, and they risk alienating major donors if something turns out to be a blind alley.)

Re:Look at it this way

[dgatwood]

But realistically, if $300 will make a huge difference in your life, chances are they only took about a buck fifty from you, and about $1800 from people with more income....

Re:Look at it this way

[Anonymous Coward]

Ask the military for a refund then. Their budget is excess of $5000 billion for same time period. That's a *only* $16.5k per every individual, or if you want, per individual taxpayer (about 130m in the US), you are looking at only $38,500 refund....

I'd rather spend money on R&D rather than destruction.

Re:Look at it this way

[man_of_mr_e]

You're suggesting that space didn't give us technology? Seriously?

Re:Look at it this way

[booyabazooka]

Yeah, when you have absolutely no qualms about being trillions of dollars in public debt, there really is no such thing as a dichotomy when it comes to spending.

Re:Look at it this way

[Anonymous Coward]

More than that, how much industry, and technology has spawned (see now private space industry) off of the constant political scrutiny that comes attached to all things NASA?

There's also the assumption that the ISS was a ROI endeavor from the beginning, or is it that Capitalism must be the tow line for any government expenditure. I sure ass hell don't remember hearing about ROI when the ISS was built, but I guess our economy wasn't suffering from a complete fleecing then as well. Oh, that's right. We were at the pinnacle of economic progress then.

If this doesn't paint a very clear picture of modern politics, nothing does. Rather small in terms of funding, but publicly, one of the largest targets of any that exist from the Government.

The bullshiat continues to pile up, and the media keeps feeding.

Re:Look at it this way

[rickb928]

If he brought me a few stock certificates for his Internet business that went public, I might not feel so bad.

More likely, if he tutored me in in Astrophysics for $2.50/week, I'm pretty sure I would not mind IF I passed the course. And if I needed it.

Yes, investing in the ISS is not so obvious a payback as the Chevy Volt. Or is it?

Re:Look at it this way

[Lucky75]

Irrelevant argument. I get nothing out of my roommate stealing $2.50 (actually only $0.89 a month over 30 years), whereas the space station helps us grow as a civilization leading not only to an unmeasurable amount of scientific advancement but also helps provide potential security to threats from space (such as meteors or aliens ;) ). The investment of 100 billion dollars is invaluable to us as a civilization. Certainly it helps me more than my roommate stealing money (unless he uses that money to directly or indirectly have a positive influence on my life in the future).

Re:Look at it this way

[SleazyRidr]

If you've got $300 to spend on a meal and you're in Houston. Check out Marks in Montrose. Dinner for 2 will set you back about $300, but it'll be fantastic. Hard to say that it's worth it, but it's the best meal I've ever had.

Re:Look at it this way

[definate]

Yet private companies implemented it, while the CSIRO was holding up the standard, so that it could get its patents everywhere, so that it will make more money than it invested. The CSIRO also funds itself in other ways.

Either way, regardless of whether he (the GP) benefits or not, he still has the right to complain about being forced to invest in this. Especially if he's quite poor.

Secondly, you don't know what the net benefit was, because you don't know what it would have been like without, nor can you quantify the costs of providing them a monopoly. Economics is a lot harder than just "look, there's some benefit".

Re:Look at it this way

[Anonymous Coward]

That $15/yr person assumes the US didn't go into debt to pay for it and instead paid it outright.

Re:Look at it this way

[currently_awake]

America put a man on the moon, Canada got universal healthcare. If you wonder who got the better deal: when was the last time you looked at a microchip and said "that Apollo program was money well spent."

Re:Look at it this way

[Anonymous Coward]

A Corporation would never have run the copper lines without the government making it profitable for them to do so.

First they would have had to built the interstate highway system, and they wouldn't have done that either.

Re:Look at it this way

[denzacar]

Sure it would. And all would be just the same. Except a little different.

Re:Look at it this way

[Lucky75]

Does that mean that you shouldn't pay taxes for firefighting either? Should we privatize firefighting instead? What happens if your neighbour doesn't pay for firefighters and his fire spreads over to your house? Sure they could put out your fire, but some damage would be done, and your fees would be higher.

In regards to the internet, perhaps, perhaps not. Without a doubt it surely would have been developed later, and since technological advancements grow exponentially, we might still be back in the days of Mosaic browsers. What influence would that have on the world at large? Perhaps certain things wouldn't have been developed, maybe we wouldn't have discovered cures for illnesses which would cost millions or billions of lives?

Perhaps the US government has made more money off of their research than they have lost? Certainly US companies have gained a lot because of the invention of the internet. More than 100 billion dollars worth anyway.

Re:Look at it this way

[Jeremy Erwin]

We'll compromise.

$100 billion for space
$100 billion for welfare and war
$100 billion for tax cuts
$300 billion in debt.

Re:Look at it this way

[icebike]

$100 billion for space-based research or $100 billion for Welfare and War.

Not really a touch decision.

Exactly so. And spending on either of the other would lose the first derivative, (the valuable result of the first transaction, prior to the money percolating down to the bag boy at the local grocery store).

Contrary to popular perception, rockets were not stuffed full of Dollars, Euros, and rubles, all to be scattered in space. All the money was spent on earth.

But beyond that, the value of the station was in the building of same. /me invokes Marshall McLuhan, The medium is the message).

This particular space station may not serve any real science purpose other than the engineering learning derived from its construction and assembly, and the world wide cooperation used to build in, staff it, and support it. That alone is worth the 100 billion.

Re:Look at it this way

[ghjm]

I'd keep the roommate who steals $2.50 out of my wallet every month for loopy dreams of space travel, and ditch the roommate who steals $100 out of my wallet every month to buy bullets and bombs with which he rains terror from the skies on some of our neighbors.

Re:Look at it this way

[Anonymous Coward]

$100 billion for space-based research or $100 billion for Welfare and War.

Not really a touch decision.

Only one of those three is constitutional and it is not the welfare or the space station.

Re:Look at it this way

[Platinum Dragon]

I'm not sure what to make of your equivalence between a minimum of support for those who don't possess property and resources, and the profligate waste and destruction of property and resources.

Re:Look at it this way

[Rockoon]

I said that exact thing the last time I fled from the United States to Canada to get my health care.

Re:Look at it this way

[MightyMartian]

The Internet is a spin-off. It was originally a Defense met (DARPA), then opened up to academia and then, through some twists and turns, by the late 1980s you had some individuals getting on board via facilities like UUCP (that's how I got my first mail and news feed around 1993).

It's hard to see how private industry in and of itself would have the where with all to develop it. I know there were other forms of internal networking, but DARPA had fairly specific needs for a routed packet switching network, and not in the sort of fixed networks that corporations were using.

But the fact, at the end of the day is that directly the US taxpayer funded the development of the Internet and its basic protocols, directly funded many of the early users (US military, defense contractors and academics) and directly and indirectly funded a helluva lot of the copper that ended up being used for ARPANET as it grew.

However much the US government ending up spending on ARPANET, I'll wager the US economy has made it back many times over, and indeed it literally has created whole new marketplaces. So that initial investment has paid off hugely.

That's the problem with Libertarians. They're like religious fanatics, and like all fanatics, they have tunnel vision.

Re:Look at it this way

[bhcompy]

Except each person is not a taxpayer. It should be divided by all taxpayers that eclipse that amount in taxes paid, since they're the ones funding it. According to the Tax Policy Center that number is around 150m, and 40-45% of those pay zero or negative income tax. So now you're left with 90m taxpayers who actually pay taxes. Now you're looking at $1100 per person. That is a much more significant number.

Now, do the same thing with the numbers spent on stimulus, just for giggles. Pretty ridiculous.

Re:Look at it this way

[Anonymous Coward]

On the bright side, it only took NASA $100 billion to secure low earth orbit, the solar system and the rest of the universe from the terrorists. The military can't even secure top secret documents.

Re:Look at it this way

[pacinpm]

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=usa+gdp+%2F+usa+population

Re:Look at it this way

[FooAtWFU]

it's simply impossible to argue with someone who claims that "taxation is theft."

Well, how about this then? Taxation is good for society if the tax money (plus any incidental losses) is spent more effectively than it would have been spent by the private sector. The private sector expects to earn about 4% real return in a year on their investments, on average (at least the upper echelon, who's paying most of the taxes anyway).

So the price tag is about $100 billion. Will the contributions the space station makes to Science and society at large be sufficient to provide a $4 billion/year real rate of return in perpetuity, give or take? Does it even come close? If not, it's a net loss to the economy and inhibits economic growth, and there's a bunch of people who'd like to talk to their politicians about that come Tuesday.

Maybe it is worth it. Heck if I know.

Re:Look at it this way

[hedwards]

It's an investment. One of the reasons why the post war period was so cushy was that we had managed to take in all those brilliant scientists that were fleeing the devastation and persecution of WWII and then later on from communist oppression in the USSR and Soviet block.

There was obviously a bit more to it, but we have to pay today for the research that will drive the economy tomorrow. That's the main reason why we're likely to see our asses handed to us in the future. We're cutting back on the research that's likely to drive future improvements in the standard of living.

Re:Look at it this way

[astar]

The nature of basic research is such that the return is hard to predict, and often hard to quantify after the fact. But the Chinese guy who is in charge of their lunar stuff and seems to expect to get approval to go for a manned landing soon, thinks apollo had a 14 to 1 payback. The reasons private companies do not go for basic research is multiple. On one hand, there is a risk of not getting anywhere. Then if it does have a payback, the individual firm may not benefit from it. (Horrors, the whole society may benefit and in a way that cannot be monertized.) And of course, a sure but distance benefit is meaniless because compound interest at market rates makes the present value of the return essentially zero. And of course, management is pretty much required to look only a quarter ahead anyway. Oh well. Since the cultural destruction from the Peloponesian war, a lot of people have had the idea that money has an intrinsic worth. So you get funny things like Office of Management and Budget making NASA R&D decisions.

Re:Look at it this way

[dondelelcaro]

So the price tag is about $100 billion. Will the contributions the space station makes to Science and society at large be sufficient to provide a $4 billion/year real rate of return in perpetuity, give or take? Does it even come close? If not, it's a net loss to the economy and inhibits economic growth, and there's a bunch of people who'd like to talk to their politicians about that come Tuesday.

It's a certainty that if we're ever to leave this spheroid, we need to build things like the ISS to learn how to live in microgravity environments with limited earth interaction for long periods of time. We won't know if the ISS paid off for a while, but at least it's a project which is forward looking and leads farther along the roads that we need to travel in the future.

While we certainly need to look for ROI in the projects that the government funds, the ROI for many things that the government needs to do is very difficult to measure. Consider how difficult it is to measure the relative importance and ROI of education versus infrastructure expendatures. We know for sure that they affect GDP, but it's hard to say how much, and which schools or projects do it better?

Re:Look at it this way

[Darkness404]

it's hard to see how private industry in and of itself would have the where with all to develop it. I know there were other forms of internal networking, but DARPA had fairly specific needs for a routed packet switching network, and not in the sort of fixed networks that corporations were using.

In the late 1960s, name me a company that had a lot of computers that needed to "talk" to one another via large expanses. There wasn't any, the only entity large enough to have that problem was the US government.

Fixed networks worked just fine for the problems that businesses faced and its incorrect to assume that when businesses started to expand and need networks like the US government needed back in the late 60s they wouldn't have created something very similar if not exactly like the ARPANET and eventually expand it to something almost exactly like the internet we have now.

There was nothing "magical" that governments had that created it, it just happened to be that the only entity large enough to have those problems at the time was the US government.

Re:Look at it this way

[prehistoricman5]

hmm...it seems that with every discussion of the funding of %GOVERNMENT_PROGRAM, somebody will compare it to the Iraq war. I wonder if this is just a passing fad or will it be here to stay...

Re:Look at it this way

[the gnat]

Will the contributions the space station makes to Science and society at large be sufficient to provide a $4 billion/year real rate of return in perpetuity, give or take? Does it even come close?

No, and I totally agree with the premise that the ISS is a waste of money. That said, I'm hesitant to endorse a system that only judges basic research expenditures based on the eventual return. Hubble is a terrific example of a project that cost a fair amount of money and probably won't pay back very much of it, but it did some spectacular science for many years. I do think there is some intrinsic value in the acquisition of new knowledge, and it's also very difficult to quantify payoffs for basic research that doesn't lead directly to a tangible product. The problem with the ISS is that the so-called science it supported wasn't even very interesting. (I'm familiar with the microgravity protein crystallization research, and it has done very little for the field. The underlying idea is sound, but the cost and practical obstacles are a deal-breaker.)

It's a complicated problem, and I'm honestly not sure what the best course is, but I think that in our current economic and political system, our basic research expenditures and the resulting economic gain are about as optimal as can be hoped for. (Semi-obvious disclaimer: yes, I'm a government scientist, so hardly disinterested. I won't be voting tomorrow, however.) I'd be much happier if the entire scientific enterprise - and space exploration too, for that matter - were completely in private, non-profit hands instead of having to rely on either the government or corporations to fund it. On the other hand, when we're spending more on two unwinnable wars each year than the ISS has cost in its entire lifetime, I'm not going to get my panties in a knot over the relatively small portion of my tax dollars going to NASA. Based on past experience, I suspect the poster to whom I was replying is very selective in his outrage.

Re:Look at it this way

[interkin3tic]

$100 billion for space-based research or $100 billion for Welfare and War. Not really a touch decision.

Which type of welfare? Corporate welfare? Welfare spent on people who are abusing the system? Or just all welfare?

While it's easy to find plenty of examples of where welfare was wasteful, there's plenty of good that comes out of it. Meanwhile, as the summary mentions, it's hard to find tangible benefits of the ISS. Welfare or the ISS may not be a tough decision if you think that all welfare is wasted money*, but it would be a tough decision for some of us.

(* we'd be wasting our time to discuss it if so)

Re:Look at it this way

[SETIGuy]

$100 billion for space-based research or $100 billion for Welfare and War.

Not really a touch decision.

Exactly. I think everyone should go here to play "find NASA".

Re:Look at it this way

[SETIGuy]

There is a third choice, letting the people keep the money they earn.

If you want to be over simplistic, sure. Nothing in economics is simple.

You are aware that tax cuts exert a downward pressure on wages. Supposed your boss hired you at $70k/yr gross and you paid $20k/yr in taxes. Now you get a $5000 per year tax cut, so you're now taking home $55k rather than $50k. But, of course, your boss knows you would do the job for $50k take home. We'll assume your boss is a nice guy, so he's not going to cut your pay immediately. But he is going to hire the new guy at about $65k/year gross. And when it comes time to tighten the company belt, well you're 7% more expensive than the new guy who's just as good as you, so you get to collect unemployment. (Damn socialism.)

To a significant extent the benefits of income tax cuts accrue to the employer rather than the employee. Every personal income tax cut is a cut in labor costs to large corporations. That's why Republicans like them.

Oh.... You thought they were trying to help you? Unless you're bankrolling campaign ads, I don't think they much care about your take home pay.

Re:Look at it this way

[Lanteran]

Something I found extremely disturbing when comparing proposed space travel budgets as opposed to government overspending: The (extremely bloated) nasa mars mission plan in the early 90's, which called for orbital fuel depots, a quadrupling of the size of the ISS, lunar bases and ship yards plus a whole host of other stuff cost 450B$, or a fraction of the combined recent government bailouts of big business. Mars direct, zubrin's plan, called for something like 55B$, including mars habitation units left behind and fuel refineries.

Re:Look at it this way

[SETIGuy]

Either way, regardless of whether he (the GP) benefits or not, he still has the right to complain about being forced to invest in this. Especially if he's quite poor.

Yes, and the way you complain is to vote. And if he's quite poor, he didn't pay any income taxes anyway (like about 50% of taxpayers last year). Maybe he wants to. Voting for Republicans will get those poor people into the club of paying taxpayers and all lot of rich people out of the club.

Re:Look at it this way

[anyGould]

That's GDP. For federal budget it would be this, but that doesn't split it down to per-person detail. (You spend $15/year on the space program, for instance.)

Re:Look at it this way

[SETIGuy]

How about 100 billion that could still be in the pocketbooks of millions?

It's not like that money disappeared. A lot of that went into the paychecks of American citizens who invested it or used it to buy things. Some of those paychecks went into paying income and payroll taxes. Some of it went to the shareholders of the corporations that did the work. In other words, a lot of it is in the pocketbooks of millions.

Re:Look at it this way

[Anonymous Coward]

Then look at what % each person pays of the total tax, a millionaire will have paid more than someone making min wage.

Re:Look at it this way

[agm]

I don't think that's a valid or relevant point. The point is that it is his money, earned by him. Only he should be able to decide what happens to it. If he wants to help fund a space industry, then it should be up to him to voluntarily give them how ever much of his money he wants to give them. Having the state forcibly take that money from him to use for such things is fundamentally wrong. Liberty is not possible while such socialism exists.

Re:Look at it this way

[agm]

I think we should do research - I don't think it should be funded by compulsory wealth confiscation.

Re:Look at it this way

[pgmrdlm]

And even though nobody on this site wants to hear this, that would be the highest earners who paid the most.

http://www.taxfoundation.org/blog/show/341.html

But I doubt anyone wants to REALLY see what the tax break down is, and WHO actually paid the most for the space station. That would completely ruin their arguments of how THEIR money was wasted.

I used that link because it references the IRS for its data, and the pdf that they used.

Re:Look at it this way

[emtilt]

You fail to consider that that same money could have been spent on *other* research. I work in astrophysics, so my field deals with where NASA spends its budget all the time, and I can tell you that there is almost no one in the field that wants it in the ISS.There are soooo many more interesting things NASA could do with that money. The ISS was mostly a political and PR move; science was almost secondary.

Re:Look at it this way

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, because no research ever came out of the military budget. [rolling of eyes]

Re:Look at it this way

[biryokumaru]

The cost of the space station is a pittance to what we already spend on welfare concerns, which is a pittance to what we spend on killing the unborn, sick and dying off on the other side of the world.

Beside that, it is beyond foolish to assume that this meager "viable ecosystem" we happen to live on will last forever. Right now we have only one basket, and nearly 7 billion eggs. Seems like a bad plan. The trifle we put into space travel is, in fact, much less than a sane person should consider worthwhile.

Re:Look at it this way

[Muros]

Advanced research is and always has been funded by governments.

Not quite true. We get a lot of valuable research funded by various governments, and this should continue, but a lot of groundbreaking work is done with little or no governmental support. As an example, the first nuclear accelerator, and the first experimental verification of e=mc^2, was in Trinity College, Dublin, on what was then considered an extravagant budget of about £5, using some parts from a bicycle repair shop.

Re:Look at it this way

[Swanktastic]

This is true, but it doesn't help us decide the question at hand, which is whether the ISS was a good use of funds. I'm always suspicious of any project when the best defense is "Hey, so and so wasted more money!"

Re:Look at it this way

[vux984]

Fixed networks worked just fine for the problems that businesses faced and its incorrect to assume that when businesses started to expand and need networks like the US government needed back in the late 60s they wouldn't have created something very similar if not exactly like the ARPANET and eventually expand it to something almost exactly like the internet we have now.

ROFLMAO.

Sorry I disagree. I disagree because its pretty miraculous we got the internet at all,

The internet would not exist if corporations created it.

At best we would have AOL.

Re:Look at it this way

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems that the GP is saying that even the Iraq war costs little compared to "routine" army spending.

Re:Look at it this way

[Anonymous Coward]

This may be true of the post-WWII world, but if you go back over the course of history, a lot of research was funded out of pocket through what was essentially hobbyist effort or via independent inventors. Average corporations are indeed interested in what is necessary for the short term. This is in part because it is difficult for non-experts to assess the potential of longer term investments. If a researcher truly believes that his or her research will likely pay off in a big way, the researcher should be willing to invest his or her own funds or be able to convince investors to fund said research. Even if the odds of individual projects are low, it is still viable - pharmaceutical research is proof of that. Where research is not fundable is where the costs outweigh any reasonable return for the foreseeable future. Those where the costs of the investigative tools must massively drop before any application of the research can be made. Instead such research is left unconducted until such time as the research tools are cheap enough to make it feasible. This is not such a terrible thing.

Get past the taxation as theft straw man and look at the economics. The objection really is that on an individual by individual basis, the opportunity cost due to taxation is considered higher than the value the individuals place on this research. If this assessment is incorrect, voluntary funding should be possible by persuasion. To convince the libertarian minded that this research is morally justified you merely need to show that, on average, the return on investment is better than the marginal improvement in quality of life that letting the individual keep the money would permit.

Re:Look at it this way

[lennier]

Fixed networks worked just fine for the problems that businesses faced and its incorrect to assume that when businesses started to expand and need networks like the US government needed back in the late 60s they wouldn't have created something very similar if not exactly like the ARPANET and eventually expand it to something almost exactly like the internet we have now.

Ahem. On the contrary, what business created by the mid 1990s was CompuServe, BIX, GEnie, The Source, The WELL, Prestel, and QuantumLink.

None of them talked to each other or even wanted to. Not only was email interoperability between online services not on the horizon, it was seen as a distinct commercial no-brainer NOT to. Just like Facebook doesn't want you to export appointments with Google, MSN to chat with Jabber, or World of Warcraft to share toons with Lord of the Rings Online.

It took the tidal wave of Web adoption to drive the old guard to grudgingly support SMTP mail and I remember the screams as they fought to escape having to do it.

When I had a CompuServe account in 1994, it was two numbers with a comma. You didn't even get to choose a 'screen name'.

THAT's what the free market would have built without the Internet.

Re:Look at it this way

[Teancum]

Arguably much of the reason why most corporations are abandoning basic and pure research is largely due to government interference and the deliberate encouragement of mergers and hostile take-overs within the public equity markets. Tax policies substantially discourage corporate research, and certainly discourage any sort of long term investing where any sort of pot of money set aside for future expenses is quickly going to be taxed to oblivion.

In other words, the reason why government has to be the source of basic research is because the government has deemed itself to be the arbiter of what ought to be basic science for purely political reasons so it can reward those who play nice and according to the rules at the expense of those who have a contrarian point of view. If you don't have the right political connections, your research project is screwed.

For myself, I would rather that the government get out of the game of advanced and basic research, but that would imply that they trust their citizens to be capable of making their own decisions with their own money and not have to spend a minor fortune hiring a bunch of lawyers and accountants to hide the money in creative ways (including into the bank accounts of politicians).

Companies like AT&T used to have incredible basic research facilities including scientists that were routinely published in major scientific journals and even won Nobel Prizes. Bell Labs was a top notch facility for basic research, and little of it had a 5-10 year ROI. Much of what was done there was certainly for much longer term development.

Other companies like IBM and even Microsoft have R&D groups that even now are doing some amazing things. In fact, I wish that Microsoft as a company paid more attention to what their far out researchers were coming up with rather than simply letting the ideas die as a cute intellectual curiosity. Unfortunately these are, as you've pointed out, the exceptions to the rule rather than something typical with corporations.

I'm just saying it doesn't have to be this way and trusting democratic (little-d as in Thomas Jefferson's concept of a limited government) principles that people if left to themselves will usually get things right is by far and away healthier for freedom and will ultimately do more to advance scientific ideas than trying to shoehorn everything through some sort of gatekeeper who doesn't always know what is best.

Re:Look at it this way

[Teancum]

There have been many other network topologies, including several that were started and encouraged by for-profit corporations and some that even received widespread adoption at least initially much more so than TCP/IP.

What difference happened is that TCP/IP was one of the few really good network protocols that wasn't encumbered by "intellectual property" concerns, as it was nearly the only networking protocol that was completely open. It was this open nature, on top of the use of this protocol by university researchers studying network topologies that propelled "the internet" into what we have today.

One interesting "network" that perhaps could have been modified and updated to do much of what is done today with "the internet" was FidoNet, something surprisingly still in use even today although clearly a shadow of what it used to be. This network philosophy shares much with peer-to-peer networks and certainly would have had to be heavily adapted and morphed to do much of what "the internet" does today, but I would argue that it very well might have been the medium for communications around the world had TCP/IP not taken over and proven to be a much more robust form of communications. I'm using this as another example of open standards and how that has helped spread an idea quickly.

There are other protocols "below" and "above" TCP/IP as well that played substantially into the development of "the internet", but this is really the key part that made the rest work so well, together with the various abstraction layers to the standard networking model.... arguably as significant of an invention as even TCP/IP itself.

Re:Look at it this way

[Anonymous Coward]

What are you? Some kind of neighbor lover? They're nothing but a bunch of degenerate communists, what with their boogie-woogie music and smoking that reefer all night.

Re:Look at it this way

[Teancum]

The problem with the ISS is that it was never intended to really be a scientific research station in the first place. Yes, that was one of the stated goals, but its primary purpose was to serve as a "vehicle" for transferring engineering knowledge and skills from in-orbit construction tasks from the Soviet Union (yes, the USSR, not the current Russian Republic) developed through the Almaz program and later MIR to NASA. It was also intended to be a way to subsidize Russian spacecraft developers after the collapse of the Soviet Union so they wouldn't run off and show countries like North Korea and Iran how to build ICBMs capable of reaching America.

In this regard, $100 billion might have even been a bargain, and it is certainly true that American spaceflight companies as well as NASA has been able to pick up some substantial knowledge from the construction of the ISS.

Now the question as to if continued funding of the ISS is worth the expense is something more fitting to the question and on that point I'm not entirely sure. There are some international commitments that need to be maintained, and as a common meeting place in space for all spaceflight capable nations it might still serve a strong and useful purpose. As to if $4 billion per year on a space-based United Nations directorate is something useful is again arguable for debate and to me also seems to fall short on better ways to spend that kind of money even if that was the ultimate goal.

One thing that I do think the ISS has been able to prove at least some basic scientific research from is as a prototype for space-based solar power satellites. Unfortunately virtually none of the major proponents of space solar power sats care to use any of the research notes used for the construction and operation of the ISS, and never reference the ISS in terms of electrical power generated. Keep in mind that the ISS has a power generation capability in the 100 kilowatt range, which is roughly comparable to a neighborhood or small municipal power plant. If you want to understand some of the limitations to large scale electrical power generation in space, it would seem like the ISS would be the first place you would want to consult for this and related problems. They've had to solve these problems because this is not a paper study but a physical piece of operating equipment.

One other area of research that I'm hugely disappointed in with regards to the ISS is the study of sexual reproduction. I am not talking about sex in space between astronauts, but to understand the effects of gestational development of mammals in a microgravity environment. There have been several different species that have gone into space including several mice of both genders, and it would seem like something of significant importance to know ahead of time what would happen if a mammal was to conceive in space and produce babies, and what kind of long term consequences would happen to a baby in that environment. With mice, you could even conduct a multi-generational study in a relatively short period of time. At the moment, we simply don't even know what would happen and it looks like it will be using human babies as test subject to find out. I'm sure that would make PETA real proud too.

Re:Look at it this way

[Teancum]

If the Chinese follow the Apollo model for going to the Moon, I wish them a pile of luck and would be grateful to see China waste their billions of U.S. dollars they've acquired over the years on such a fruitless endeavor. It might help bring Chinese industry up to western standards to make the attempt, but the technologies needed for that effort have already been invented and are currently in use. They might find some scraps and crumbs left over that the Apollo engineers ignored, but it won't be the same thing.

As for China going to the Moon "soon", that makes me laugh. They haven't even made a successful in-orbit rendezvous yet, much less be able to achieve much of what both Russia and America were able to accomplish in the 1960's. Going to the Moon is going to be an order of magnitude higher difficulty than even this sort of modest accomplishment. China has the benefit of being able to see what others have done before them, but I seriously don't see China doing anything new or innovative in terms of spaceflight any time soon. A repeat of previous accomplishments, perhaps, and if they plant the Chinese flag next to Neil Armstrong's flag at the Sea of Tranquility while doing what amounts to be a weekend camping trip on the surface of the Moon, perhaps there is something to what China is doing in space. The first serious accident where a Chinese astronaut dies in space is going to be so humiliating for the Chinese government that they are also going to be risk averse to a degree that would make NASA blush.

I predict that Americans will be back on the surface of the Moon before the Chinese, and they will be private citizens who will be there instead of government employees. The Russians might beat America to return there as well (possibly as a private commercial effort by a Russian firm), but I'm not expecting the Chinese to leap ahead that fast. China has been able to get into space, but it is something where political rhetoric isn't sufficient to hand wave over what are real physical challenges and the cruel reality of physics.

Re:Look at it this way

[Anonymous Coward]

... then opened up to academia and then, through some twists and turns, by the late 1980s you had some individuals getting on board via facilities like UUC ...

That's the problem with Libertarians. They're like religious fanatics, and like all fanatics, they have tunnel vision.

You're the ignorant fuckface. Libertarianism has little to do with business per se. It is about the individual's right to pursue their own ends whether for education, personal enrichment, survival, or just the hell of it. I know we would have the internet because it wasn't Uncle Sam splicing and stringing telephone wire to a modem back in the day. Nor did Uncle pay for the service, the PC, or pickup the other end of the phone call. We would have the internet regardless. What we ought not have, and only have due to the government, is onerous patents and copyrights and a thousand other sins. Fuck you, asshole. BTW, I didn't start my comment saying "that's the probelm with ignorant fuckfaces". I tried to keep you out of it.

Re:Look at it this way

[Anonymous Coward]

the roommate who steals $100 out of my wallet every month to buy bullets and bombs

Flak Jack, we used to call him.

Re:Look at it this way

[Teancum]

I'm curious....

Presuming that the ISS gets splashed and that a cheaper way of getting into space like Robert Bigelow's space stations were built that would cost mere millions to use (a few thousand dollars per day for rent for a long-term study that fits in a shoebox), would that change the mind of your fellow researchers?

It seems like for astrophysics in particular that the benefits of a manned laboratory are few, where even terrestrial observatories are becoming increasingly automated except for maintenance purposes. How many astronomers do you know that put their own eyes up to the eyepiece on the major telescopes any more, or are even capable of doing that?

About the only really significant space-based astrophysics program that would require astronauts (instead of being an occasional annoyance) would be to build a major observatory on the "far side" of the Moon, primarily as a radio telescope but other telescopes would be useful in that environment and it would be beneficial to scientific research in that regard. Unfortunately the ISS doesn't share those benefits that having 2km of rock acting as a shield from electromagnetic signals coming from the Earth. If you are going to dream, at least dream big. Almost everything else going up would seem to work better as a remote satellite, and certainly anything that could be thought up or realistically budgeted for space-based research in that field over the next couple of decades would want to avoid having astronauts as a general rule.

Not all space-based scientific endeavors are this way, but astrophysics seems particularly well suited to be without people. That is sort of the point of the ISS too, to do stuff that requires having people around to help keep things working.

Re:Look at it this way

[Teancum]

Then again it could be argued that the $100 billion spent on building the ISS was a form of social welfare spending... it just went to congressional districts where the military-industrial complex was already well established and helped keep a couple of generations of geeks employed.

The layoffs from the end of the Apollo era, from a certain perspective, were instrumental in getting the microcomputer revolution started as there were a whole bunch of unemployed electrical engineers who were forced to live at starvation wages for a bunch of start-up companies. Had Jobs and Wozniak been employed by NASA or a NASA contractor on an effort to go to Mars (something Von Braun was hoping as the next step after going to the Moon), would they have put together the Apple computers? How different would the electronics industry be like today in such an environment?

It is hard to say, but I do look at the "downsizing" from all of the NASA projects over the past few years as something of a good thing that is ultimately going to be beneficial. It will stink for those who are down in the trenches doing stuff, just as it was something awful for those engineers formerly employed by NASA and NASA contractors in the 1970's. This $100 billion also represents a whole bunch of people who have been able to learn some very unique skills that are now released to apply those skills to other areas of society. It is going to be interesting to see what the long term benefit of this may be for America and the world as a whole.

Spending $100 billion on building a few nuclear aircraft carriers isn't going to have nearly the same sort of impact upon society, much less spending $100 billion on food stamps. If you disagree, try to explain why.

Re:Look at it this way

[LongearedBat]

Unless, of course, some of that research money can be spent on making the armed services less expensive to run. (Such as reducing the use of "liquid fossil fuels". http://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/11/01/2033248/Saving-Lives-On-the-Battlefield-With-Green-Tech )

That said, I don't know of any military being financially savvy. They'd probably just spend the saved money on something else.

Re:Look at it this way

[VoidCrow]

So, what's your plan, and when are you going to implement it?

Re:Look at it this way

[VoidCrow]

I think you mean *not* using fire. And, I agree with you.

Re:Look at it this way

[agm]

My plan to fund a space station? I don't have a plan to fund a space station because I don't personally want one. Instead I donate time and money to organisations that help children. I do this *voluntarily*. No need to force me to.

Re:Look at it this way

[pablo_max]

Then apparently you don't know my neighbors!

Re:Look at it this way

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't disagree with your message, but all large companies already had networks running between their offices and universities would have certainly connected their networks without DARPA. The internet would have come anyway, maybe somewhat slower than it did now.

Re:Look at it this way

[Anonymous Coward]

Where would Canadian health care be without american medical research facilitated by the microchip. Do you think an MRI runs on vacuum tubes?

Re:Look at it this way

[Dusty101]

Mod parent up.

Re:Look at it this way

[Teancum]

NASA did not invent nor did the Apollo project even create the first practical integrated circuits. This said, one of the first major customers of the early chip production lines was NASA, and the Apollo Guidance Computer was one of the first devices that made extensive use of integrated circuits. At the time it was still a wash between discrete transistors or ICs, but the designers went with the chips instead.

Perhaps there was some benefit to the Apollo program in this regard, and it did give some early seed money to the chip fabricators to expand that has been useful since, but integrated circuits would have likely been developed without the Apollo program. Other "technologies" like Velcro and Teflon were also similarly developed well outside of the R&D research for the Apollo program, even though both were used extensively as they were well suited for space applications and have been tied to spaceflight.

There were technologies developed by NASA for the Apollo program that are unique, but they aren't the marquee kinds of technologies that often you hear about.

Re:Look at it this way

[AstroMatt]

Yes, but it's not *really* science. It's a public works project for engineers and provides a place for astronauts and the shuttle to visit - justifying their existence. If instead we'd spent the money on on dozens to hundreds of robotic missions to other planets, asteroids, and comets - now that would have been some good science. Matt Wood www.astro.fit.edu/wood

Re:Look at it this way

[SteveFoerster]

Does that mean that you shouldn't pay taxes for firefighting either? Should we privatize firefighting instead?

That's an interesting example, since firehouses were originally built not by governments, but by insurance companies that realized they were a good way to lower payouts.

In time government took them over, since that's its nature. But even now, as budgets get tight, fees are being instituted/raised for use of emergency services. That's partway to re-privatized right there.

Re:Look at it this way

[wikdwarlock]

How do you square your rant|views re: US spending on international medical aid with your eggs and basket analogy? Is it alright for some of those eggs in the dirty, poor countries "on the other side of the world" to die of dysentery, AIDS, unwanted childbirth, etc? I assume that your plan is to build up the US space capacity and then keep it all to yourself, saving only a small fraction of the ~300 million eggs on the "good" side of the globe, right?

Re:Look at it this way

[geekoid]

No it wouldn't. 300 dollars would just postpone where you are at...by a few weeks.

Re:Look at it this way

[geekoid]

If that's true, then probably a dollar came from you.

Re:Look at it this way

[Thud457]

Advanced research is and always has been funded by governments. Right now, the average corporation is barely looking past next quarters returns. Anything that can't turn a profit this fiscal year is not done by average corporations. Even long term investments expect a return within 5 to 10 years at the most. If it wont produce profit in that timeframe, it won't be done. Government needs to finance theoretical and advanced research, otherwise new opportunities for applied research that private orgs are willing to invest in will rapidly dry up

And (our) government is barely looking past the next election.

We should have NASA set some long term goals, make a budget, and stick to a plan. Let congress decide if their priority is to put money into the pool to make that happen.
Instead, our government has shamefully jerked them around in a different direction with each administration.

Our society needs a better way of handling long-term projects.

Re:Look at it this way

[biryokumaru]

Um, no. I just think it's unreasonable to cry foul at obviously beneficial ventures like space travel when the expense is trivial next to the senseless slaughter committed elsewhere. The entire idea of a $100 billion space station is a ridiculous straw man next to our obscene military spending.

Re:Look at it this way

[MightyMartian]

And why would they have connected them? As others have pointed out, the kinds of private networks we got prior to the "leaking" out of chunks of ARPANET via UUCP and SLIP was anything but interconnected.

We hadn't seen anything like it by the late 1980s, and it was only when protocols like SLIP became available allowing various institutions to extend the reach for employees, students and contractors that we even saw ARPANET opened up to blossom into the Internet.

But the larger point is this, that regardless of whether private industry would ultimately have done it or not, the fact is that the US Government's investment in a packet-switching network (quite necessary when considering the sorts of disruptions and threats that the Department of Defense was looking at when funding the research), has paid off far beyond the initial investment in expertise and equipment. Those that are foes of government investment in this kind of research refuse to admit that the Internet, like the interstate highway system, underwriting the copper the Telcos laid and such ultimately benefited the economy to a degree far beyond the costs.

Re:Look at it this way

[Anonymous Coward]

You might be typing away on some kind of network... but it certainly wouldn't be the internet!

Only paying subscribers of X-corporation could ever get to read your post and it would probably cost you 20c to write it.

Y-corp would have their own network which can't connect to X-corps MaxExtremeCommentWriterPro2000 TM website and poor old Z-corp subscribers would be stuck with reruns of X-corps comments from 5 years ago.

Re:Look at it this way

[jwhitener]

If the internet had not been born from the government, I have little doubt I'd still be typing this message on it, it simply would have been born from a corporation, perhaps with better features and the like.

I'm not so sure about that. It is pretty rare for a corporation to have very long term goals, shelling out lots of cash with no idea about their potential for ROI. Just think of how long arpanet was around before any average person started using it http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET , and even then, how much longer it took for people to think about making any profit from it.

It may have happened, but it would have been nothing like we know today. Can you imagine what the 'internet' would have been like if just microsoft built it. They controlled all the routers and switches, root dns servers, etc.. Can you honestly say that there would have been a chance that the internet would have turned out better, with nicer features, if a corporation was totally in charge of it?

Making things is just as good as using things

[cowscows]

I'm assuming that various technologies and engineering solutions were developed in order to build the station and get it assembled in orbit, so even if no science is done on the station from this day forward, much knowledge was undoubtedly gained already. Knowledge that would probably not have come about from non-space-station-related projects. 100 Billion dollars is a lot of money, but humanity has blown significantly larger sums of money on way less useful stuff on many occasions.

Re:Making things is just as good as using things

[Darkness404]

Um, you mean the technologies that were basically all figured out with MIR?

Re:Making things is just as good as using things

[petes_PoV]

The only piece of knowledge that I can think of which was a result of the ISS is knowing that the scuttle was a really bad idea. Personally I doubt if that knowledge was worth the price paid.

Re:Making things is just as good as using things

[currently_awake]

We're getting into diminishing returns from the station now. The first space station was a learning project, after that it's just incremental improvement. If half the money from the ISS had been spent on unmanned missions we'd have rovers on Jupiter's moons right now.

Re:Making things is just as good as using things

[Anonymous Coward]

Take a middle school student outside on a clear evening that will have the ISS fly over during the hour after sunset. Point out the bright light crossing the sky to him or her and explain what that bright moving light actually is.

I do this on a regular basis, and every time I have done it, the result has been a youngster that is motivated to learn math and science so he or she can have a possible future in space-related work.

Human beings need aspirations. We need something to lift our thoughts above the hum-drum of everyday life. In the lack of a space program that is moving beyond low earth orbit, the ISS is all that we have to serve that role. It is keeping the spark of the future alive.

Re:Making things is just as good as using things

[jmcharry]

I wonder how much more might have been gained from that amount of targeted R&D.

Re:Making things is just as good as using things

[jd]

Yes, but it was the Russians who has figured those out. And they had a horrible problem with mutant moss. (It formed a trades union and demanded equal rights for microbial organisms.)

Re:Making things is just as good as using things

[Poorcku]

100 billion = 1/7 of the economic rescue package for ze Banks...

Re:Making things is just as good as using things

[fermion]

I hear the Hobbit is going to cost at least $500 million to produce. Add the advertising and distribution costs and you have billion dollar film. Clearly this is an positive economic decision because even if the near term gross is only 1.25 billion, someone stands to make a lot of money.

But what does the Hobbit give to Humanity long term. What does the billion buy us. Do we get experience building a reliable structure in a hostile, novel environment? Do we get to do science in an environment not available on earth? Do we get new technology?

Ok, on such film we do get new technology. But when we do science, especially big science, it is not on the same basis as a production job. In science we throw money at problems, sometimes it shows results, sometimes it doesn't, but when it does the economy is transformed and the value cannot be calculated.

I mean what is the value of radio? What is the value of tv? What is the value of being able to travel quickly from the US to New Zealand? What is the value of being to transmit data quickly form US to New Zealand? ATT certainly is not profiting off The Hobbits digital cameras, does that mean the CCD was a waste of money?

Part of the problem with the space station is it took money from a relatively small pile of money that can be used for big science, which means that other project leaders are pissed that they cannot do their big science. But the bigger problem is that the common person sees the billion dollars and thinks that it is a lot of money. But do you think all the money that was spent on basic research leading up to the creation of the NAND chip hasn't been paid over many times in the transformative technology of the solid state drive? Do we seriously think that space is not going to transform and improve our society?

Re:Making things is just as good as using things

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure we would have even more options for erectile disfunction, depression, hair loss treatments, and weight control pills.

The market targets short term profit above all else.

Re:Making things is just as good as using things

[lennier]

Do we get experience building a reliable structure in a hostile, novel environment?

Hey now! Matamata isn't that hostile, at least now that the union have settled their contract.

Re:Making things is just as good as using things

[RealGrouchy]

Mir had a lot of issues of its own. It's not enough to say "okay, we won't do that next time," you have to demonstrate that it can be done; hence the ISS.

Mir was Space Station Beta. The ISS is a Release Candidate.

- RG>

Re:Making things is just as good as using things

[Anonymous Coward]

It's easy to target the D, but a bit harder to target the R. If you knew what you were Ring, it wouldn't be R: it would be D.

Re:Making things is just as good as using things

[GodfatherofSoul]

We had a space station back in the 70s before Mir.

Re:Making things is just as good as using things

[gumbi west]

Even if you did that with every child in America, you are still talking about over $1,000 per child. That's a lot of money.

Re:Making things is just as good as using things

[strangluv2]

But those Ruskies on MIR developed technology wayyyy beyond space station. They had a still and vodka. Let us guess what else happened, months in isolation, with a couple of lonely drunk cossacks in zero geee. Another Russian First.

Re:Making things is just as good as using things

[Anonymous Coward]

Um... It's 157 billion... and it may be the most expensive thing ever built.

Re:Making things is just as good as using things

[Anonymous Coward]

MIR was essentially just a handful of modules docked together, there was little actual construction done with robotics and spacewalks. It was a good experiment in the survivability of a space station though.

Re:Making things is just as good as using things

[DerekLyons]

Um, you mean the technologies that were basically all figured out with MIR?

Um, actually, no. MIR is a very different beast from ISS. Among other things, MIR wasn't modular, it was hacked together. Nor could any of MIR's major systems be replaced, while most of ISS's (at least on the US side) are in cabinets that can be swapped out.
 
Etc... etc...
 
MIR is a shining example of how *not* to design a space station.

Re:Making things is just as good as using things

[beckett]

maybe Apple could develop an iphone with a replaceable battery with that kind of dough!

Re:Making things is just as good as using things

[IrquiM]

No - the other ones

Re:Making things is just as good as using things

[severoon]

But what does the Hobbit give to Humanity long term. What does the billion buy us.

Basic economics--it buys us an easier life. Anytime you buy something, it's presumably because you're trading that money for something worth more than the cash itself (and by extension, something worth more than anything else you can do with that money in that moment).

The kind of simplistic view of expenditure that this statement promotes would lead down the path of doing away with anything that's not "essential" because it costs too much. And a bunch of people would be out of work, eveyone in the nonessential industries, and then they wouldn't be able to buy things to fill their spare time. It would be like a hundred years ago, when most people worked ridiculous hours and spent the few spare hours they had drinking a pail of warm beer on their porch because there was nothing else to do.

Re:Making things is just as good as using things

[captainpanic]

Sputnik only made a beep. That was therefore completely worthless. Or was it?

Re:Making things is just as good as using things

[liquiddark]

If by figured out you mean didn't work and nearly killed people constantly, sure. The ISS isn't a moldy, constantly broken, jury-rigged nightmare whose crew have to undergo massive rehabilitation when they return to earth. If you don't think those improvements are necessary for further exploration, well, please don't go into the space business.

Re:Making things is just as good as using things

[jgtg32a]

But wasn't that technically a low interest loan, and hasn't most of it already been paid back.

Re:Making things is just as good as using things

[ShanghaiBill]

... but humanity has blown significantly larger sums of money on way less useful stuff on many occasions.

Anytime you try to justify an expense by pointing out that we could have spent it on something even stupider, then you have already lost. This is just not a valid argument at all.

Re:Making things is just as good as using things

[airdweller]

Like what?

Re:Making things is just as good as using things

[RocketRabbit]

Yeah, and they need another one now.

Pandora's box, and all that. Once they get a bailout, they will need another soon. This will only stop once there is no money left for bailouts.

Somehow I think the next bailout will have easier terms for the banks. Pretty soon, there'll just be a banking tax and it will not be a loan but a gift.

Re:Making things is just as good as using things

[Anonymous Coward]

But what does the Hobbit give to Humanity long term.

The eventual destruction of the One Ring and the ultimate downfall of Sauron?

ISS expiration date?

[dazedNconfuzed]

"I think those who are naysayers haven't given us a chance -- haven't given us enough time to show what we can do."

Wasn't the ISS built with an expiration date approaching ... about now?

Re:ISS expiration date?

[Anonymous Coward]

Last I'd heard, that was being extended. Or at least that was being seriously considered. Sorry, no source.

Re:ISS expiration date?

[maxwell demon]

It also was planned to be finished much earlier, so that actual research would not have had to wait that long. Well, if they had known in advance about their Space Shuttle problems ...

Re:ISS expiration date?

[jd]

Not so much an expiration date, more a timeframe in which the risk of a catastrophic collision with something was acceptably low. I guess that since it has already collided with stuff, NASA figures that the event has happened and it's good for another decade.

Re:ISS expiration date?

[IrquiM]

Wasn't the US supposed to fly shuttle flights in 2003, 2004, 2005 etc?

Unique science is often worth it

[Anonymous Coward]

The potential value to science can be found where else?

If we are comparing similar projects the price tag becomes a useful thing. Unique projects are harder to judge. Is it worth more than a fraction of the gulf war(s)?
It's not worth more than the cost of cleaning up government but then I don't thing that's on the table.

What about the LHC

[huzur79]

Is the Large Hadron Collider valued at 9 Billion dollars worth it for smashing tiny particles up once in a while when its actually working? While the science on the ISS is qustionable, what isn't in question is the team work it took to build it and put it in orbit. Russa, Canada, Japan, US, Europe. I mean there is some value in being able to do it, and doing it together as a unified human race. Costly yes, worth it, I think so. After all the Iraq war was what 500 billion dollars?

Re:What about the LHC

[hedwards]

The LHC is a bit different. The ISS doesn't come with a small possibility of destroying the world.

Re:What about the LHC

[gumbi west]

No. The large hadron collider isn't worth it. As they point out when they claim that they will not destroy the Earth, we are already hit daily with billions of with particles that vastly exceed its production. The new high energy physics is astronomy. Making more satellites (such as Hubble and the Webb telescope) would have made much more sense.

Re:What about the LHC

[HuguesT]

There is an enormous amount of new physics expected from the LHC. The Higgs is only the beginning.

Observing random cosmic rays high-energy collisions is currently done using the atmosphere and large arrays of ground-based detectors, not satellites.

Re:What about the LHC

[gumbi west]

Higgs? The Tevetron has the energy to find it.

Second, you wrote, "Observing random cosmic rays high-energy collisions is currently done using the atmosphere and large arrays of ground-based detectors, not satellites." This is not true. Observations are made in space, on the ground, and deep underground.

But the Hubble and Webb telescopes can see things like black holes, star formation, very old objects... the list goes on. These are high energy experiments just sitting there, waiting to be cracked.

Important engineering lessons

[jpmorgan]

Scientific research is just gravy. The biggest benefit of the ISS is it teaches us how to operate indefinitely in space. All the little unexpected things that went wrong and had to be solved, was an important lesson learned. They all might seem trivial, but if we ever want to do more than hang around in low-earth orbit, these are all important lessons to learn. And they can only be learned through experience.

When you're half way to mars, a malfunctioning toilet would be a shitty way to die.

Re:Important engineering lessons

[jpmorgan]

Ugh, were important lessons learned.

Re:Important engineering lessons

[GrumblyStuff]

But it didn't raise our stock this quarter! Fire that man and cancel everything he did!

Re:Important engineering lessons

[PCM2]

When you're half way to mars, a malfunctioning toilet would be a shitty way to die.

I see what you did there.

Re:Important engineering lessons

[GreatAntibob]

Not to rain on this parade, but Russia figured most of these lessons out a long time ago with the Mir/Soyuz. Even now, the person who spent the longest continuous period in space did it on Mir, not the ISS. And even the US figured out a good number of these lessons with Spacelab. The ISS doesn't provide any really new experience in long term space survival, though it does provide some engineering challenges that Mir did not. And besides, neither the Mir nor ISS are close to operating indefinitely. Both needed regular resupply from Earth (the ISS, in particular). And for all the patriotic rhetoric in the US, the USSR had arguably the better and more successful space program and did it at lower cost per mission (and probably lower regard for human life). Didn't get to the moon, of course, but much more successful at space stations and getting to LEO.

Re:Important engineering lessons

[Bigjeff5]

Wow, the grammar self-police. ;)

Re:Important engineering lessons

[hweimer]

When you're half way to mars, a malfunctioning toilet would be a shitty way to die.

Oblig Race into Space quote: "FOOD AND WASTE PROBLEM, CONTAINMENT BACKFLOW, QUITE MESSY. MISSION IS SCRUBBED."

Re:Important engineering lessons

[Nyeerrmm]

While the ISS has only served to continue early work on extended duration spaceflight as far as it being a space station, two things stand out as new with the ISS:

1. Effective, large scale international cooperation.
2. Large scale, in-space construction.

In learning how to truly expand beyond Earth, these are important lessons. Add to this the lessons of everything that went wrong, particularly a dependence on a single launch vehicle for many components, and there is much to be gained from the experience. You might say that you have to do it wrong before you know how to do it right.

Whether it was worth the cost is another question -- but now that its done we should learn everything we can from it.

Re:Important engineering lessons

[rickb928]

Is it possible that at least a few of those who think the ISS is a waste are, right now, wishing that money was put into a mission to 'somewhere else'?

Do you think learning how the toilets actually work on the ISS would be useful to this mission to 'somewhere else'. Like, somewhere the Shuttle can't deliver spares?

Yes, the ISS is expensive. Going 'somewhere else' will dwarf this expense.

Next question.

Re:Important engineering lessons

[jpmorgan]

If the ISS (and Mir) were capable of operating without regular resupply (and spare parts) we wouldn't need to learn how to operate indefinitely in space. In other words, that's the whole point.

Re:Important engineering lessons

[jd]

Budget cuts.

Re:Important engineering lessons

[chebucto]

Another big side-benefit touted in the early days was the fact that the ISS kept a lot of experienced Russian scientists & engineers occupied on productive work during the chaotic years after the Soviet Union collapsed, reducing the chance of them selling their skills to countries like North Korea and Iran.

Of course you can't prove a negative and it will always be impossible to say whether the ISS prevented countries like those developing missiles more quickly or better than they did in reality. Even so, it's a real possibility that the ISS saved us from a world where Kim Jong-Il has a working ICBM.

Re:Important engineering lessons

[carvalhao]

I completely agree but I one further advantage: forcing us to REMEMBER the lessons learned by having an ongoing need for the skills involved. We learned with the Apolo program how easy it is to forget skills and lose schematics...

Re:Important engineering lessons

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you think learning how the toilets actually work on the ISS would be useful to this mission to 'somewhere else'.

It's a simple concept really. Since it appears to be eluding you I try to help with an analogy.

When you build a large ship you do something called a 'sea trial'. This is were you operate the ship near shore with engineering and construction expertise at hand to deal with unexpected problems. You *do not* shove the ship into the ocean and immediately dismantle the entire engineering/construction apparatus.

The fact that long experience with naval technology has led builders to believe that large ships require a period of near-shore testing does not mean the ship designs are not viable for blue water operation. Likewise, the knowledge gained from IIS operation with the benefit of shuttle resupply does not obviate the experience for use in interplanetary expeditions.

Please don't allow your opposition to ISS, or any other undertaking for that matter, to cause you to reject sound and reasonable arguments. The notion that because a mars mission won't have the benefit of low orbit resupply the lessons learned on ISS are irrelevant is profoundly stupid; worthy of, if not an apology, at least a cessation of further bullshit on your part.

The grandparent's assertion that the largest value of IIS is the knowledge gained of long term operation in space is, in my opinion, correct. The fact that NASA no longer has the wit or the courage to assert this, and instead tries to rely exclusively on the 'science' claim, is one good reason to de-fund it. The S in NASA isn't for science, and the A isn't for atmosphere. NASA has evolved into an aimless science clearing house which now no longer even has a space program and only a vestigial aeronautic one.

Re:Important engineering lessons

[rickb928]

Hey butthead. I'm in FAVOR of the ISS.

Really.

I'm well acquainted with sea trials. They're not just for big boats.

Re:Important engineering lessons

[Anonymous Coward]

Scientific research is just gravy. The biggest benefit of the ISS is it teaches us how to operate indefinitely in space. All the little unexpected things that went wrong and had to be solved, was an important lesson learned. They all might seem trivial, but if we ever want to do more than hang around in low-earth orbit, these are all important lessons to learn. And they can only be learned through experience.

When you're half way to mars, a malfunctioning toilet would be a shitty way to die.

The problem is those lessons learned are propriety information of Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and other big space contractors. Until they share those lessons with the rest of us such that we can go to the local university library and buy a text book that can teach engineering students those lessons, we have gained nothing--the corporate engineers will eventually retire and die off and the knowledge will be lost.

Re:Important engineering lessons

[Anonymous Coward]

> When you're half way to mars, a malfunctioning toilet would be a shitty way to die.

This is one of the few places where you really *are* allowed to say "literally" :)

Re:Important engineering lessons

[sincewhen]

And yet, have *we* actually _learned_ anything?

I would question if the we which creates a human mission to mars will not be the same we working on the ISS. And thus doubt if any useful knowledge would be passed on.

And I would also question if any learnings (I hate that non-word) from the ISS would be applicable. Take your example of the toilet. The requirements for a Mars mission may be different to that of the ISS in terms of space available, crew size (utilisation capacity), recycling capability etc etc etc. Which means it needs to be designed differently.

So given that it will be a different designer making a different product (with similar functionality), how useful will the prior experience actually be?

Re:Important engineering lessons

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not the ISS it's the ability to travel through space with the technology based on the ISS. We can now go to Mars and beyond because of the problems solved on this platform. It's a first step and though 100 Billion Dollars is a large sum it has created a culture that exploits the talents of those who can take us beyond the limits of our small home nested in the limitless space.

Re:Important engineering lessons

[Anonymous Coward]

the USSR had [...] probably lower regard for human life.

But you also need to consider the facts...

1. All Soyuz capsules made in last 30 years are safe at most points of the mission. They carry 2-3 persons. The last fatality in Soyuz was in 1971, about 40 years ago.
2. All Shuttles made in last 30 years are vulnerable at most points of the mission. They carry 7 persons. The last fatality in Shuttle was in 2003, about 8 years ago.

Soyuz was designed to survive failures because its constructors understood that perfect things rarely exist. And failures do occur from time to time, it's unavoidable.

Shuttle was designed to require perfection. It can take very little damage before things start unraveling. And when the damage was taken it completely failed.

Re:Important engineering lessons

[Jane Q. Public]

Huh? That's kind of like asking how important Ford was when it later became time to build a Cadillac.

Answer: it was absolutely essential. It could not have been done otherwise.

Re:Important engineering lessons

[DerekLyons]

Not to rain on this parade, but Russia figured most of these lessons out a long time ago with the Mir/Soyuz.

The problem is, Russia figured them out by figuring the most difficult and complex way that a space station shouldn't be built.
 
And what's the point of learning the lessons in V3.0 if you don't build a V4?
 

The ISS doesn't provide any really new experience in long term space survival, though it does provide some engineering challenges that Mir did not.

Actually, ISS is providing tons of new information on long term space survival - mostly because the Russian programs provided essentially none. The Soviets were notorious for the lack of... well, pretty much everything concerning actually documenting the lessons learned. Their medical studies were badly performed and incomplete, their are essentially no engineering reports, etc... etc... Most of what was 'learned' from MIR is actually a product of NASA, especially during the Shuttle/MIR program.

Re:Important engineering lessons

[PastaLover]

It'll be at least another half century before we seriously consider sending people to Mars (and it might be never, there is nothing out there that robots can't explore better). So why should we spending money on these lessons now? There's a lot of basic science where the dollars would be better spent, IMHO.

Re:Important engineering lessons

[master_p]

The biggest benefit of the ISS is it teaches us how to operate indefinitely in space.

Not interstellar space. We have to learn a lot more things for that.

Re:Important engineering lessons

[ImprovOmega]

By 2030 the first permanent colonies begin to form on the moon. Life is harsh, and constant resupply is necessary in the early years. Advances in rocket technology leapfrog each other in the ensuing race to exploit the moons resources. By 2050 a consortium of companies begins construction of the first of many "lunar resorts". Regular rocket service between earth and the lunar spaceport become a reality by 2055. By 2080 many people are making weekend trips to the moon and back to relax on their days off. The rich often have vacation homes built on the lunar surface to "get away from it all". Somewhere along the way, along about 2083, a gardener on a riding lawn mower shakes his head at a wide eyed tourist jumping around in his rich friends' backyard as the tourist experiences lunar gravity for the first time in his life.

Re:Important engineering lessons

[iMadeGhostzilla]

Best post on this topic. There's things that will have to be done in space -- command centers? special labs? huge solar panel systems? -- with more and more people servicing orbital stations, and this is the only way to learn. It's more than rocket science, it's understanding how people think and behave in those unnatural circumstances.

Remember the astronaut who "dropped" her toolbag and let it float away? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_F2Ixn8loc
Just that incident may get them to make such bags easier to attach to the spacesuit, and that can make a big difference for someone some day.

Re:Important engineering lessons

[PastaLover]

Ah, so what you're saying is, private industry will take care of it. Sounds good.

Fund Me!

[Anonymous Coward]

Fund me instead!

Ebay

[sycodon]

Put it on eBay and find out what it's worth,

Re:Ebay

[fkx]

I don't see why we can't have auctions right here on slashdot .. if facebook can do it ..

Re:Ebay

[maxwell demon]

And the item goes to ... Anonymous Coward! :-)

Re:Ebay

[gmhowell]

I thought one purchased (or rented) tang on craigslist, not eBay?

Re:Ebay

[mnmn]

People in the ISS staring back at Earth while a huge asteroid wipes off the planet killing off all mammals would probably say "yup... that's some nice ROI.. good investing".

Re:Ebay

[93 Escort Wagon]

People in the ISS staring back at Earth while a huge asteroid wipes off the planet killing off all mammals would probably say "yup... that's some nice ROI.. good investing".

They'd be able to say that for a few weeks or months, anyway...

Re:Ebay

[muckracer]

> > People in the ISS staring back at Earth while a huge asteroid wipes off the planet killing off all mammals
> > would probably say "yup... that's some nice ROI.. good investing".

> They'd be able to say that for a few weeks or months, anyway...

I'd be so pissed, if the other astronauts on board were only guys! :-)

Re:Ebay

[TheRaven64]

Yup, if that happened then the human race would survive at least a week longer than without the ISS.

Re:Ebay

[elrous0]

Yeah--until they realized that, without regular support from Earth, humans can't survive anywhere else for very long.

Re:Ebay

[Anonymous Coward]

not really, they would go hungry pretty soon.

Re:Ebay

[danlip]

Not even that long - an impact that size would eject a hell of a lot of debris into orbit.

Re:Ebay

[dradler]

People in the ISS staring back at Earth while a huge asteroid wipes off the planet killing off all mammals would probably say "yup... that's some nice ROI.. good investing".

And then they realize that they have all men up there on the current rotation ...

Re:Ebay

[StikyPad]

Until they got hungry.

we need bigger space stations

[BlackSnake112]

So we can build more things in space. What would happen if we were to build a foundry in space? Could we build new metals? Would they be stronger? Would they be applicable to more uses? What about making CPUs in space? Could we build a system that would align the materials better in space?

Yes I am dreaming here. If we could safely work with liquid materials (metals, silicon, etc.) in space, we might be able to build better things.

Re:we need bigger space stations

[fpgaprogrammer]

contrary to the AC response, there are a lot of metal alloys that cannot be made on earth because gravity causes the mixture of liquid metals to form separate layers (like mixing oil and water) especially during the cooling process for making the allow. another possibility is the creation of metallic foams which cannot be made the same way on earth because gravity separates the liquid metal from the air bubbles.

Re:we need bigger space stations

[currently_awake]

A chip fab would be the best bet. In zero grav you can deposit the metal layers slower therefore more accurately. You can grow crystals easier, maybe better. Put a maglev launcher on the moon for silicon and you can build solar panels for basically nothing. I'd be willing to pay more in taxes if it got me beamed solar power to replace OPEC oil.

Re:we need bigger space stations

[Darkman, Walkin Dude]

Nothing, it's not possible. The gravity and inertia on Earth allow us to do things like pour liquids from one vessel to another.

Meh, just keep everything under a little pressure.

You'd have to reinvent every single process to do it in space. Why?

Because space has a lot more stuff than earth. True, you'd need to do it just for space based markets first, but before too long economies of scale would kick in and you could just drop your manufactured products straight down to earth.

Space is a dead end. Face it.

The more engineers I meet, the less I respect the breed tbh. Science, motherfucker, it does stuff it couldn't do yesterday. Economics, you do not understand it.

Re:we need bigger space stations

[jd]

I don't know about making CPUs in space, but certainly if you made the silicon crystals in space you would have a major advantage. The microgravity would mean fewer flaws. The yield, as a percent, is very high as it is, but it's still too low to go to wafer-scale infrastructure. (Wafer-scale IS used, but not at the kinds of densities used in domestic electronics. A wafer-scale RAM chip at current densities would give you between 16-32 terabytes and require none of the support electronics required on a typical RAM card, for example. A wafer-scale CPU would turn Intel's dream of an 80-core CPU into a 512-core CPU. And so on.)

The cost would obviously be much higher, done this way. You'd be looking at 200x current prices per gigabyte. However, that would not be a major problem in the supercomputer field, and I'm not all that sure it'd be a problem in the extreme gamer market.

There are masses of molecules that cannot survive on Earth, so you're not even limited to metals. Anything with a crystalline structure would benefit automatically from the lack of gravity. Anything intended for space that can be damaged by launch (for example, a space telescope's mirror can be deformed by the acceleration forces) would benefit not only from the environment being easier, but also benefit from the lack of stress placed on it to get it into space.

Re:we need bigger space stations

[khallow]

contrary to the AC response, there are a lot of metal alloys that cannot be made on earth because gravity causes the mixture of liquid metals to form separate layers

Unless you mix them and/or pour them from a sufficient height (to get a few seconds of microgravity, enough for quick hardening alloys). It's tiresome to hear of all the things you can do only in microgravity, only to find that you can them good enough on Earth with some cleverness. What's the point of growing large perfect crystals of protein in space, when you can grow large enough protein crystals on Earth? Or specialized alloys that can be trumped by a cheaper alternative on Earth? It's not enough to do something unique in space, it's got to be valuable enough to beat cheap.

I'm not a metallurgist or pharmaceuticals research, and I sure don't have a lock on what technologies are going to work in space. But a lot of this is hard even by the standards of today's science. You not just trying to find novel things never discovered before, here, you're also trying to find really valuable things that require some aspect of space such as the microgravity environment or the ready access to vacuum. To be blunt, that effort has been going on for decades by a lot of smart people with a lot of money and they still haven't found the magic discovery that will justify space industry.

Re:we need bigger space stations

[Bman21212]

Why bitching about engineers? Where did he talk about being one?

Re:we need bigger space stations

[pablo_max]

Sure we can. We just wont however. At least not in our lifetime and I seriously doubt within the life of our children. I think there is a tendency during hard times for people to not invest in the future. Better to look out for number one at any cost.
Hell, we could have done it 30 years ago. That's the trouble with capitalism, one must be able to provide a profitable results straight away. There is no room for the long game.

Re:we need bigger space stations

[sFurbo]

on Earth with some cleverness. What's the point of growing large perfect crystals of protein in space, when you can grow large enough protein crystals on Earth?

But you can't, not necessarily, anyway. Growing protein crystals is more art than science, and is not always possible. It depends very much on the protein, but after all, they were not meant to crystallise. It really is the perfect example, as you only need to grow one crystal of every protein, then you can take it down to earth and do X-ray crystallography.

I don't know if that is enough to justify the price tag, though. It is quite a lot of money to pay for a few crystals.

Re:we need bigger space stations

[DigitalSorceress]

You're right there's no possible value in researching space... I guess maybe we should spend that 100 Billion on more bombs and bullets to kill people in Iraq and Afghanistan. /GAH I feel dirty even saying it sarcastically

There's a lot of direct benefit to research done on the space station, but as others have said, dealing with the engineering challenges of building a space station has led to other knock-on benefits and inventions. There's more going on here than just "will it blend" experiments.

Things like Teflon, GPS, satellites, lithium batteries, various new thermal materials for clothing, CAD/CAMM software, and a zillion other things came out of the space program - either directly or as tools/techniques/materials just created along the way to solve problems/address engineering needs.

Plus, think of the benefit to science that the various space telescopes have had.

I know I'm talking about stuff invented pre-ISS, but that's because it's only with a fair degree of hindsight that we even realize that some little thing someone did to solve a given space related problem turns out to be immensely valuable / commercially viable down the road.

In summary: It's sometimes the journey rather than the destination that's important.

Re:we need bigger space stations

[khallow]

But you can't, not necessarily, anyway. Growing protein crystals is more art than science, and is not always possible. It depends very much on the protein, but after all, they were not meant to crystallise. It really is the perfect example, as you only need to grow one crystal of every protein, then you can take it down to earth and do X-ray crystallography.

Again, what makes a somewhat better crystal in space worth the effort? My bet is that whatever you get on Earth, be it a crystal, quasi-crystal, glass, or some other sort of amorphous blob, is probably good enough compared to the additional cost and effort of doing it in space (at the least, a six month wait). If they can't do X-ray crystallography on a structure with some additional noise in it, then there's something wrong with their approach.

To be honest, it's not clear to me why they aren't imaging individual protein molecules directly. It can't be that hard to make a small hard X-Ray synchrotron and appropriate imaging hardware. Then you can skip the protein crystallization step altogether. You also get the advantage of being able to view the protein acting dynamically.

Re:we need bigger space stations

[liquiddark]

the magic discovery that will justify space industry.

You mean everything outside of the atmosphere?

Re:we need bigger space stations

[khallow]

Things like Teflon, GPS, satellites, lithium batteries, various new thermal materials for clothing, CAD/CAMM software, and a zillion other things came out of the space program - either directly or as tools/techniques/materials just created along the way to solve problems/address engineering needs.

GPS is the only thing on your list there that wouldn't have been developed anyway. And it wasn't developed by NASA, but by the US military.

Re:we need bigger space stations

[Teancum]

Assuming about $10k per pound (a rough guesstimate for what "low cost" launches to LEO would cost), how much would that make each chip? Could the crystals be grown in space and then brought to the Earth for subsequent processing, or would there be an advantage to building an actual chip fab itself in space?

I'm presuming that costs of building a mining facility on the Moon or an asteroid would be cost prohibitive conjecture too, but if substantial quantities of some minerals could be extracted from those places and sent to a manufacturing facility instead of lifting those minerals from the Earth, it seems like there would be additional potential cost savings that could develop here as well..

This certainly is a business proposition for commercialization of space I haven't heard about and sounds like something of value, although I've heard of other crystal growth in microgravity conditions that could be beneficial. I wonder what "gemstone" production like creating artificial diamonds, sapphires, or rubies would be like in space? A pure diamond that is the size of your fist would certainly have some significant intrinsic value and may have some applications that wouldn't be possible with the current sources coming from DeBeers.

Re:we need bigger space stations

[Anonymous Coward]

"I'm not a metallurgist or pharmaceuticals research, and I sure don't have a lock on what technologies are going to work in space. But a lot of this is hard even by the standards of today's science. "

"I know absolutely nothing about what I'm talking about, but just trust me on this one."

FTFY

Re:we need bigger space stations

[khallow]

"I know absolutely nothing about what I'm talking about, but just trust me on this one."

Er, no. Doesn't work like that. I've read a number of summaries of ISS science (including lists of every little scientific thing done back to the beginning of ISS construction). There well could be some big win in there somewhere. What I do know is that they haven't found anything close to a big win yet and that the problem is unusually hard and expensive.

Re:we need bigger space stations

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not a metallurgist or pharmaceuticals research,

That much is glaringly obvious from your post. You talk about simulating micro-gravity, emphasis on simulating and not replicating. Completely different engineering challenges, and to be frank it's easier and cheaper to build an orbital lab than to use simulated microgravity in any type of Earth-based production facility.

To be blunt, that effort has been going on for decades by a lot of smart people with a lot of money and they still haven't found the magic discovery that will justify space industry.

Of course not. The 'magic discovery' is nothing more than the ability to locate, reach, and colonize other worlds in a reasonable time frame. Ultimately it would include the ability to change or even create planets for human habitation.
But it's going to take a lot of work to get to that point, we're not going to wake up and see on the news "Researchers at ISS stumble across secrets to FTL space travel, Immortality, Terraforming, and the Genesis Device. Film at 11."

Re:we need bigger space stations

[the gnat]

It really is the perfect example, as you only need to grow one crystal of every protein, then you can take it down to earth and do X-ray crystallography.

Well, there are at least two problems with this:

1. Protein crystals are sensitive to vibration (and many other external factors); some don't age well either.
2. We usually freeze protein crystals in liquid nitrogen to protect against radiation damage. Unfortunately, this also tends to decrease crystal quality a great deal, which we accept because we can get away with blasting them with synchrotron X-rays.

It also turns out that many of the advantages of microgravity can often be simulated in other ways to obtain equally good crystals. I'm fuzzy on the details, but I think using an agarose matrix to slow diffusion is one method. And there are many, many other tricks to improve crystallization that are vastly less expensive or troublesome than shipping the protein into space. In fact, because the resources up there are so limited, you need to have already identified a set of conditions that you know will get at least marginal crystals, before doing the microgravity experiment.

Re:we need bigger space stations

[the gnat]

To be honest, it's not clear to me why they aren't imaging individual protein molecules directly. It can't be that hard to make a small hard X-Ray synchrotron and appropriate imaging hardware.

You wouldn't use a synchrotron for this; you need something called a "free electron laser". This science is in its infancy, and single-molecule imaging with FELs is still only theoretically possible. And it still isn't clear whether the resolution limit will be as good as we can get with crystallography. It's a very promising avenue of research, but it will probably take another decade for it to become truly practical, and decades longer (if ever) for it to supplant crystallography. (And FELs are neither small nor cheap - not that a state-of-the-art synchrotron is either, for that matter.)

Re:we need bigger space stations

[jd]

There would be no real benefit in chip fab in space. Once the crystals had formed, they could be brought to Earth with no significant risk of disrupting the wafer - the lattice is more than strong enough.

The costs of building a mining facility on the moon would likely to be cost-prohibitive (the moon is mostly silicates and other very light elements and the gravity would be problematic).

Certain metals on Earth's surface only exist because they existed in asteroids and meteorites - the natural purely terrestrial deposits are all way too deep underground. (Uranium is likely one of those.)

I could see mining asteroids for heavier metals being viable after a while. Not at present, but well within our lifetimes. There's about 20 years of uranium left. No new deposits will be found on Earth - ore from the formation of the planet will all be well below the mantle and is likely largely in the core. None of that is reachable.

Within 50-100 years, I would imagine asteroid mining to be not only viable but actually cheaper for certain elements.

Re:we need bigger space stations

[khallow]

That much is glaringly obvious from your post. You talk about simulating micro-gravity, emphasis on simulating and not replicating. Completely different engineering challenges, and to be frank it's easier and cheaper to build an orbital lab than to use simulated microgravity in any type of Earth-based production facility.

You can get a few seconds of decent zero gravity on Earth just by dropping things in a near vacuum a few tens of meters. It's not microgravity, but who needs that for a few seconds?

Of course not. The 'magic discovery' is nothing more than the ability to locate, reach, and colonize other worlds in a reasonable time frame. Ultimately it would include the ability to change or even create planets for human habitation.

Uh huh, and how does microgravity work help you colonize something that's in a gravity well? What is the space industry angle here?

But it's going to take a lot of work to get to that point, we're not going to wake up and see on the news "Researchers at ISS stumble across secrets to FTL space travel, Immortality, Terraforming, and the Genesis Device. Film at 11."

My take is we won't see significant space science or industry applications out of the ISS over its lifetime, that hasn't already been done (namely the orbital assembly demonstration).

Re:we need bigger space stations

[khallow]

You wouldn't use a synchrotron for this; you need something called a "free electron laser".

The "free electron laser" happens to be a synchrotron radiation source.

Re:we need bigger space stations

[anguirus.x]

They do use synchrotron source x-rays to image protein molecules. Aside from signal-to-noise issues which are dramatically increased on Earth you could not realize the diffraction that produces the image we interpret. A single molecule does not have a regularly repeating structure like a milieu of proteins in a crystal do. No repeating crystal lattice, no diffraction. Mathematically this is understood as interference effects absolutely mutilating your image. Have you ever tried to effect a Fourier Transform on the data 1,0? Your spectrum is just a flat line with a unit intensity spike at zero representing the average of your data. On a crystallographic photo plate you would just see a small black dot in the center fading out radially. The dot's size will be related to your overall signal-to-noise ratio.

Re:we need bigger space stations

[anguirus.x]

2. We usually freeze protein crystals in liquid nitrogen to protect against radiation damage. Unfortunately, this also tends to decrease crystal quality a great deal, which we accept because we can get away with blasting them with synchrotron X-rays.

I think for real problem cases, performing the crystallization in space for a large number at once, could be cost effective.

Also, it's not that freezing proteins necessarily creates worse crystals. Flash freezing proteins and forcing them to remain contorted away from their global minima by ionic forces without the heat to explore their energy landscape creates worse crystal images.

The trick is to allow the proteins the barest minimum of movement. They naturally exist in a state well described by glass-liquid dynamics. I know UCSD and other universities in the area are beginning some research into interesting new phases that will allow synchrotron source studies of more mobile cyrstal structures. I may be pulling this out of my ass, but if they can create zone boundaries along one or two axes they should be able to get good images from the remaining dimension(s). Perhaps a secondary magnetic effect could be introduced to create a chaotic flow in which zone boundaries arose. I really have no clue, but it's fun to think about, isn't it?

Salient quote

[dazedNconfuzed]

Strange how much human accomplishment and progress comes from contemplation of the irrelevant. - Scott Kim

Re:Salient quote

[Anonymous Coward]

Contemplation is free. Research in space clearly isn't.

Re:Salient quote

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems like humans would be wanting to try some of the ideas NASA came up with in the 1960s by now:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_%28nuclear_propulsion%29

Maybe it's just me, but between this administration that likes to spend 3/4 of a trillion on a failed stimulus while cutting everything of value, and a congress that wants to turn this nation into a flea circus, it all makes me yearn for an America that knows how to take chances again.

Re:Salient quote

[Anonymous Coward]

Research helps even if we currently lack practical application for it. A good example is the laser invented in 1960. Townes has spoken about the development extensively.

The first practical application would take several years from the announcement of the technology. Today, that research formed the basis for our modern communication and entertainment needs. They are used in medicine and manufacturing for a variety of uses. It took decades to get from the research phase to the small, affordable, commonplace use of lasers today. Furthermore, the initial development seemed to be a novelty more than something of practical value.

It's fun!

[Bromskloss]

I thought people fly in rockets and visit space stations and the moon because it's cool. I don't care if no scientific progress comes out of it - I like space travel because it's awesome. Similarily, I'm not attracted to science, mathematics or technology for their practical uses, but because it's fun understanding how the world works, being able to calculate things and think up and admire cool (preferably huge) machines.

Re:It's fun!

[robotkid]

I thought people fly in rockets and visit space stations and the moon because it's cool. I don't care if no scientific progress comes out of it - I like space travel because it's awesome. Similarily, I'm not attracted to science, mathematics or technology for their practical uses, but because it's fun understanding how the world works, being able to calculate things and think up and admire cool (preferably huge) machines.

Maybe if you work for spaceshipone, you can legitimately say that. The US industrial-military complex, however, made rockets and went to the moon because we had to beat those darn Russkies . Once that motivation (and the associated infinite budgets went away), NASA was left holding the bag trying to figure out what types of science could be done with things that were designed in an era of infinite budgets and intimate military support that no-longer existed.

How many scientists did we actually put on the moon? Exactly one, and he was the last one to set foot on it.

Next exhibit - the space shuttle. The amount of useful things it could do were severely gimped because the Air Force wanted a low-orbit heavy lifter, whereas most science payloads were smaller and would have benefited from being in higher orbits (so they can point AWAY from the Earth instead of towards it). And once the air-force decided they were better off using non-manned rockets to deploy their spy satellites, NASA was left high and dry with something they could barely afford to maintain, never afford to replace, but also didn't actually do the things they needed it to do.

As a big supporter of space science and someone whose father has worked at NASA his entire career, I will still maintain that any possibly useful scientific justification for the ISS was gimped from day one once the cold war ended and budgets became ever increasingly small. Early drafts for the station had on-board observatories (imagine how much easier AND cheaper that would have been to fix than doing that mission-impossible stunt to fix the Hubble) as well as an array of labs to test everything from solar propulsion to human physiology in zero G. What we actually ended up with is this giant white elephant that does nothing in particular well, that we are constantly begging other countries to help us run, and the toilets don't even work reliably. And all of that money could have been spent on real space science, like a couple thousand mars rovers or dozens of Hubbles or what have you.

So for me, it's not a question of if we should fund space science even if it's expensive and there's no immediate return. We fund art too, and I would argue it makes society richer for similar reasons. But we can't pretend that cost doesn't matter in an era of forever shrinking federal science budgets, not to mention the gov't has many more pressing problems it needs to worry about. We need science agencies that can be small and nimble, retain the best talent in the field and reliably get the most bang for the scientific buck. Instead we have these bloated, hyper-political agencies that lost their best talent to industry years ago, have 12 layers of middle management fighting tooth and nail about what logo to use in the next press release defending giant, gimpy white elephant projects of limited scientific usefulness that was pitched to congress as a job creation strategy for someone's homestate. This was never a winning formula.

Re:It's fun!

[DerekLyons]

Next exhibit - the space shuttle. The amount of useful things it could do were severely gimped because the Air Force wanted a low-orbit heavy lifter

Wrong. The Shuttle was already growing into a low orbit heavy lifter because Congress didn't fund a separate heavy lifter in order to provide destinations for the Shuttle.
 

whereas most science payloads were smaller and would have benefited from being in higher orbits (so they can point AWAY from the Earth instead of towards it)

ROTFLMAO. You can point away from Earth from *any* altitude - go out in the street and look up, and you're looking away from Earth *right at ground level*.

Re:It's fun!

[robotkid]

ROTFLMAO. You can point away from Earth from *any* altitude - go out in the street and look up, and you're looking away from Earth *right at ground level*.

If you've ever studied astronomy, then you would know that faint signals need to be acquired for as long as possible in order to get good signal to noise. Being in a low Earth orbit where you circle the earth every 90 minutes (and hence nighttime is only 45 minutes) is a logistical tracking and signal/noise nightmare for something that is meant to look at very faint signals from very far away. Geostationary orbit would let you look at the same object all night long, and if you went to a Lagrange point you would never have to worry about the Earth blocking your view.

It is great, however, if you want to keep track of what is changing on the ground every hour and half.

Re:It's fun!

[DerekLyons]

If you've ever studied astronomy, then you would know that faint signals need to be acquired for as long as possible in order to get good signal to noise.

I have studied astronomy, and it's abundantly clear you have not. ("Geostationary orbit would let you look all night long"? ROTFLMAO. There is no night in space you moron.)

Re:It's fun!

[robotkid]

If you've ever studied astronomy, then you would know that faint signals need to be acquired for as long as possible in order to get good signal to noise.

I have studied astronomy, and it's abundantly clear you have not. ("Geostationary orbit would let you look all night long"? ROTFLMAO. There is no night in space you moron.)

Well, I'll be sure to let the next planning committee know that future space telescopes should be placed in as low an Earth orbit as possible and not to worry about stars being eclipsed by the earth, and not to worry about where the shadow of the earth with respect to the sun is whatever you decide to call that.

Clearly these are unimportant details best left to scientific experts such as yourself, who are infinitely more eloquent in trying to explain basic science concepts to a lay audience.

Re:Afro-American Racism Against Whites and Asians

[gestalt_n_pepper]

Semper Non-sequitor!

Same old:

[Hartree]

Here. Let me translate:

"They've paid 100 Billion. Think how much more they would have gotten if they'd granted that to my field."

I'm sure it is everywhere, but I've seen this personally in biochemistry, solid state physics, and particle physics.

My original advisor in grad school was literally jumping for joy when the SSC was cancelled. He didn't like it when I pointed out that none of that money would be going to grants he was involved in and would in large part go back to the general US budget.

Re:Same old:

[jd]

Give me 100 billion and I will research this "self-deluded blindness through greed" phenomenon.

Re:Basic science is fine but...

[hey!]

NASA's work in creating orbital systems has easily paid for itself, including the showboating projects like going to the moon. Imagine a world without satellite communications, GPS, weather satellites, or remote sensing.

All of that is an accidental outgrowth of the dream of human space exploration. The problem is that now we're on the threshold of serious exploration of the Solar System, and its hard to imagine gains made outside Earth's orbit paying for anything in an economic sense.

Prototype

[Anonymous Coward]

Has ANY prototype, in the history of industrial manufacture, been, in and of itself, worth what it cost to make?

Re:Prototype

[jd]

Well, let's see. There was the... ummmm.... and the.... urrrr..... What about.... no, wait, that wouldn't work either.

Space travel (c'mon already!)

[Anonymous Coward]

Meh. The real breakthroughs that I'm looking for will result from mastering quantum physics. No, I don't know what the hell I'm talking about. But this is Slashdot. Quantum physics is where we'll find the science to harness energies, or master tricks, to enable long distance space travel. I'm just convinced that there is no way we're here in this universe with no practical way to travel through space. I just can't imagine a system would be setup where we couldn't practically travel to other stars, and galaxies. And want folks to hurry up already. (My) time is running out.

The alternative

[NoSig]

The alternative is not 100 billion dollars for a war. The alternative could have been 100 billion dollars on general science spending. That's 11 LHCs of science or 10,000 individual X prices of engineering. I'm not in a position to evaluate that against the current space program, but that's a lot of pay off to compete with.

Re:The alternative

[master_p]

If they had devoted 100 billion dollars to work related to gravity and superconductors, we would have been a lot more closer to real space travel.

It's a space station

[Mantrid42]

It's a space station. We're not getting enough science out of our space station?!

It's a station. In space. Right now, we have humans off-world. Think about that for a moment. Surely these are important fields to develop if we want to survive as a species long-term.

Re:It's a space station

[ceeam]

> off-world

ISS is great and everything, but don't over-dramatize it. Its orbit is, like, just over half an inch away from a 2ft/60cm diameter globe model. And what's probably more important it's well withing earth magnetic field.

Re:It's a space station

[jd]

You have to remember that a lot of the critics are the people wanting to put inflatable brothels in space. Aside from the fact that ultra-violet does nasty things to rubber that might reduce the profit margin (permanently), these are sick minds we're talking about. The moon would be far better for that.

Re:It's a space station

[houghi]

Indeed. Some things are not about financial gain, but about knowledge.

Re:It's a space station

[lennier]

It's a space station. We're not getting enough science out of our space station?!>

Sure. We figured out how to put people in a can in orbit (and get them back) 50 years ago. There's nothing much else up there to do. After a while, there's only so much science you can wring out of doing the same thing over and over.

Shall we try a 'Manned Spaceflight as MMORPG' analogy? We hit the level cap for the Astronaut class in 1969, we're getting no loot from our encounters any more, there's been no new quest content in the last two decades, the primary server has crashed twice with major data loss, and we're about to lose our our epic mount. There aren't any NPCs in any of the zones we've explored already. The 'Mission to Mars' expansion which was promised since the 1980s has been continually delayed, but it's going to have around a nine-month loading time for each session and there's no guarantee it will add any much more than a reskin of the assets we've already seen. The long-awaited 'FTL' sequel is a complete bust, with industry leaders saying it's theoretically impossible even given infinite resources.

Worse, since the Cold War storyline finished in 1989 there's been a complete ban on in-game PvP.

Now it's 2010 and players are considering abandoning the game out of boredom. Should we blame them?

Re:It's a space station

[Stuntmonkey]

Yeah, it's just a space station, and that's the problem. We've had space stations since Skylab in the 1970s. They aren't good for very much. They make poor science platforms (all the jostling, noisy humans nearby), and there isn't any interesting exploration to do in low earth orbit. I can think of much better ways to spend the money on space exploration, both manned and unmanned.

The ISS is the result of a long chain of mis-justifications. Various political forces wanted to keep the Shuttle flying for as long as possible, despite its horrible economics. So the Shuttle needed something useful to do, and the ISS was cooked up as the solution for that problem. Now we have the ISS, and we're trying to figure out what IT's good for. These are all solutions in search of a problem. Better to go after some real goal, like sending astronauts to explore a comet.

Re:It's a space station

[Anonymous Coward]

> inflatable brothels in space

There's a funding model. How much *is* membership in the 200-mile-high club worth to some people?

Re:It's a space station

[agm]

Freedom trumps knowledge. Knowledge is good, but it should not be acquired by means that lesson our basic liberties.

Re:It's a space station

[Nyeerrmm]

The shuttle and ISS, boondoggles that they are, are a completely different world from Apollo.

Apollo was not the end-all be-all of what we can do in space. A massive effort to achieve a single goal is impressive, but quite frankly, learning to stay up for long periods of time, build a huge structure in space, and test out reusable launch vehicles is much more important, if less obviously impressive. Some things have worked better than others, but all of these things are on the road to learning how to actually, really live in space with ever smaller umbilicals back to Earth. If we had followed the Russian approach after Gemini, I can't help but we'd be a lot further along in true settlement.

And no one is abandoning space. We're just adjusting to the fact that Apollo and its anything-goes budget were apparitions of short-term geopolitics, and we've got to learn to leverage market mechanisms where appropriate to bring costs down and make it more sustainable.

Re:It's a space station

[lennier]

If it wasn't for the Shuttle, we could have had some interesting results from the Apollo Applications Program. The technological expertise that went into developing Apollo could have been directed toward building more of a permanent infrastructure without having to completely reinvent everything for a winged monster (and then throw it all away and go back to Apollo-style stacks thirty years later).

But even then, even with a cool on-orbit habitation infrastructure, we'd still have built ourselves mostly a space bridge to nowhere, wouldn't we?

The problem I have with manned spaceflight is that ultimately, there's nowhere practical to go. We can build all the capability and develop all the skills we want, but in the end the chances of actually colonising any other place in the Solar System on a long-term sustainable basis are much slimmer than of permanently colonising the wastelands of Earth.

If we had FTL that equation would change drastically: suddenly we'd have somewhere off-Earth for people to go (all those billions of Earthlike planets we suspect must be out there). But FTL, we are assured by the smartest minds in physics for a century, is not merely impractical but literally and forever impossible.

My money is on Einstein, Hawking and Wheeler being flat wrong when they say FTL is impossible, but that's an argument from coolness and pulp space opera, not from science.

What science has taught us about space in the last half-century is very, very depressing. Yes we can survive there, but there's no actual there there for us to survive for.

Re:It's a space station

[Nyeerrmm]

Somehow I find in-situ resource utilization, economic development of extra-planetary resources, and reduction of launch costs via economies of scale a lot easier to expect and plan for than FTL based on as-yet undiscovered physics.

Not saying its impossible, just saying there are only incremental developments required to make a real economic case for settlement. We need to reconsider our approach, largely in terms of business practices, not abandon the concept.

Re:It's a space station

[lennier]

Somehow I find in-situ resource utilization, economic development of extra-planetary resources, and reduction of launch costs via economies of scale a lot easier to expect and plan for than FTL based on as-yet undiscovered physics.

Certainly. That's why FTL not being even theoretically on the horizon is so depressing. FTL could conceiveably give us access to Earthlike biospheres. There are however no known biospheres at all in the reachable solar system, only dead rocks.

The problem is that I don't see the economic benefit of developing the dead-rock extra-planetary resources we know for sure are out there. It seems like even given the best-case scenario for cheap launchers, it will still always be cheaper to mine Earth atoms and settle Earth deserts than to mine an equivalent amount of moon atoms or settle Moon deserts.

Conversely, in order to figure out how to live sustainably on the Moon, we're going to need to learn to live within VERY tight resource constraints - far slimmer than even the most dire dreams of Al Gore. We're talking recycle-your-own-urine-each-day levels of frugality, and that's assuming you have some way to mine oxygen. So space habs, if we ever manage to make them run, won't be resource-plentiful utopias, they'll be like nuclear submarines with extra small bunks. They won't be fun places to live, they won't generate as much science as the robotic probes do, but only the ultra-rich will be able to afford them.

Economically speaking, I don't see much future for a lifestyle like that given current Western cultural tastes. But I suppose tastes might change.

Re:It's a space station

[coaxial]

Surely these are important fields to develop if we want to survive as a species long-term.

Given that horseshoe crabs have been around for 450 million years, "getting off this rock" is demonstrably not a requirement for long term species survival.

A human diaspora to the stars is just an appeal to romanticism rather than an actual argument. There is literally no place to got where we wouldn't die. No way to to get there fast. No way to get there cheaply (for any definition of "cheap").

Re:It's a space station

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd rather see $100B put into propulsion. Until surface to orbit transport and especially deep space propulsion get orders of magnitude better, our species is going nowhere at any scale which is in the least bit meaningful to our survival (i.e. tens of thousands of people living far enough from the solar system to survive a nearby nova, as opposed to a half a dozen people golfing on Mars for a few weeks and then no one going back ever again). NASA is researching propulsion (i.e. VASIMIR), but seemingly at a snail's pace. Of course, the reason for that is political, any real solution has to be nuclear, which is politically toxic. We've basically closed the sky until we get over our idiotic fear of all things nuclear.

Re:It's a space station

[master_p]

Correction: it's a station 460 km over the surface of Earth. Space is so vast, that ISS distance from Earth can hardly be called 'space'.

Re:It's a space station

[Anonymous Coward]

ymmd! :D... that is exactly the reason we should spend money on such projects. it may not pay off until hundreds of years have passed and the iss is crumbled to dust, but ROI should not be an issue when dealing with off-world-exploration...

Re:It's a space station

[olau]

Surely these are important fields to develop if we want to survive as a species long-term.

Why?

Because you think space is a cost-effective escape route for humans?

Space will never be easier or cheaper than fixing Earth itself. You could move to Antarctica and live on the ice, and it would still be cheaper and easier than living in space. Heck, in 6 billion years when our sun dies, if we're still around at that point, it will probably still be cheaper to move Earth than finding another planet.

Re:It's a space station

[ImprovOmega]

Shall we try a 'Manned Spaceflight as MMORPG' analogy? We hit the level cap for the Astronaut class in 1969, we're getting no loot from our encounters any more, there's been no new quest content in the last two decades, the primary server has crashed twice with major data loss, and we're about to lose our our epic mount.

Ah, an Everquest player I see.

Let's NEVER go in that direction

[mozumder]

The third choice of "limited government" never works, and only leads to tragic outcomes, because to put it simply: the public is incapable of making decisions on their own that benefit society.

Right now, if you give the public more money, they will simply send it to China or Saudi Arabia.

We need government to spend the public's money in a focused manner, that the public would NOT do on their own.

Government is what determines economic direction, not the public.

Somalia has "limited government". Somalia is also a failure. We don't want to be like Somalia.

We need more socialism and government control, not less.

Government needs to be expanded and be given more control, let's make sure we give them more power tomorrow.

Remember, DON'T BE LIKE SOMALIA.

Re:Let's NEVER go in that direction

[Anonymous Coward]

France has a massive government and has been in a state of mass riots for over a week.

Remember, DON'T BE LIKE FRANCE.

Re:Let's NEVER go in that direction

[mozumder]

More people want to be like france than want to be like somalia.

Therefore, a massive government is better than a "limited government".

Remember, DON'T BE LIKE SOMALIA, with their silly "limited government".

Re:Let's NEVER go in that direction

[Anonymous Coward]

Our government already sends a huge of our funds to China and Saudi Arabia. More government will mean more funds going out of the country.

Fuck that. The country needs to be free. Free to succeed and free to fail.

Re:Let's NEVER go in that direction

[Nadaka]

Both are true. Socialism is good. Capitalism is good. Socialism is bad. Capitalism is bad. We don't necessarily need more of one or the other. but better of each.

Re:Let's NEVER go in that direction

[ArcherB]

The third choice of "limited government" never works, and only leads to tragic outcomes, because to put it simply: the public is incapable of making decisions on their own that benefit society.

Right now, if you give the public more money, they will simply send it to China or Saudi Arabia.

We need government to spend the public's money in a focused manner, that the public would NOT do on their own.

Government is what determines economic direction, not the public.

Somalia has "limited government". Somalia is also a failure. We don't want to be like Somalia.

We need more socialism and government control, not less.

Government needs to be expanded and be given more control, let's make sure we give them more power tomorrow.

Remember, DON'T BE LIKE SOMALIA.

I'm going to respond as if you are serious in your post, only because I hear so many with a post just like yours who are dead serious... Please don't reply with a "WHOOOSH".

First, don't misrepresent your opponent's position. It's a fallacy... Red Fish or something. I remember herring about it, but don't recall.

Anyway, no one is for NO government. No one is for government under a civil war. No one is for a corrupt government. What us limited government types want is a limited FEDERAL government, with a strong and state and local governments... or not, depending on what you and your state decides.

The federal government is, or should be, limited by the Constitution, as spelled out by the 10th Amendment. Basically, it says that anything not spelled out in the Constitution as a federal power is a power to the states or people, provided it doesn't violate the Constitution. In other words, if the only the feds can do it, then it's a federal job... everything else should be a state power. Health care, for example, should be a state power. There is absolutely no reason why the states can't create their own health care plans. Welfare, state power. Education... state and local control. Legal status of marijuana, state power... and so on.

I'll even go so far as to agree with a liberal reading of the 10th to say that anything that states can't do effectively, the Feds should step in.

NASA, military, interstate commerce, federal treaties... federal powers. If the Feds want more powers, like health care, then the Constitution needs to be amended. That's what the amendment process is for.

But, please stop saying that us LIMITED government types want NO government. Limited != None. I shouldn't have to tell you that, but evidently, I do.

Re:Let's NEVER go in that direction

[Anonymous Coward]

Bad luck poster, you told the truth.

But this is Slashdot, where libertarian fuckwits mod the truth troll.

What more can one expect of people who think Henleins ideas had any connectionnwith reality.

They should have their own seperate country where they can drown in their own shit
system.

Re:Let's NEVER go in that direction

[mozumder]

Somalia also has "limited government". Somalia is not "no government". Please study Somalia's "limited government" on why "limited government" is such a failed concept.

The constitution already allows for a strong, centralized federal government, with the interstate commerce clause designed to bring more government intervention into private businesses.

It is designed to direct the economy, a planned economy.

Let's make sure to keep it that way. We now have nationalized health care, we need more federal control.

Housing and Education are also good candidates for centralized control by the federal government.

The more government intervention, the better.

If it wasn't for that, private corporations would be out-of-control and otherwise terrorize the population.

Re:Let's NEVER go in that direction

[Teancum]

Bad luck poster, you told the truth.

But this is Slashdot, where libertarian fuckwits mod the truth troll.

What more can one expect of people who think Henleins ideas had any connectionnwith reality.

They should have their own seperate country where they can drown in their own shit
system.

If I could move to a country where a large number of people followed libertarian principles (at least a million or so people or about a half a percent of the population of America) simply to show the socialists what freedom from government really means, I'd move there in a heartbeat and take my whole family there tomorrow. The problem with socialists is that they want to force me at gunpoint to follow their beloved ideals and to deny me the chance to follow my own path instead, and to go so far as to point the guns as me to make sure I don't get the crazy idea to leave either.

Socialism has China, France, Greece, and many other places around the world to prosper and survive. Please, just give me one good place where libertarian principles can be at least permitted to work so I and others can show you just how far off the mark you are with such a crazy statement like this. Let me have that separate country. Once upon a time it was called America, but now America has become this crazy socialist utopia too. Where do I move to now, Mars perhaps? Certainly no place on the Earth.

Re:Let's NEVER go in that direction

[Teancum]

I don't think you've ever really studied the philosophies and principles of the founders of the American Republic if you believe anything that you are writing here. The references you are making here seem to be in relationship to America and not some other country at least.

The interstate commerce clause? That wasn't to impose government authority on businesses, but rather to pull authority from states to keep things like trade wars between states from happening. in the 1780's and 1790's there was a trade war between New York and New Jersey that very nearly resulted in a full scale armed conflict between those two states, and was very much on the mind of the authors of the U.S. Constitution when that clause was put in. Trade between states was something to be decided in Congress with more diplomatic discussions rather than at the point of a gun. The purpose of this clause is to limit government and to keep the government from intruding on our lives instead of reaching into our lives. I'd also call the interstate commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution to be the most abused part of that whole document where it has been perverted beyond anything ever intended when that clause was put in.

As for central economic planning, that was the furthest thing from their minds. It should be pointed out that central banking authorities within the U.S. economy were generally looked at with distrust, where the Bank of the United States was dissolved, more than once, because it was deemed to be unconstitutional. This is something I think Andrew Jackson got right, and it is sad that the inheritors of his political party so completely misunderstand this principle that they should be embarrassed. No where in the U.S. Constitution will you ever see something like "The Fed" mentioned, and the U.S. government's only authority is to regulate coinage of metals as a means to standardize an exchange medium. Again, it wasn't to control the lives of ordinary citizens.

In general, government seems to work best when it governs least, and as an occasionally necessary evil it can and should be done with caution and pushing decision making down to the most local level possible. Educational decisions are best made at the local school district level and IMHO even better at the individual school level. It is not something which should even be a federal responsibility, and having federal funds involved with education was a bad idea to begin with. It is a community issue where folks who want to attract citizens and businesses to an area will have well run schools and those who don't care will see their areas fall apart.

As for housing, people have been building homes since before the modern nation-state even existed. What possible benefit can come from federal government control and authority over housing construction? At the moment, it is one of the few things that the federal government has almost no authority at all over with the exception of "housing projects" that have all largely failed as well. I can't think of a single successful housing program or project operated by the federal government that can be deemed a success. Fanny Mae and Sally Mae? I suppose, but what do you think has caused the current recession/depression we are currently in? To me it is because the federal government had too much authority to act that exceeded its constitutional scope and failed to put the decision making on a local level. This is where the federal government screwed up, not where they are beneficial.

The way to limit private corporations is to encourage the development of more enterprise and to enforce anti-trust legislation that keeps the monster mega-corporations from being formed. Unfortunately the exact opposite is true where consolidation of authority is encouraged and the creation of smaller enterprises is far too often discouraged or even flat out prohibited as a matter of law. To me, the government is the problem, not the solution to constraining monster corporate abuse of authority.

If Somalia followed the principles of Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and John Adams, they would likely be one of the most prosperous nations on the Earth today. Too bad they and you don't know anything about these men.

Re:Let's NEVER go in that direction

[oreaq]

"Mass riots" is an extrem exaggeration. The French are not satisfied with their government so they protest it. This is what the tea party would look like if they weren't just some useful idiots for corporate interests. But getting really angry while listening to Limbaugh, Beck, and the other clowns and then voting for the guys who did, and still do, and will continue to do all the thing you protest against is fine too, i guess.

Re:Let's NEVER go in that direction

[oreaq]

The fact that no such place exists might be an indication that a system that follows libertarian principles is not stable. Maybe something just comes along and fills the power vacuum. Maybe that something is not very enjoyable.

Re:Let's NEVER go in that direction

[Nadaka]

China is not a socialist country. You can't just go by what they claim to be, people lie.

China is an authoritarian police state with a corporatist profiteering owner class and a lot of little loosely aligned feudal states supported by nearly starving peasants.

Re:Let's NEVER go in that direction

[Teancum]

On the contrary, I am implying that such a place has existed in the past, but that those who are following libertarian principles are being ignored for various reasons.

The largest problem with libertarianism is that there isn't money to be made for politicians who espouse the concept. Note that this isn't the same for citizens who can indeed make money and prosper in such an environment, but for a politicians and even more so for a bureaucrat, there is money to be made by expanding government services.

Jerry Pournelle has famously talked about the "Iron Law of Bureaucracies", where essentially once an agency or organization is established, particularly a government agency, it will persist and take on seemingly a life of its own and will resist all attempts to cause that agency to cease to exist, even if the purpose of that agency is no longer relevant. Many politicians want to leave a legacy, and creating an agency or "project" is something that to them is important to leave behind. The problem is what to do with the legacy agencies that are left behind from all of the previous politicians who have come before.

About the only way to remove most bureaucracies is through war or violent revolution. Neither sounds like a pleasant alternative.

I should also note that for most of human history that people lived under tyranny, slavery (in all its various forms including serfdom), and strong social classes that were rigidly enforced to keep the bright ones from "moving up in the ranks". Something unusual happened more recently where that changed, where the slaves were able to deal with their would-be masters and tell them to go away. Unfortunately in most cases those countries simply substituted one form of tyranny for another.

In the countries where freedom prevailed, where there was a chance for an individual to do something without having a government telling them what to do and when to do it, those people prospered and acquired wealth. Unfortunately there are many who are jealous and would rather be in misery with poverty in common rather than allowing a few to succeed by their own merits. This is what I call liberty and freedom, something definitely lacking in today's world.

Re:Let's NEVER go in that direction

[mozumder]

The point is we want less freedom and more government control.

I don't want the freedom to choose various health plans. I want it to be given to me, for free.

"Choice" is a cost. It takes time, and time is money.

People are happiest under socialist control.

Re:Let's NEVER go in that direction

[Teancum]

The point is that you want less freedom. I find it amazing that you wish to become a slave under a tyrant. I hope you eventually get your wish fulfilled.

I sure don't want you to become my tyrant to enslave me, which is sort of the point. I am merely asking to be left out of that entirely. You are also the first person I've seen who is an avowed socialist who openly admits that socialism == less freedom.

Of course choice has a cost including time and money, although that is something I try in vain sometimes to explain even to committed libertarians and "tea party" guys too.

Re:Let's NEVER go in that direction

[Teancum]

To me, you just defined socialism in all of its glory. It is a process where somebody else points a gun at your head telling you what to do, removing all notion of personal free will.

One of the problems that China is facing is that the current leadership sees themselves as the legitimate successors of the Chinese Emperors. In terms of corporate profiteering, a close study of the Chinese economy shows that the "People's Liberation Army" ends up with controlling interest in many of these enterprises. From this perspective, perhaps China is indeed a fascist country?

Either way, China is certainly a country that lacks freedom and has a strong central government that controls much of what its "subjects" are capable of doing.

Re:Let's NEVER go in that direction

[Nadaka]

I see. I am using the actual definition of socialism. Instead of the reactionary abuse of the word. What you describe isn't what socialism is at all.

China is a mix of modern corporate feudalism and traditional feudalism controlled by a central authoritarian regime with a dogmatic almost religious status.

Socialism is simply a government that uses its abilities at attempt to meet some of the needs of its people. It is based on compassion for your fellow citizens and understanding that random catastrophic events and economic inequities are inevitable and should be cushioned for the good of society as a whole.

Re:Let's NEVER go in that direction

[oreaq]

I live in one of the "socialist" European countries. I have spent maybe 5 hours total in the forty years I've lived thinking about health care plans. It practically did not cost me any time at all. And time is my most valued resource. Our socialised medicine has given me the freedom to use this resource as I wish. It has not enslaved me but has given me more freedom. And I pay far less than I would have to pay in the States.

I really don't see how this makes you think that I wish to become a slave and am longing for some tyrant. I do understand that you don't want to participate in the socialised medicine I enjoy; I think everyone should have the choice to opt out. But even if you do I would still think you should get treatment if you get sick even if you can not afford to pay for the treatment. The problem is that if too many people opt out and start to freeload the system breaks. So there have to be some rules regarding opting out like proving that you will be able to pay your health care bills some other way. Theses rules reduce our freedom.

For me the freedoms I gain ("easy" healthcare) far outweigh the freedoms I give up (problematic opt-out). For you it's the other way around. But one is not pure freedom and the other is not pure slavery. That's just bad and childish rhetoric.

Re:Let's NEVER go in that direction

[Teancum]

Who said anything about socialized health care? That is just the issue of the moment. I'm talking the whole of government stepping into your life and deciding every last thing that has to be done and when you can do it.

My proposition is that such government involvement in your life simply isn't needed, and that as a general principle you should be free to do whatever it is that you want to do as long as it isn't hurting others.

Governments do a pretty good job of acting as a referee to help resolve disputes and conflict between private individuals and to help keep other people and other governments from messing with me and those things I care about. But government can and ought to be limited, and it is this principle of very limited government that I am advocating here, not a complete elimination of government.

My original complaint here is that socialism and highly centralized governments are also a part of the problem, where I believe that many of the decisions regarding things of this nature can and ought to be made at a local level and not some super-national level. In a truly free society you would have perhaps some cities and more local governments be willing to enable socialism for its citizens, and neighboring governments that perhaps don't offer these same creature comforts. Freedom of movement can and ought to be a basic freedom.

I am also suggesting that socialism can only maintain itself and the support of its citizens through force of arms and enslavement if alternatives exist for people to freely go elsewhere. It is the effort to centralize governments and impose socialism from the top down against the will of those who would do something different which is the problem, not socialism in and of itself. You can go about living your religion as you see fit, but I don't believe such nonsense and want to opt-out. It is you and your socialist buddies who are preventing me from being able to leave or to do something different, and that power is being enforced at the point of a gun against my will. You really think that is desirable and welcome?

Re:Let's NEVER go in that direction

[oreaq]

I used health care as an example to make things more concret because I find it incredibly hard to think about our/ my situation in abstract totally unfitting terms like slavery and "socialism". That's just hogwash.

Governments do a pretty good job of acting as a referee to help resolve disputes and conflict between private individuals and to help keep other people and other governments from messing with me and those things I care about. But government can and ought to be limited, and it is this principle of very limited government that I am advocating here, not a complete elimination of government.

I totally agree with that. Well ... I'm not sure if I would call it a "pretty good job", but the alternatives are far worse.

The only question remaining is: What are suitable limits? I think it would be great if nobody would feel hunger or freeze and that everybody gets medical treatment when they're sick. I'm willing to give up some of my own resources for that and I'm voting for candidates that seem to have the same goal. These candidates are not my buddies; I merely try to use them to achieve these goals because I'm too lazy to do more than voting once every other year or so. And I will never hold a gun to your head to force you to do something you don't want to do. The opt-out option should always be available but has to be balanced with the need to fight freeloading; so you might have to jump through a hoop or two to opt-out.

Note that I'm also pretty sure that a gto strategy in the struggle between different societies or groups of people will include some kind of in-group altruism. So societies that behave like I described will do better in the long run. But that's more like a belief than some kind of scientific argument.

I can't comment on the state vs. federal issue; the countries in Europe are too small to give me any meaningful insight into this problem. But looking at what monster the EU is becoming I tend to agree with you in favoring local over global solutions.

Re:Let's NEVER go in that direction

[Teancum]

If you are worried about seeing your neighbors get sick, freeze to death in a high latitude climate, go hungry, or have one of many other social ills, you can always form a charity or some other group of like-minded people to help take care of these kind of problems. Most hospitals that I'm aware of started out precisely in that fashion where some concerned citizens put together their own money and helped to make a facility dedicated to healing the sick and making a better place for society.

The concept of a for-profit hospital is actually a relatively new phenomena, and to me exists only because of government regulations and "health mandates".

I am not about being compassionate, but I do object to having the force of law stealing money from widows & orphans at gunpoint so that people who are wealthy can get good health care.

The other advantage of making donations to a charity voluntary is that it keeps those charitable organizations from getting bloated and inefficient. Those charitable groups that are less efficient with their funds tend to go out of business, while successful ones can show what they are doing and are more likely to continue to receive donations.

An inefficient government bureaucracy will always stay inefficient except through tremendous deliberate action to clean up the mess, and usually even that isn't enough. Since their source of funding is guaranteed, there is no incentive to clean up waste, fraud, or even simply mismanagement of funds.

Re:Let's NEVER go in that direction

[oreaq]

I'm mostly (only?) interested in results not in ideology. So if charities work than fine use them to cure the social ills. From my limited experience working for charities they rarely provide more than a bandaid for some kinds of usually very limited problems. The governments of the countries I lived in (only Europe) seemed to do a way better job of achieveing the goals I described above. But that's only anecdotal evidence; your mileage and hence your opinion may vary.

I am not about being compassionate, but I do object to having the force of law stealing money from widows & orphans at gunpoint so that people who are wealthy can get good health care.

LOL WHAT?

The ISS is a dead-end

[arcite]

Just imagine for a moment that there was an international PRIVATE consortium with the aim of building a space station and that they had a budget of $100 billion... The Airbus A380 cost $11 billion over five years to create. The Chinese Three Gorges Dam cost ~$25 billion....

The ISS has been a colossal WASTE of money. Speaking as a contractor who regularly works for the great US Government, if you want to deliver projects on a budget, don't let the government near it!

I watch 2001 every year on TV and it brings a tear to my eye at how the future that could have been, never was....well, just a bit behind schedule at any rate...

Re:The ISS is a dead-end

[Dimwit]

Right. And how much money did Airbus save by not having to research everything that they learned by being a contractor on the ISS? How much money did Airbus save by having all of the research NASA has done over the decades be in the public domain?

It's like people saying that SpaceShipOne cost one one-thousandth or whatever of one of the Apollo missions. It's very easy to cost a lot less when 90% of the research has been done for you by NASA and placed in the public domain.

Re:The ISS is a dead-end

[cowscows]

Well, until you can show me a private consortium willing to spend $100 Billion on a space station, I guess we'll just have to settle for governments doing most of the space exploration and developing all of the technologies with uncertain financial returns.

Are you implying that our spaceflight technology would be ahead of where it is now if NASA didn't exist? Some of the private companies building rockets and such today are doing cool stuff, no doubt, but they haven't even put a person into orbit yet, even though they have access to large amounts of knowledge generated via government spaceflight projects.

Re:The ISS is a dead-end

[jd]

The Airbus A380 cost $11 billion. The space station is a lot more than 10x as complex. So, dollar for dollar, the space-station has actually been cheaper per problem solved. The Three Gorges Dam cost $25 billion to build, has led to the first cetacean extinction since whaling ended, and the cost of repairing the rest of the environmental damage may well be more than the ISS and dam combined.

My problems with the ISS are that not enough was spent on it (spending more to get more is perfectly legit, and sensible if the ramp-up costs are high and you stay below the point of diminishing returns). If we'd spent twice as much and built it the way it should have been built, we'd have five to ten times the benefits. Cost per benefit reduced by a fifth, mankind gets massive rewards, all for less than a banker-induced crisis.

Personally, I'd rather the nation spent money on things that would likely benefit humanity rather than cripple it. Gripe for a few months over higher taxes or gripe for a decade over a catastrophic recession. A few months can be dealt with.

Re:The ISS is a dead-end

[Anonymous Coward]

a private group would blow their 100b on legal fees defending against everyone who claims they are using their imaginary property.

A government does not have that problem.

Re:The ISS is a dead-end

[lennier]

Right. And how much money did Airbus save by not having to research everything that they learned by being a contractor on the ISS?

Given that designing an air-breathing aeroplane has basically nothing in common with designing purpose-built components for the ISS, which uses its own standards incompatible with everything else... probably very little?

If you want to learn AJAX programming in Javascript, will learning how to build missile flight control systems in Ada help you? Maybe. Maybe not.

Not all knowledge gained by humans is readily transferable to non-compatible domains, and building one-off spaceships teaches us how to build one-off spaceships, not how to build mass-produced passenger planes. They're two very different technological problems.

There might be SOME slight spinoffs from , but if you really want to spend public money to develop passenger planes, why not just do that directly?

Re:The ISS is a dead-end

[dbIII]

Step back a bit and look what you just wrote. You just compared developing a new model of passenger aircraft to a multipurpose space station in orbit. How do you feel about what you wrote now that you are sober?
If it was deliberate, shame on you. Pretending to compare apples and aardvarks is a nastly little trick in arguments that should have been beaten out everyone in the playground before they became adults. I know that the slimiest folk in politics and media do so, but I doubt you are an ex-DJ with his brain damaged by cocaine so you do not have that excuse.

Re:The ISS is a dead-end

[Anonymous Coward]

Neither of those things involve space travel and are terrible examples. In fact, I'd say you'd proved the opposite of your point. For 10x more than an aircraft design, we have a semi-permanent space station. That doesn't seem all that unreasonable.

Re:The ISS is a dead-end

[GodfatherofSoul]

I assume you're trying to tell us all how private industry could do it better, faster, and cheaper? If they could have, they would have. I know that on Planet Libertaria governments just waste your tax money, but you're going to have to accept the fact that governments do a lot of things better. Most notably, taking the one for the team when it comes to loss-leader research.

Re:The ISS is a dead-end

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't even understand his point. The Airbus A380 was so heavily subsidized Boeing took them and the EU to court as it violated a US-EU bilateral agreement. Is he saying it was a government project out of control? Or that the price is so cheap compared to government projects and we should ignore the launch subsidies? Or maybe all three are overpriced in his mind the largest airliner in the world, the largest dam project in the world, and a life sustaining station in orbit in space should be trivially cheap.

Maybe he's confused and that since Facebook has been valued at 100 Billion USD and the ISS cost 100 Billion USD that they are of equal worth and the cost to make Facebook was much less, therefore private sector is better. Or something equally idiotic.

Re:The ISS is a dead-end

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah - you can better wreck the whole economy of America fighting extremely useful and very clean wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that gained the country .... eehhh something? Wait! Wait! There must be gained something from these wars that drained a multiple amount of the ISS spending? I mean - we would have been colonizing Mars or something from that amount of money, so there must be gained something?

Anybody?

Anyone?

???

Re:The ISS is a dead-end

[liquiddark]

So you think it's unreasonable to do all the original research on the biggest space station ever built, launch it into orbit, build the support systems for that station, and staff it with some of the best minds available both on the ground and in space, not to mention getting actual work done on that station at 10 times the cost of building a single airplane? You think, moreover, that the guys who spent 11 billion on that plane would somehow not spend anywhere near 100 billion on that station? That would be an interesting case to try to make. Speaking as a programmer who regularly works for private industry, private industry ain't not saint when it comes to on time under budget.

Worth?

[Anonymous Coward]

What is "worth"?

How much money you've sunk into something isn't worth.

What would it cost to replace all of the current assets of the project if they disappeared? That's nearer to the neighborhood of worth.

Another measure: how much would the highest bidder pay for it?

Honest worth can never be separated very far from fair market value.

And look at it another way

[mozumder]

Also, the money that "they earn" is never their own.

People don't earn money on their own. They earn it with cooperation of government that designed a system to enable a person to earn that bit of money in the first place.

The money that "they earn" is just one step of a much larger system where the public is expected to pay back into the system that allowed them to earn money in the first place.

Remember, without a proper system of government that is designed to encourage spending, you would not be able to earn money in the first place.

Re:And look at it another way

[Darkness404]

Yes it is.

It makes no sense for a government which has fixed costs to mandate a variable cost system of theft. There is a fundamental mistake in figuring that someone who makes $15,000 a year uses less government than the person who makes $300,000. Costs are fixed and should be based simply on fixed costs. You should pay for what you use. If you use $3,000 in government programs you should have to pay $3,000 no matter if you make $15,000 a year or $300,000 a year.

Re:And look at it another way

[mozumder]

Remember, a person that only makes $15,000 a year uses less government than a person that makes $300,000 a year.

Government is a tool for wealth. People that make more money, use more government. That is what all those millions of laws are for, for rich people.

You know that Arizona immigration law? It was written by millionaires that own prison businesses: http://topics.npr.org/article/0eWt7HBbjtbJX?q=NPR

If you make a million dollars from government, you should pay government a million dollars.

Re:And look at it another way

[Anonymous Coward]

The person who makes 300k per year uses more government simply because the government is protecting a larger amount of that persons wealth duits very existence. In other words without government the person making 15k a year would in order to better themselves simply break into mister 300k a years house, rape and kill his family and steal his wealth. I really hope you get your wish, remember to lock your doors.

Re:And look at it another way

[ArcherB]

Remember, a person that only makes $15,000 a year uses less government than a person that makes $300,000 a year.

.

That's true, except proportionally, the person making $300K, pays much more than the person making $15,000. See, the person making $15K pays $0.00 in federal income tax. A person making $300K pays something in federal income taxes.

Now for the really hard math part...

Something, anything at all, is infinitely greater proportionally than zero.

Oh, and never use NPR as a source. Anything funded by George Soros or politicians is not a valid source.

Re:And look at it another way

[icebike]

The GP made the statement that "There is a fundamental mistake in figuring that someone who makes 15K a year uses less government than someone who makes $300k."

You turn right around and assert that we are to remember that $15k uses less government.

Yet you offer no justification for your statement what so ever, in spite of the fact that the low wage person is much more dependent on government handouts, than the high wage earner.

When directly contradicting an assertion you owe us a little bit more of an explanation than simply countering "Does Not" with "Does Too" like a kindergarten child.

Re:And look at it another way

[SETIGuy]

Oh, and never use NPR as a source. Anything funded by George Soros or politicians is not a valid source.

NPR is about as unbiased a source as you can get, despite your George Soros paranoia. Ooh scary, the "left" has one moderate billionaire. Good thing the far right has the rest of them to keep everything on Fox News fair and balanced.

Re:And look at it another way

[Anonymous Coward]

In other words without government the person making 15k a year would in order to better themselves simply break into mister 300k a years house, rape and kill his family and steal his wealth.

To libertarians, it would actually be their duty to do so. After all, if the rich can't afford a police force they deserve to be killed.

Re:And look at it another way

[ArcherB]

NPR is about as unbiased a source as you can get...

Those 10 words and three letters were all I needed to know about your intelligence.

Juan Williams is a liberal on Fox News. Shepherd Smith is another. Mara Liasson is a liberal on Fox News who also works for NPR. Can you tell me who the conservatives on NPR are? Tell me who are the conservative counterweights for Dianne Rehm, Garrison Keillor and the rest of them.

Thank you. That's what I thought.

Re:And look at it another way

[SETIGuy]

Juan Williams and Mara Liasson are considered to be liberals on Fox because they worked for NPR. Both of them are conservatives. They were hired as conservative analysts by NPR because conservatives were complaining about lack of balance. Every Mara Liasson story is "this is how this event is good for the Republican party." She always refers to Republican presidents as "the President" or "President Bush" and disrespectfully refers to Democratic presidents as "Bill Clinton" and "Barak Obama" I have no idea who Shepherd Smith is, but by the Fox definition of liberal I expect he's a pseudo-libertarian who is somewhere to the right of George W. Bush.

I have trouble coming up with the name of an NPR News commentator or reporter that comes off as liberal. Cokie Roberts certainly isn't a liberal. Everyone else keeps their mouth shut when it comes to political opinions. Steve Inskeep? Has he ever said anything political? Nina Totenberg once said Jesse Helms said something stupid. So did a lot of conservative columnists at the time. I don't give a damn about the non-news programming on NPR, because that's not being passed off as news. That's diametrically opposed to Fox News where anchors and reporters are encouraged to express political opinions and right wing myths as if they were fact. Why would a conservative want an NPR show anyway when they could make better money syndicating on right wing AM radio?

Re:And look at it another way

[mozumder]

Anything funded by George Soros is the BEST source.

Reality has a liberal bias.

Re:And look at it another way

[mozumder]

You need to learn to accept NPR as fact.

NPR defines reality.

Re:And look at it another way

[mozumder]

The evidence is in the salary itself.

The high wage person is much more dependent on government.

Re:And look at it another way

[mozumder]

To make it clearer to you why the high-wage person is much more dependent on government, it is because of government that he has a high wage.

Do you think he would have the same high wage if his government was Somalia? Case closed.

Re:And look at it another way

[icebike]

The higher wage person needs less from the government, is much more able to achieve his goals without government assistance and pays far more for what ever assistance they do receive.

Re:And look at it another way

[mozumder]

No.

The higher wage person got his high wage BECAUSE of government.

The system of government that makes sure copyrights, patents, legal agreements, etc, are valid, is the reason he has a high wage.

The higher-wage person is therefore more dependent on government.

A poor person couldn't give a flying fuck about all that excess.

Re:And look at it another way

[icebike]

So all things come from government?

Is that what you are going with?

Re:And look at it another way

[mozumder]

Yes. Government is the basic foundation of society, and everything derives from it.

Re:And look at it another way

[icebike]

You air are delusional.

Society created government, not the other way around.

Government is but a tool.
The Carpenter is not the slave to the hammer.

Re:And look at it another way

[mozumder]

Society created government, but government created the rich person's income.

Do you think there would be more rich people under a Somalia-style "limited government"?

Re:And look at it another way

[mozumder]

Also, I didn't see the part where you explain how a carpenter would make his salary without a hammer?

Go on and explain how you feel a carpenter would make his salary without a hammer.

Re:And look at it another way

[icebike]

The person creates his own income.

All people stand to lose 100% of what they own should government fail entirely, but government did not give them their income or even allow them to earn it.

People earned income quite well in the absence of government, in the north american west, alaska, australia, even siberia etc. The kept their income or traded it as they saw fit with friends and neighbors or mere acquaintances. Government did nothing to help this. It existed prior to government.

You sir are a hopeless statist. Its a failed philosophy, and the route to slavery.

Re:And look at it another way

[mozumder]

Quit whining. That only indicates that you are losing this thread, and are getting mad about not being able to come up with a winning argument.

Explain why you feel income is "created".

You say people earn income quite well in the absence of government. How rich are they? How many of them are billionaires? Or millionaires?

This thread is about about rich vs. poor, and how government enables a person to be rich.

This is not about poor people deriving marginal income. This is about extreme wealth enabled by government.

Did you thank government for your salary today?

You fail to answer my question: Do you think you would be better off under a Somali style "limited government"?

Again, a rich person is FAR more dependent on government than a poor person.

Re:And look at it another way

[icebike]

He would barter a hammer head from a smith, whittle a handle, build a dog house for the smith's dog in return, and they would share a pint of beer.

Worst case, he would make a whittle a wooden hammer.

Do you seriously think government was around when mankind made the first hammer from rocks and sticks and animal hide thongs?

My god man have you never relied on yourself for anything?

Re:And look at it another way

[mozumder]

No, I don't rely on myself for anything. I rely on government to provide for my lifestyle. I rely on government to make sure my employer functions properly.

Did you know that government even defines MONEY?

Your life is defined by government.

The richer you are, the more dependent you are on government.

You even said yourself that only the poorest people do not need government!

Thanks for making my point!

Now, go thank government for making sure your employer exists, and for the lifestyle you live.

Go on! Thank government!

I know it's tough to think of yourself as dependent on government, but you can do it!

Re:And look at it another way

[mozumder]

And just think what the carpenter could do if there was government around! He could actually buy a real hammer, instead of having to whittle one himself.

Learn to be thankful of government.

You are dependent on it.

You are nothing without government.

Re:And look at it another way

[mozumder]

Oh, another thing you can thank government for is making sure you have roads to go to your employer!

Go on!

Thank government! You are dependent on it!

Re:And look at it another way

[mozumder]

Also, you're still giving examples of the POOR being independent of government.

My statement of fact is: the richer you are, the more dependent you are on government.

Please provide me an example of a billionaire or millionaire that exists without government intervention.

LOL, you're only going to find criminal cases.

Can you imagine how poor Bill Gates would be without him being able to copyright his software? Or how poor Steve Jobs would be without him being able to patent his ideas, thus giving him a government-backed monopoly control on their intellectual property?

They would be nothing without government.

They would be reduced to whittling hammers from wood.

Re:And look at it another way

[Anonymous Coward]

Greece's collapsed economy has a liberal bias too.

Re:And look at it another way

[ArcherB]

Shepherd Smith is guy who slammed his hand down on the table and screamed, "We don't F*kkin' torture!!!" when discussing Gitmo.

I listed several NPR "employees" who were liberal. I listed to a full year of Dianne Rehm discussing Clinton's impeachment and never mentioned the word "perjury".

As for your not being able to recognize liberal correspondents as liberal (Juan Williams a conservative!??! Seriously), it shows where you stand on the political spectrum. Everyone to your left is a liberal. Everyone to your right is a conservative. Since you are to the left of Juan Williams, Mara Liasson and the rest of them, you see them as conservative.

Personally, I'm a Libertarian. I believe the 10th Amendment is in the Constitution and everything that violates it is unconstitutional. I think weed should be legal, marriage shouldn't be recognized by the government, civil unions are contract and should be recognized under law and anyone should be allowed to enter into it, abortion should be illegal as no one can agree when a person is a person, and any activity that doesn't violate the rights of others should be legal. So, yeah, I'm hold some middle of the road positions, but I am open minded enough to know that I lean right on most issues and run right on others. I can see that someone to my political left may still be a conservative. Evidently, you can't if you think Juan Williams is a conservative.

Re:And look at it another way

[SETIGuy]

Shepherd Smith is guy who slammed his hand down on the table and screamed, "We don't F*kkin' torture!!!" when discussing Gitmo.

A conservative can't be against torture? I think you're wearing the blinders you accuse me of wearing. I think you're also incapable of parsing the English language, since you brought up Diane Rheem, who isn't a news reporter, analyst, or commentator. I think you're judging Juan Williams by the color of his skin and his prior employer rather than based upon opinions he holds.

Re:And look at it another way

[ArcherB]

Shepherd Smith is guy who slammed his hand down on the table and screamed, "We don't F*kkin' torture!!!" when discussing Gitmo.

A conservative can't be against torture? I think you're wearing the blinders you accuse me of wearing. I think you're also incapable of parsing the English language, since you brought up Diane Rheem, who isn't a news reporter, analyst, or commentator. I think you're judging Juan Williams by the color of his skin and his prior employer rather than based upon opinions he holds.

You don't think Diane Rehm is liberal? Why not ask the Corporation for Public Broadcasting:

In 2005, a private study funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting accused Rehm of booking 22 liberal guests for every 5 conservative guests.

Rehm is on NPR for several hours a day. She gets the same amount of air time on NPR than Beck and O'Reilly get on FoxNews combined and she doesn't have to break for ads.

So, because Shep is on FoxNews, he's a conservative. I've labeled liberals, and I can label conservatives, Beck, Palin, Limbaugh... that's easy. So tell you what, you tell who YOU think a liberal is. Go ahead, name a few and explain to me why you think they are liberal.

Re:And look at it another way

[SETIGuy]

Again you show yourself to be a prick who can't comprehend written English. Why the hell does it matter if Rheem is a liberal? She's not in the news business. And I'm pretty sure that study wasn't CPB funded. It was another conservative attack study where everyone who was a reasonable human being was deemed liberal and everyone who believed in the infallibility of the Christian sky spirits and believed thermometers are a communist plot was considered conservative.

Re:And look at it another way

[ArcherB]

Again you show yourself to be a prick who can't comprehend written English. Why the hell does it matter if Rheem is a liberal? She's not in the news business. And I'm pretty sure that study wasn't CPB funded. It was another conservative attack study where everyone who was a reasonable human being was deemed liberal and everyone who believed in the infallibility of the Christian sky spirits and believed thermometers are a communist plot was considered conservative.

You may have your opinions, but you may not have your facts. The study was CPB funded. Google it if you like. Here, allow me...HERE. The whole PDF is write there, taken directly from the CPB website.

Diane Rehm hosts a news talk show, two hours a day, M-F. She is no different than Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly, or Keith Olbermann. The difference is that FoxNews and MSNBC fund themselves and my tax dollars pay to pay Diane Rehm and broadcast her opinions, opinions that are different than my own. NPR has no one on their show that refelcts MY opinions, yet, I still have to pay for it.

Rehm takes up just under 10% of NPR's weekly schedule. Prairie Home Companion takes another 3hrs per week, provided it's only aired once and provided that Garrison Keller does nothing else throughout the week. And even though I've heard anything terrible partisan from Click and Clack, the CarTalk guys, NPR is liberal, period. The fact that they were supported by George Soros to the tune of millions of dollars, after Soros said he was spending his money to take Republicans down really drives the point home. Why would Soros, who stated that he wants to support liberals, give money to NPR? Doesn't that put NPR in the same camp as MoveOn.org and MediaMatters.org? Or do you not think those are liberal outfits either?

Anyway, my point is that even if Rehm is providing editorial, it is the editorial section of any news org that makes up the overriding opinion of that organization. Rehm is the Bill O'Reilly of NPR and reflects their political leanings. So to say that NPR is not liberal only proves not only your ignorance, but worse as it shows that you are not someone to accept facts that may counter your preconceived notions. Ignorance is curable and forgivable. Stubbornness is not. I am terribly sorry.

Re:And look at it another way

[SETIGuy]

Yeah, and the military doesn't express my opinions either and I have to pay for it. I don't like my tax dollars funding churches in violation of the constitution but it happens anyway. And I certainly don't want to be paying for the salaries and health benefits for the bunch of ignorant jerkwads that just got elected. All those things cost me a hell of a lot more than the government funded 10% of NPR costs you, so go cry to someone who cares.

Gee, if Diane Rheem is do liberal, its a wonder her show doesn't play in the San Francisco bay area.

And enough with the George Soros crap already. So liberals have one billionaire willing to spend his money on elections. Unlike the ones on the right, he spends his money openly, rather than inventing a shill non-profit to take undisclosed donations.

Re:Basic science is fine but...

[gestalt_n_pepper]

All of that is an accidental outgrowth of the dream of human space exploration.
Fooey. All that is an intentional outgrowth of a policy of competing militarily with the Soviet Union while scoring political points at home. Space was our next battleground.

The technology migrated to the public sector as military technology is wont to do. There's no reason that investments in something a bit more practical, which would also yield more new technology.

And no, we're not on the verge of serious exploration of the solar system. It still costs too much. We may send more unmanned probes out, but I'll be we're not sending humans anywhere until we get something a little more sophisticated than rockets.

I feel cheated by this thing.

[SloWave]

I remember when they shut down the Apollo program to do this thing it was suppose to be a permanent hopping off point in space to get us out to the other planets and beyond. They never told us it was just going to go around circles just outside the atmosphere and let astronauts perform little science fair experiments and do little else. Basically, I believe now the space station and the space shuttle were just welfare programs for aerospace companies. Now NASA wants to crash it back to earth and loose everything. I don't blame Russia and the other countries wanting to detach their modules and taking them to play elsewhere. If NASA really wants to salvage the space station project, they need to push it to a higher, more useful orbit, and start building some real interplanetary manned (and unmanned) spaceships out there.

Re:I feel cheated by this thing.

[Anonymous Coward]

What would it take to move the ISS to a lagrange point?

Child support?

[Fuzzums]

Same goes for so many things. Part of the taxes I pay go to child support for dysfunctional families with a father in prison and so on.
Most of those children will vote for people and have ideas that I don't like, yet still my money goes there...
Where's my return of investment here?

Re:Child support?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well they're getting the money they'd be taking directly anyway - and you get to keep your kneecaps. :-)

Re:Child support?

[Anonymous Coward]

Same goes for so many things. Part of the taxes I pay go to child support for dysfunctional families with a father in prison and so on.
Most of those children will vote for people and have ideas that I don't like, yet still my money goes there...
Where's my return of investment here?

The return is that you live in a society that doesn't let children starve on the streets - or at least attempts not to. Even if you don't give a toss about current children, the same guarantee was made to you, whether you needed it or not. Complaining that you shouldn't have to pay for it because you didn't need it yourself is a bit like me complaining that I have just had to pay to renew my house insurance despite not making any claims last year.

Re:Child support?

[Anonymous Coward]

The opportunity cost of all the stuff you couldn't produce while trying to fend off the thugs who don't like the things you're spending your money on if the law of the jungle reigned?

Re:Child support?

[jd]

You get surprisingly good return for your investment. If the US had no preventative medicine and had lacked universal health care, then the moment Mexico had started suffering a major flu outbreak, the US would have suffered too. (Irony Mode Off.)

The poor often don't eat well, often don't have good accommodation, and often are subject to stresses that impact their immune systems. This makes the poor one of the best attack vectors a virus or a bacterium could have. Which is why virtually every epidemic and pandemic ever suffered has started with them and spread via them. The poor and the dysfunctional will have just as many geniuses as the rest of society, but if they don't get the education needed, that talent is wasted, and all the things that can come from such talent (one idea in the right place at the right time can spark an industry employing millions) are left to rot on the vine of the merely possible.

Quality of welfare (as opposed to quantity alone, you have to have both) is a brilliant way to invest money for a society. The lack of quality and the lack of quantity needed to make the quality matter can cripple a society. If 70% of the population are below the poverty threshold, then 70% of your industrialists can't afford to build industries. 70% of your inventors can't invent. 70% of your discoverers can't discover. Most countries could quite easily double their GDP within 5-10 years, but don't because although it's worth the investment, it's not worth the cost in votes.

Re:Child support?

[Fuzzums]

Poor and dysfunctional are two different things.
For poor people I'll gladly pay taxes to provide them with good education.

If I talk about dysfunctional, I talk about those that will "borrow" my bike or laptop one day. Or those that rather drink beer in the sun while I work for their child support.

Re:Child support?

[Anonymous Coward]

You think you're being funny, but this is studied and the ROI is enormous. For every $1 spent n Pre-K education, the ROI is $7.

http://eclkc.ohs.acf.hhs.gov/hslc/Program%20Design%20and%20Management/Fiscal/Financial%20Management/Budgets/Opinion1inpr.htm

Re:Child support?

[Anonymous Coward]

Think of it as revolution mitigation.

As we're seeing in the rise of the neo-Know Nothings, economic hardship leads to irrational anger. Without the welfare state, there'd be A LOT more people in the streets literally and figuratively calling for the heads of the bourgeoisie. It's why many Marxists would like nothing more than for the country to come crashing down in economic flames, because it would give them the environment they need to bring on a bloody revolution.

Re:Child support?

[coaxial]

Don't think about supporting the children of the prisoner. Think about all the money you're using to keep the father behind bars! P

Re:Child support?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's nothing. I pay taxes to build infrastructure for antisocial assholes like you. I wish I could banish you to a desert island where you can "invest" all for yourself.

ISS benefit

[mozumder]

Probably the biggest benefit of the ISS is the ability to be a stopping point for manned travel to other moons/planets.

Working together

[Sean_Inconsequential]

I would say the biggest thing we should take from the ISS is that it got several countries to work together toward a common goal. Certainly there were disagreements along the way, and that is to be expected. The main countries involved had plans for their individual space stations though none could afford them. Let's be honest, it is likely that will be the only way we get to Mars and beyond, several countries working together to get there.

Re:Working together

[Anonymous Coward]

I would say the biggest thing we should take from the ISS is that it got several countries to work together toward a common goal.

Only an American would think this is worth 100 billion dollars. Countries around the world have no problem working together for, what, as long as one can remember? Look as EU, look as ASEAN.

Perhaps instead of wasting 100B, your government might consider SAVING 100B in pointless wars around the world, then your country may find it easy to work with other countries?

Re:Working together

[Anonymous Coward]

Some people believe the space station served the purpose of keeping rocket scientists in failing Russia gainfully employeed with peaceful endeavors when they might have found alternate work building weapon delivery systems for other nations. How much is that worth?

Re:Working together

[Sean_Inconsequential]

You, as the colloquialism goes, are preaching to the choir, good sir.

Positive Externalities

[Anonymous Coward]

One thing that always gets my blood boiling reading these articles about how space programs are a waste is the complete ignorance of all the stuff that the space program has brought us.

http://www.thespaceplace.com/nasa/spinoffs.html

http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/11/is-space-exploration-worth-the-cost-a-freakonomics-quorum/

There's dozens more like these. Essentially, you can point to the fact that for every dollar we spend on the space program, the US economy is boosted by many times that amount. The above two papers cite $7 and $8 dollars as the figure, but don't have a source to point to- but depending on the study, I've heard the figure as high as $15. I would posit that very few federally funded programs can boast such a return on investment.

Freedom is overrated

[mozumder]

We need more government control, since government spending results in more spending within the US compared to consumer spending.

Freedom just means more corporate control, and the resulting export of money to foreign countries through corporations incorporated in foreign countries and shareholders in foreign countries.

Government doesn't have shareholders in foreign countries.

For the cost of one ISS ($100B)

[Snufu]

we could have sent up thirty Hubble telescopes ($5B).

Just sayin'.

Re:For the cost of one ISS ($100B)

[Snufu]

(edit: The $5B estimate for the Hubble includes multiple cost overruns due to it being a first iteration. Subsequent iterations would likely be cheaper, hence my guesstimate of one ISS ~ 30 Hubbles.)

Re:For the cost of one ISS ($100B)

[skywatcher2501]

100 / 5 = 30 for values of 5 extremely close to 10/3?

Re:For the cost of one ISS ($100B)

[pwnies]

It's a buy-two-get-one-free deal.

Re:For the cost of one ISS ($100B)

[Alastor187]

we could have sent up thirty Hubble telescopes ($5B).

Just sayin'.

Maybe nobody knew there was a $50 billion discount for buying Hubbles in bulk? ;-)

Re:For the cost of one ISS ($100B)

[Anonymous Coward]

No. No, no, no! Absolutely not! After the third one, they would only have cost $1B per, after the tenth one, $100M per. $100B would have launched a hell of a lot more than thirty Hubbles.

Re:For the cost of one ISS ($100B)

[Anonymous Coward]

5*30=100?

Re:For the cost of one ISS ($100B)

[crispytwo]

we could have sent up thirty Hubble telescopes ($5B).

Just sayin'.

Though I get what you are sayin', I don't think that would be true. Iff there were no ISS, there probably would be a huge increase in how much it would cost to put people up into space. For one, maintaining the shuttle program for the Hubble would not have happened, so it might be the $50B Hubble telescope, or the nice idea that never was.

The ISS kept (keeps) the space program in operation, and without it, I doubt there would be much drive to keep going back into space. The ISS is more than just NASA too. Don't forget about ESA, that probably wouldn't have existed, the CSA that barely is, in Canada, and the RSFA (Russia) that would be much worse off without it.

This is a big deal throughout the world, and is a significant contribution to space exploration, etc.

If you don't care about space exploration, then fine. $100B is a bunch of money. But then we can compare with other big recent expenses like oil spills, $3 billion for the BP disaster in the gulf canada.com -- which arguably didn't help humanity in any good way. Or, $750B for the Iraq war and the $300B for the Afghanistan war and the $28B for higher security (at airports? really?)... Then a $100B starts looking like the good looking sister. infoplease.com

Numbers at these huge values are always deceiving on what they bring and value they produce. Saying that spending x on y would do better is nonsense... it would bring something equally increased, but, also, something completely different. Spend it on oil spills and we'd have great oil pick up technology and nothing for space... Or maybe we would have some really nice houses and crappy oil pick up technology still, and nothing for space. It looks like the $30B for security brought us much better civic spying technology. I wonder if that is improving humanity? Maybe not as much as the ISS after all.

Re:For the cost of one ISS ($100B)

[The_mad_linguist]

Imagine a Beowulf cluster of them!

Re:For the cost of one ISS ($100B)

[IrquiM]

What would we do with thirty Hubble telescopes? And I guess development cost is included in the $5B since 100 / 30 = 3.33

Re:For the cost of one ISS ($100B)

[khallow]

Though I get what you are sayin', I don't think that would be true. Iff there were no ISS, there probably would be a huge increase in how much it would cost to put people up into space. For one, maintaining the shuttle program for the Hubble would not have happened, so it might be the $50B Hubble telescope, or the nice idea that never was.

The Shuttle is around four times the cost per kg of US commercial spaceflight alternatives like ULA's Atlas V or Delta IV Heavy. Those in turn are about double the cost of Russian launch vehicles like Proton or Soyuz. If we dropped both the ISS and Shuttle, NASA would, no doubt, have vastly cheaper access to space along with vastly more money to spend on useful space projects like multiple Hubble-class telescopes.

Re:For the cost of one ISS ($100B)

[Anonymous Coward]

30*5=100? I think someone needs some money for mathematics research.

Re:For the cost of one ISS ($100B)

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm... 5(billion) x 30 (billion) = ? I dare say it's not 100 billion.

Re:For the cost of one ISS ($100B)

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, you probably have sent up about eleven of these already:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-11_KENNAN

Re:For the cost of one ISS ($100B)

[Anonymous Coward]

we could have sent up thirty Hubble telescopes ($5B).

...or taught billions of people how to do basic arithmetic correctly.

Re:For the cost of one ISS ($100B)

[Anonymous Coward]

As long as you're right 97% of the time, who cares about the other 4% eh?

"Competitive"?

[mozumder]

The ISS, or the LHC, or any other major research project wasn't built with competition in mind.

Competition is a bad thing, not a good thing. It results in monopolies, since the whole point of competition is to eliminate competitors.

Why would you want monopolies?

Re:"Competitive"?

[Normal Dan]

Erm... The lack of competition is what makes monopolies.

Re:"Competitive"?

[mozumder]

No. Competition is what MAKES monopolies.

The lack of competition IS a monopoly.

Government is a monopoly.

Fortunately, government's interest is the public's interest.

Meanwhile, a private company doesn't have a public interest. They should not be allowed to have monopolies through competition.

Re:"Competitive"?

[Anonymous Coward]

If it's the LHC, magnetic monopolies would be a great thing.

Re:"Competitive"?

[Muros]

Cart before the horse son. Monopolies create a lack of competition, not the other way round.

Re:"Competitive"?

[Muros]

Fortunately, government's interest is the public's interest.

In theory.

Re:"Competitive"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Competition only results in monopolies when one company is dramatically more efficient (Intel at various points in time for instance) or when the product admits a natural monopoly (phone/power companies where it is silly to lay multiple lines to the same home). In most other markets competition keeps prices in check because anyone who attempts to abuse their market share to increase profit generally loses that market share fairly promptly - if Dell or WalMart raised its prices for instance. Collusion (recent cases against ram and LCD manufacturers) can still occur, but that's anti-competitive behavior. If you look back at some of the horrible monopolies in the Robber Baron days, you see that they were achieved by dramatically cutting costs/prices and the prices stayed low to prevent entry of competitors rather than rising to what a monopolist market would allow for maximum profit.

Re:"Competitive"?

[lennier]

Do not pass Go. Do not collect 500 Higgs Bosons.

Re:"Competitive"?

[dfenstrate]

The ISS, or the LHC, or any other major research project wasn't built with competition in mind.

Competition is a bad thing, not a good thing. It results in monopolies, since the whole point of competition is to eliminate competitors.

Why would you want monopolies?

Competition also drives improvements. Why would you deliver a better product unless you would gain from doing so? If no one competes with you, by definition you have a monopoly, and there's no reason for you to improve what you're offering to your customers. You'd probably just sit there, making the same barely adequate product until the end of time.

Re:"Competitive"?

[mozumder]

You know that copyrights and patents are government-granted monopolies, right?

Re:"Competitive"?

[dfenstrate]

You know that copyrights and patents are government-granted monopolies, right?

For limited times, specifically to encourage development of new products to compete in the marketplace. If someone can freely copy something that took you significant resources to develop or write, then that reduces your incentive to improve.

I'm not sure why you think that advances your position. There's certainly room in our world for cooperative research projects, but competition is vital to the advancement of humanity as a whole.

Re:"Competitive"?

[mozumder]

Give an example of where you think "competition" enabled scientific progress.

Who were they competing against?

Re:"Competitive"?

[Teancum]

Give an example of where you think "competition" enabled scientific progress.

Who were they competing against?

The most clear-cut example of competition that has enabled scientific progress that I can think of is the Ansari X-Prize. This was completely financed through private means and was a flat-out competition to see who would "win" ten million dollars that generated a whole bunch of interest from a variety of backgrounds.

The end result of this competition is a half-dozen companies from this competition who are still putting things together and making things happen with spaceflight that simply would never have been attempted through a government contract, and more significantly these organizations who are developing spaceflight on their own dime are also cutting costs for getting into space to such an embarrassing level that traditional procurement methods for spaceflight are now being dismissed.

The real winners from this "competition"? Scientists who now have a whole range of platforms for doing atmospheric studies that simply didn't exist before, where experiments that simply were too expensive to repeat and do on a regular basis are now being opened up due to the incredibly low cost from reusable vehicles capable of going into space.

You asked for an example, this is about as clear cut as it gets. The Google Lunar X-Prize may end up doing something similar and even more profound in terms of planetary exploration away from the Earth.

I could name many other examples including things that aren't contests necessarily that has enabled scientific progress, including many examples from the computer industry where I can document "intellectual property" laws are doing much more harm than good. Patent law as applied to computer software is especially horrible and a mis-application of government authority on something clearly not needed.

Re:"Competitive"?

[CondeZer0]

> Fortunately, government's interest is the public's interest.

The government's interest is the interest of those that make up the government: for the most part politicians and bureaucrats.

No

[Anonymous Coward]

:)

Not worth the price...

[Anonymous Coward]

... considering you can install some LAMP boxes for free.

Wait, the ISS?

100 Billion?

[Belial6]

100 Billion? Is that all it cost? With a population of just over 300 million, that means it cost us less than $350 per person over 10 years? I would have to give a resounding yes. ~$35 a year per person is a bargain.

I have a crazy idea. Lets make a space tax. 1% of any revenue generated directly from space goes to new space research. So, any telephone plan that uses satellites, television programming that uses satellites, satellite photos that use satellites, all get taxed at 1% to further the industry. Obviously any services that are consumed in space would be exempt.

Re:100 Billion?

[darkwing_bmf]

Does the term "opportunity cost" mean anything to you?

Re:100 Billion?

[Lanteran]

A tax dedicated to furthering technological progress? Experts say it'll happen on February 31, 2011.

Circle of Grant Money

[Anomalyx]

I think those who are naysayers haven't given us a chance — haven't given us enough time to show what we can do.

I'm 100% sure that in another 10 years, when we still haven't seen anything of value come from the ISS, they'll say the same thing. It's a convincing argument, until someone realizes that it follows horrible logic. Basically they want us to fund them until they find something, then fund them some more. There's nothing that says anything interesting will ever come out of it. I'm not saying they shouldn't do research, I'm just saying I don't want that much money coming out of my (taxpayer) pocket.

Re:Circle of Grant Money

[Anonymous Coward]

Says the man who probably uses dozens of technologies in his daily life, developed because of our space program.

Re:Circle of Grant Money

[10101001 10101001]

I'm not saying they shouldn't do research, I'm just saying I don't want that much money coming out of my (taxpayer) pocket.

The ISS costs $100 Billion over 30 years, or $24/year/taxpayer. Meanwhile, defensing spending--which including the salaries, health care, etc of most troops along with most (all?) the jets, tanks, etc--is ~$4000/year/taxpayer. The Iraq/Afghan Wars are costing an additional ~$940/year/taxpayer. I'm not saying we shouldn't defend our country, I'm just saying that I don't want that much money coming out of my (taxpayer) pocket.

PS - I'm pretty sure I've gotten a lot more out of the ISS so far in pictures, news stories, etc than I've gotten out of the Iraq/Afghan Wars and for a lot less cost or deaths. Yet, I still have higher expectations for the ISS. But, then, my expectations aren't focused on quickly marketable results as much as good science and long-term benefit. I do lament those who feel obligated to spin the ISS in such a way to obtain/sustain funding, especially if they're right about the necessity for such. Then I have to think back to people who talk about their "(taxpayer) pocket" but never seem to bother to go over the budget to actually have a clue where their money is being spent.

Re:Circle of Grant Money

[khallow]

Meanwhile, defensing spending--which including the salaries, health care, etc of most troops along with most (all?) the jets, tanks, etc--is ~$4000/year/taxpayer.

The US citizen got something concrete with defense spending. They get elimination of two hostile powers over the past ten years and continued maintenance of a economic hegemony, worth trillions of dollars a year (IMHO). Also, the military spending continued to support the primary goal of protecting the US and its citizens from other military powers. To complain about military spending, you have to first understand the point of the military spending. (And if it weren't for the considerable number of adults (getting towards 100 million adults) who don't pay any taxes, the number of dollars per taxpayer would be a bit under $3,000 per taxpayer.)

My take is that the US is overpaying for military expenditures by a considerable amount, both through hiring private contractors at several times the costs to do jobs the military used to do, and by excessive cost for acquisition of military systems and logistics (which traditionally has always been high cost for what it provides).

The ISS has a few concrete things as well. It's a demonstration of orbital assembly techniques and that you can have six people live in space indefinitely. It might do some useful science as well (the trick here being to find science that is both valuable and can only be done in space). But is it worth $100 billion? I don't see it.

Re:Circle of Grant Money

[10101001 10101001]

The US citizen got something concrete with defense spending. They get elimination of two hostile powers over the past ten years

While the elimination of the Iraq and Afghanistan governments might be concrete, I don't see how either has benefited the US citizen. Neither Iraq nor Afghanistan attacked or were likely to attack the US. Al Qaeda still exists and seemingly just as capable of attempting rouge operations (their success being more thwartable probably more due to heightened anxiety/paranoia and and the intelligence community, not the military). The Taliban still exists and provides some level of safe harbor although admittedly less of it and a lot more directly (the Taliban in the past merely looked the other way in large part). Any actual gains to US citizens are a lot less concrete; I don't doubt they're there, but it's not something you could bring forwards as proof of the need for action.

and continued maintenance of a economic hegemony, worth trillions of dollars a year (IMHO).

Except that hegemony is deteriorating. China has and is growing at an enormous rate and it's unlikely that a military solution will somehow maintain the US's economy state in the world.

Also, the military spending continued to support the primary goal of protecting the US and its citizens from other military powers.

Not to mention protecting its allies indirectly by freeing them from having as large of standing armies. No doubt, we do need military spending. My point was that at over 100x the spending of the ISS, one should consider complaining about the actual waste there first, especially when a significant part of that waste gives you nothing.

To complain about military spending, you have to first understand the point of the military spending.

I think I understand the point of military spending. The fact is, while the point of the military might be and have been true for various purposes (maintaining the economic state of the US, attacking actually hostile states (not simply ones with possibly nasty rhetoric), etc), the military has often been abused for other things which have not been of much concrete value. Now, overall there's been a significant benefit. But, what I speak of could translate into perhaps a 20% waste of badly focused upon projects. Even if it were 1%, avoiding that waste alone would save $60 billion/year or 18x what the ISS costs yearly.

(And if it weren't for the considerable number of adults (getting towards 100 million adults) who don't pay any taxes, the number of dollars per taxpayer would be a bit under $3,000 per taxpayer.)

And then it'd be $14/year/taxpayer for the ISS. Either way, it's a lot of money both by percentage of taxes spent and as a raw number; added in all US residents doesn't change that figure much either.

My take is that the US is overpaying for military expenditures by a considerable amount, both through hiring private contractors at several times the costs to do jobs the military used to do, and by excessive cost for acquisition of military systems and logistics (which traditionally has always been high cost for what it provides).

The military also tends to fund multiple projects to do the same thing, given one or more might fail in development and each project if it succeeds is probably better suited for specific tasks. In any case, now that it's recognized the US probably overpays on the military, we can both agree that that should be corrected regardless of what is done about the ISS, right?

The ISS has a few concrete things as well. It's a demonstration of orbital assembly techniques and that you can have six people live in space indefinitely. It might do some useful science as well (the trick here being to find science that is both valuable and can only be done in space

Is it really?

[pavon]

Sure, back when the space agency was pushing the cutting edge it resulted in the development of a large amount of new technology. But is that really true today, now that we are just applying tried and true principles? I haven't heard of a single invention that came out of the ISS which has made it's way into the civilian marketplace.

Furthermore, if building anything high tech will result in new tech, then doesn't it make sense to choose goals that are useful and worthwhile by themselves, over something that is a waste of money - we are getting the same indirect return either way.

Re:Is it really?

[cjonslashdot]

I agree with you. I think that the space station was essentially a program championed by the aerospace contractors to keep the gravy train rolling after the Apollo program was canceled. The ISS was a huge waste of money. Big, inefficient projects to create things that had already been invented during Apollo. The Space Shuttle was a similar waste of money.

Instead of spending money on these mundane things, NASA should have been pushing the envelope in new propulsion systems. Yet, almost all of that research got canceled during the 70s. Now it is reviving, after we have lost 40 years.

Re:Is it really?

[HuguesT]

Hello,

NASA should have been pushing the envelope in new propulsion systems.

They did, but as a background effort. The problem is basic physics. Essentially we have a choice between chemical propulsion, which is essentially as efficient now as it will ever be, or nuclear propulsion, which is extremely polluting. There is no other choice given our current knowledge of physics.

With nuclear propulsion we think we can go anywhere in the Solar system without too much effort, but the expense is staggering. Think sending millions of tons of material into orbit, or if you prefer thousand of space stations. Think spending 100 of trillions instead of mere billions. it got cancelled in the 70s because of the cold war. There was a hard-won treaty that said the cold war would not extend into space and that killed all space nuclear research right off.

This is something that can only work in global peacetime. Also we probably need controlled fusion rather than controlled fission. In other words, we are not ready, either politically or scientifically.

Re:Is it really?

[TheRaven64]

A list of two items, and you miss the two propulsion systems that are getting a lot of attention at the moment; solar and electric. Ion drives are neither chemical nor nuclear, they can use any electrical power source (which can be nuclear, can be solar, can even be some form of battery) to accelerate the reaction mass. Ion drives decouple the reaction mass from the fuel, so they can achieve very efficient thrust.

Solar sails are have no reaction mass, their thrust is quite low but it's essentially free.

Re:Is it really?

[cjonslashdot]

There are many different forms of nuclear propulsion. One example is using a reactor to provide electrical energy to power a plasma propulsion system. This is how the VASIMR system works (adastrarocket.com). Another technique is to use microscopic pellets of fissile material and electron beams to compress the pellets to critical density to produce fission, to heat a very small reaction mass (e.g., water or hydrogen) to a very high temperature, generating a large impulse from very little reaction mass. The electron beam system for this is about the size of a refrigerator: the beam energies required are very achievable. This approach has the advantage that it can generate a very high thrust for a long period. The only technical challenge is controlling the plasma, but the VASIMR systems shows that that is possible. A third, widely popularized method, is to explode atomic bombs behind a very large ablative plate. This is the least feasible technique, yet somehow it has remained in the public discussion and has been depicted in several movies (e.g., Deep Impact). Other techniques, which have been used since the 60s, include nuclear batteries to power an ion engine, using small but continuous trust.

The pellet implosion technique is the most promising, but it can only be used beyond the atmosphere because it releases radioactivity. However, for an interplanetary vehicle that is boarded from orbit, this is not a problem.

Fusion is an exciting possibility, but it is far off, and it is not needed to achieve interplanetary travel.

Re:Is it really?

[Anonymous Coward]

But is that really true today, now that we are just applying tried and true principles? I haven't heard of a single invention that came out of the ISS which has made it's way into the civilian marketplace.

1. Calling anything with manned space flight tried and true is downright ignorant. Human presence in space is barely in its infancy, and you're already acting like it's old news. You're like a kid who managed to get a bathtub to float in the pool in his back yard and acting like you just crossed the Atlantic.

2. Inventions don't usually "come out of" space programs, they aren't magical invention factories that just start puking new products out. For example, data is gathered on the materials used for the outer shell of the ISS every day in terms of longevity, resistance to stress, radiation, debris, temperature flucuation, etc. This is not laboratory simulated, this is the Real Shit and nothing can replace it. This data will get mined and used by other researches and engineers in multiple fields... for example auto engineers will examine it as they find ways to make cars lighter and stronger. Maybe they use it, maybe not- it saves them time from having to research it themselves, it may provide an idea for a direction to move in, or rule out an option which they might otherwise waste time on.

Furthermore, if building anything high tech will result in new tech, then doesn't it make sense to choose goals that are useful and worthwhile by themselves, over something that is a waste of money - we are getting the same indirect return either way.

You're not correct in your assumption; different projects will have various degrees of success in terms of the resulting generation of tech. Space is a unique engineering challenge and all the data is useful if for no other reason than we have so little data available. This is fundamental research, it just isn't easy to directly measure the benefit in terms of consumer products. And I haven't even addressed the political and social benefits of the program.

Invalid question

[Enry]

It's an invalid question for two reasons:

1) It's teaching us about how to live, build, and work long term in space. We need that knowledge to go to the moon and mars.

2) You can't put a price tag on basic research. There's no guarantee that you'll find what you're looking for, or if you'll find what you're looking for, or if you find something completely different. Any of those answers could be worth nothing, it could be worth new industries, it could be life saving. There's no way of telling until you've spent the time and money on it.

How do you quantify the cost for basic research?

[johanwanderer]

The research that goes into making the ISS a viable space station is important for the future. To ask if the ISS is worth $100 billion is like to ask if the wheel is worth 500 years of rolling things down hill, of if the splint axe is worth $x. If it were not for those things, we probably would not be having this discussion now.

We have the mean to fund such research. Therefore we should.

Another way to look at it.

[Firethorn]

Another way to look at it is 'opportunity cost'. What if we'd thrown the $100B into wind technology research? Solar Cells*? Cellulostic Ethanol? Battery tech? Cancer prevention? A replacement for the shuttle? Thorium nuclear power?

Personally, I think the ISS is what happens when you go at something but don't go in ENOUGH. We'd have had a lot more actual research for the buck if we'd payed the extra money to get the thing assembled and working on schedule, rather than have modules go end of life without real use because you didn't have the full crew up there, because you don't have the necessary equipment up there to do research, because of delay, delay, delay.

*I'm sure at least some of that $100B ended up towards solar research, but eh...

Re:Another way to look at it.

[SETIGuy]

Another way to look at it is 'opportunity cost'. What if we'd thrown the $100B into wind technology research? Solar Cells*? Cellulostic Ethanol? Battery tech? Cancer prevention? A replacement for the shuttle? Thorium nuclear power?

Some government research dollars need to go toward things that don't have an immediate economic payback. Even a corporation watching the quarterly statements would have a reason to put money into researching those things. And in case you haven't checked both DOE and NIH have larger budgets than NASA. I'd be surprised if we hadn't thrown $100B into cancer prevention alone in that time period.

Re:Another way to look at it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed, except for the nuclear power bit.

Thorium nuclear power would have been just throwing more good money at the bad money already spent on nuclear without much in terms of return.

There is no single example of a commercially successful nuclear program anywhere in the world. Nuclear is more expensive than space.

Re:Another way to look at it.

[biryokumaru]

Boy are you misinformed.

Re:Another way to look at it.

[Muros]

Better still if we actually built a space STATION instead of a little orbiting box. I can remember reading about that proposed railgun spacelaunch system for (non-fragile) materials; with something like that floating in the pacific or atlantic coupled with research into low/zero gravity manufacturing, the space station could be much more impressive, and at relatively low cost compared to what it has been so far. Of course, it does all boil down to research in the direction of Von Neumann machines, which is what a self constructing space station you blast material at from earth would be. But for any realistic attempt at space exploration/colonisation, Von Neumann machines, or at least processes, are what we need.

Re:Another way to look at it.

[Firethorn]

Thanks for your reply. Oddly, it appears my post got cut off on submission, as it was complete in preview. WTH?

Still, most of it got in there.

The ISS would indeed have been a valid stepping stone. Problem is that we never met a bunch of design goals due to funding difficulties. Modules were hitting their end of life before any research was done in them because the station didn't have full manning or construction.

We can't really build manufacturing up there until we have the tech to simply LIVE up there. That would have been the primary goal of the ISS. Your idea would have been more the replacement for ISS, which we'd have been considering right now if we'd stuck to the schedule.

I like the railgun idea, it'd certainly save some money. My other though would have been to have the station in a better(higher) orbit, then you don't bring materials down. Design some sort of solar furnace/forge and start recycling material, even if only into shielding material at first.

Re:Another way to look at it.

[Firethorn]

Yeah, cancer prevention gets lots of money. Still, I don't think Cellulostic Ethanol has gotten $100B put into it yet. Battery tech, probably, but we still have a ways to go. Thorium power is another one that with $100B of funding I'd expect to see 10-50 Gigawatts of generating capacity up and running.

Not sure if $100B could have replaced the shuttles, but we'd be a heck of a lot closer.

All of this is dependent on my idea that we didn't actually fund the ISS enough. We did the equivalent of delaying construction on a building so much that we're having to conduct repairs on the building before we can even finish it. Or the guy who buys a classic car to restore; only he's working on it so slowly that it's rotting faster than he's fixing it.

We spent more maintaining the ISS than we did doing research with it. Most of our R&D in association with it ended up being in how to maintain the ISS. Some useful knowledge on living in space, but not as much as if we'd properly funded it.

Re:Another way to look at it.

[h4rm0ny]

There is no single example of a commercially successful nuclear program anywhere in the world.

France.

Hindsight

[sodavatn]

Anybody heard of this concept before ? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindsight_bias

The question is, is google and facebook worth it

[nibbles2004]

Google's what $150 billion, Facebook $10 billion , ISS is a steal at $100 billion and will in history be far more relevant than most other things from today.

There are really two questions here

[g01d4]

The first: is a space station worth a large government investment, and the second is are we really getting our money's worth. I think the answer to the first is yes, especially if one thinks of the space station as an R&D effort of a magnitude and scope outside the typical commercial realm that can yield several benefits; mostly in engineering as opposed to pure science. The answer to the second question is not as clear.

Re:There are really two questions here

[mrcleaver]

I don't know if the space station was worth it or not, but I agree with you strongly on the engineering point.

Why do we only look at the space station from a basic science output perspective? Can we not look at it from the perspective of what kind of engineering achievement it is to have constructed this giant ass thing in ORBIT?

I would be shocked if the construction of the space station didn't teach us a lot about what it takes to build structures in space and the challenges that can come up, and that these experiences will be invaluable for future space exploration.

I have the answer

[roc97007]

Let's convince NASA that the space station is a money pit and they should sell it to Virgin Galactic at scrap prices.

Re:Basic science is fine but...

[Goetterdaemmerung]

And no, we're not on the verge of serious exploration of the solar system. It still costs too much. We may send more unmanned probes out, but I'll be we're not sending humans anywhere until we get something a little more sophisticated than rockets.

We won't get anything more sophisticated than rockets without a long-term research entity like NASA + a purpose - such as a space station. Corporations can't substitute for #1. Unmanned probes can't substitute for #2.

the ISS is not worth a damn penny

[FudRucker]

if you can not get it back down to earth undamaged so you can re-sell it, it might be worth a little up in orbit to those that can get to it, but it is more of an expense than an equity.

Re:the ISS is not worth a damn penny

[jimmydigital]

if you can not get it back down to earth undamaged so you can re-sell it, it might be worth a little up in orbit to those that can get to it, but it is more of an expense than an equity.

Unless of course you are looking for real estate in space. Existing home beats new construction every day of the week.

Depends on who you ask

[toppavak]

"The product of mental labor — science — always stands far below its value, because the labor-time necessary to reproduce it has no relation at all to the labor-time required for its original production." - Karl Marx

Re:Depends on who you ask

[Anonymous Coward]

no better person for creating mental ideas... depending on how you use the word mental of course...

Chance?

[mosb1000]

There are a lot of good ideas that haven't received $100,000,000,000 of development. How much of a chance does this thing need?

Wrong Question

[mhollis]

This is the wrong question that keeps getting asked again and again. It's the "NASA shouldn't send men into outer space" meme that closely accompanies the "NASA should only use robotic spacecraft" meme.

This is blue-sky (well, since it's space, its probably black) research. This is the last vestige of this type of research that the United States has any investment in. the Reagan Administration axed all federal funding for this kind of ongoing research at Universities and think tanks long ago. But, since NASA had landed on the Moon, the Reagan Administration didn't want to cut this for fear they'd be hounded out of office.

But CNN correspondents breathlessly ask Astronaut after Astronaut in "exclusive" interviews, taking up precious air time, "Considering the dangers, should we really keep putting men up into outer space?"

Call me an Old Fossil, but I was there. Not once did Walter Cronkite ask the Apollo Astronauts this question. Everyone knew the answer. "Of course!" Even after the near-disaster that was Apollo 13, everyone was still just fine with the idea of going to the Moon. And we did it four more times, putting eight more men on the Moon. And we completely revolutionized our understanding of the Earth-Moon system and its origins.

When NASA pulls its head out and gets the right teams together, they can do anything. And that includes helping pull Chilean miners out of the ground. (Oh, maybe there are some scientists at NASA who know a thing or two because of all this money being thrown at these "blue sky" projects!) The only limitation is funding, and NASA's funds have been cut, sliced, diced and reduced to the point where they cannot get off the ground any more. NASA is on life support, dependent utterly on 1960s-era technology supplied by Russia. When NASA was flying things with the Shuttle, people my size could go into outer space (I stand 6'5"). Now that we're all "back to the future" with Russian space capsules, It has increased to 6'3" because Russia generously redesigned their capsules, which were limited to 5'11". Russian capsules are what our Astronauts called "Spam in the can."

Everyone here on Slashdot uses a computer for something. And I'll bet over 90% of slashdotters are using microcomputers to get on line. Microcomputers were developed based on needs by NASA to have computers that were light enough to be on a spacecraft because you couldn't fit a room-sized mainframe on an Apollo spacecraft or on the Lunar Excursion Module. So, let's see. We have this little space race thing that ends in the 1970s with NASA pouring money into little teeny solid state computing devices and you get the Apple ][ computer in 1977. And the IBM PC four years later. The last Apollo spacecraft was designed around 1967 more or less so I have to ask the naysayers what they're expecting to see in about ten years now that the ISS is complete. because everybody knows NASA science doesn't contribute to anything down here on earth.

I get absolutely disgusted and horrified when I hear and read this line of reasoning. Here we have this community on slashdot that is the beneficiary of the technology that NASA's scientists had a major hand in developing and you're discussing piddling nonsense.

Blue sky research generally takes about ten to fifteen, sometimes 20 years to result in something you hold in your hand. That's why it's called blue sky research, because it seems like you're funding a bunch of people looking up at the sky and asking why it is blue. But it always results in benefits to humanity that are incalculable. The United States is the only remaining superpower in the world. Rather than developing and maintaining stuff to kill people, we should be throwing big budgets at NASA and at other blue sky research. But, ever since Reagan took away the funding in our Universities (saying the Government is the problem), we have had none at Universities and a dwindling amount at NASA.

Slashdotters should be ashamed these questions are being asked.

Re:Wrong Question

[0123456]

Here we have this community on slashdot that is the beneficiary of the technology that NASA's scientists had a major hand in developing and you're discussing piddling nonsense.

Microcomputer development had very little to do with NASA. At worst they might have appeared a few years later than they did because the AGC pushed IC production rates and quality up while pushing price down.

And that work was done by MIT and their hardware manufacturers, NASA just gave them the specs and the money.

Re:Wrong Question

[MadUndergrad]

When NASA pulls its head out and gets the right teams together, they can do anything.

That's a foolish thing to say. They really can't do anything. It makes about as much sense as saying "When Archimedes pulls his head out and gets the right teams together, he can do anything." It's just not true. There are limitations, physical and practical, that NASA can never overcome. Could Archimedes have built a really tall ladder? Sure. Could he have built a space elevator? No. Not with all the money in the world and 500 years. He would have long since bankrupted Sicily and probably been conquered sooner than he was had he tried. At best they might have learned the limits of wood construction.

We would be far better off researching the things that we need to know for space exploration directly rather than spending the money to keep guys living in cans 100 miles overhead. We can research materials, propulsion, computers, vacuums etc. on Earth or with robotic probes. We don't need a manned space program to drive this research - if we can muster the will to put people in space we can muster the will to research these topics.

So by all means lets increase NASA's budget, but I have yet to hear a convincing argument that a manned program is worth more on a dollar-to-dollar basis with an unmanned program, or even close in terms of science output.

Re:Wrong Question

[KZigurs]

United States are a superpower? Ghmm, somebody please tell China that the fatties are getting all worked up and ambitious again...

Re:Wrong Question

[Stuntmonkey]

I wouldn't read Slashdot general sentiment as opposing space research in general, rather the opposite. The question is whether the ISS represents R&D at all. What do we gain from the experience that we didn't get from Skylab, or Mir? To me the ISS represents a failure of imagination. The ISS does not advance human imagination or technology or capability along any dimension. I'm in favor of spending $100B on space exploration, I just think the goals should be worthy.

It's also a cognitive error to say: This program is justified because we got a lot of useful spinoffs from similar projects in the past (microelectronics, Tang, ...). That logic could justify *any* space-oriented program, and obviously they can't all be justified.

Re:Wrong Question

[lennier]

Not once did Walter Cronkite ask the Apollo Astronauts this question. Everyone knew the answer. "Of course!"

Everyone also 'knew' that we'd have colonies on the Moon in 2001 and that there would be a grand future for human life in the solar system, and probably alien ruins on Mars and Venus.

I grew up believing this too. But the hard lesson I've learned is that most of that Space Age propaganda was just that - a falsely idealistic vision of human colonisation designed to justify what was basically the ICBM and satellite program.

Yes, the Apollo computer did a lot of pioneering research in real-time operating systems. But so did the Minuteman computer, and how many people would argue that we NEEDED a hair-trigger nuclear Armageddon device in order to advance human knowledge? If we wanted to invest government money to build computers, we could have done just that, rather than creating a space vehicle to drive demand for them.

The truth is that NASA's 'civilian' space vehicles and the military ICBM projects were joined at the hip, using the exact same launch vehicles in many cases (Atlas, Redstone, Titan). Dropping nuclear weapons on the USSR and intercepting their communications were the bill-paying 'killer apps' - manned spaceflight itself was just a spinoff.

Even so-called 'pure science' satellite launches from the 1960s USA have now been declassified and reveal secret military missions behind them - for example, the Galactic Radiation and Background mission. This revelation ought to shock us - no wonder the USSR seemed so paranoid and distrustful of our peaceful scientific initiatives! Because many of them weren't peaceful at all, just cover for spy stuff.

And the US military-industrial space complex was perfectly happy to lie to the US civilian population about the true intent of some of these launches. Shouldn't that not happen in a democracy?

Rather than developing and maintaining stuff to kill people, we should be throwing big budgets at NASA and at other blue sky research. But, ever since Reagan took away the funding in our Universities (saying the Government is the problem), we have had none at Universities and a dwindling amount at NASA.

I agree that if we're willing to spend money on military space infrastructure (like Reagan did with SDI), it would be better to spend that sort of money on open-source civilian spaceflight than in the black military world.

But if what we actually want is NOT just pretty space hardware, but breakthroughs in technology with terrestrial applications, I think it would be even better to just fund those breakthrough studies directly, rather than funding an expensive space mission and hoping that somehow something somewhere down the line might spin off into the commercial world.

Re:Wrong Question

[khallow]

So by all means lets increase NASA's budget, but I have yet to hear a convincing argument that a manned program is worth more on a dollar-to-dollar basis with an unmanned program, or even close in terms of science output.

How much would it cost to duplicate the Apollo missions? I figure the part of Apollo that actually went to the Moon (strip off Mercury, Gemini, and Skylab) cost somewhere around 100-150 billion in today's dollars (depending on what you think the rate of inflation should be, I consider the lower number more reasonable). For that they got 21 unmanned missions and six manned missions.

The last three of the manned missions in particular returned considerable quantities of lunar material from up to around 2.5 km (IIRC) from the landing sites and remain among the most important scientific efforts in the Solar System. I would consider them more significant even than the Voyager missions to the outer planets. That's because we got concrete physical evidence about the early Solar System during what is called the Hadean era a period from roughly 4.6 billion years ago during what is thought to be Earth's (and the Moon's) formation through to roughly 3.8 billion years ago which is the age of the oldest rocks known on Earth. That era has been erased from Earth's geological record, but not from the Moon. In total, there's been as I understand it, almost 400 kg of lunar material returned.

So having hyped that up, what could a series of unmanned missions do? First, at the time of Apollo, the effort could not be repeated exactly with an unmanned effort. Only recently have we made unmanned vehicles on Earth with similar mobility to the lunar rovers used in the last three lunar missions. So right away, we're looking at a 30 to 40 year delay in capabilities present in the Apollo program. Duplicating the original 21 unmanned probes probably would cost a similar amount, say $10 billion in today's dollar, though I imagine it'll decline significantly in the future with commercial space launch continuing to improve. Meanwhile the only planned sample return mission we know of, to Mars, is budgeted something like $7 billion dollars. At a stab, I consider $20 billion in the neighborhood for 6 very aggressive, high mobility, high return mass missions. So my view is that if we flew all this stuff in the near future, it'd cost us at least $30 billion to duplicate what is probably cost $100 billion way back in the 60s and 70s. It's probably a lot worse for two reasons. First, you have to consider the time value of returning lunar samples in say 1972 instead of 2017. In other words, because we flew Apollo then, we have perhaps 45 more years to look at those lunar samples and integrate those ideas into everything we do. Second, you have to consider whether we'd need to develop more advanced launch vehicles to handle these missions. What is the mass of a vehicle that needs to return say, 80 kg of lunar material from the Moon and deliver an advanced rover capable of collecting that much material? A huge part of the Apollo program was the development of the Saturn V.

Finally, it's worth noting that Apollo was primarily a prestige thing. The science was mostly incidental. Who knows what value we'd have gotten out of Apollo, if we had focused more on the science than on getting there first? Maybe using a smaller rocket that was a bit more cost effective or launched more frequently? For example, doing an Apollo mission in two launches of a half-sized vehicle instead of one Saturn V, results in a higher launch frequency. That seems to help with cost per launch even if the same amount of payload is launched.

Re:Wrong Question

[khallow]

Just a quick question, why did we spend $100 billion to build a $30 billion space station? All this chatter about the value of the ISS, ignores that we paid too much. All we had to do was leave the Russians and the Space Shuttle out of the loop. NASA could have launched the ISS components (which would have to be narrowed a bit in width, but otherwise unchanged) on the Saturn 1B, Atlas V, and/or Delta IV Heavy (or equivalents). People can be so casual with Other Peoples' Money.

Re:Wrong Question

[SpleenVenter]

Applause. Nicely said.

The "right" question is "how much is it worth to take the first few steps to insure the long-term survival of the human species?"

We've got to go physically into space to do that, and there is no substitute the for the experience we've gained with the entire space program from the first baby steps to the current ISS mission.

Re:Wrong Question

[DerekLyons]

But CNN correspondents breathlessly ask Astronaut after Astronaut in "exclusive" interviews, taking up precious air time, "Considering the dangers, should we really keep putting men up into outer space?" Call me an Old Fossil, but I was there. Not once did Walter Cronkite ask the Apollo Astronauts this question.

You may have been there - but you sure weren't paying attention. That question was asked repeatedly.
 

Everyone here on Slashdot uses a computer for something. And I'll bet over 90% of slashdotters are using microcomputers to get on line. Microcomputers were developed based on needs by NASA to have computers that were light enough to be on a spacecraft because you couldn't fit a room-sized mainframe on an Apollo spacecraft or on the Lunar Excursion Module.

Wrong. The Apollo and LEM guidance computers were based on the Polaris (SLBM) guidance computers - and were built with space qualified IC chips originally developed for the USAF and the USN for ballistic missiles.
 
Microprocessors, the necessary precursor to microcomputers, wouldn't be developed for another decade - and when they were, they were developed by a commercial company for hand calculators.
 

The last Apollo spacecraft was designed around 1967

Wrong again - the basic design for Apollo was frozen in 1963 and did not undergo significant modification thereafter.

Re:Wrong Question

[Dhrakar]

Sir (or ma'am ;-), I greatly wish I could give you a 'Hell Yes!' and a + to the moderation. For several years now the US has been reduced to focussing on the next quarter and no longer looks at the big picture. You can see this in Wall Street, in the budgets for technology companies, in the lack of University R&D... etc. If it isn't shiny and available-right-now it is beyond our attention span and seen to be without value. Even in my own field of supercomputing I see this (folks don't want a bleeding-edge system ... they just want big clusters).
    We are, I think, currently living on the fruits of fundamental research that was done in the 60s and 70s. Since then, we have been (to stretch another analogy) eating our R&D seed-corn and not planting for 10, 15 or more years out. It will definitely bite us in the butt soon.

Re:Wrong Question

[geekgirlandrea]

And I'll bet over 90% of slashdotters are using microcomputers to get on line.

Nope, sorry, I only log on from my System/360 so I can troll with JCL.

Re:Wrong Question

[Anonymous Coward]

Call me when they can do anything other than have a land war in Asia..we all know how good an idea that is..

Re:Wrong Question

[BJ_Covert_Action]

Thank you, I was waiting to see someone post something like this on this thread. I don't understand the spineless, "humans shouldn't be in space," attitude. Sure, it's a hard problem to solve, but that doesn't mean it's impossible. Unlike you, I wasn't around for the Apollo days, but my head was filled with glorious stories regarding men setting foot on another celestial body as a kid. Back then I never even considered the possibility that such a feat was a mistake a or a waste. These days, I still can't understand how that question can be asked with a straight face.

So once again, thank you for this little rant. Someone needed to say it.

The real issue

[NumLuck]

The real issue here is not about government spending on the army or other [insert field where you think gov spends too much] over the space program. Its more space program money might have been spent on more space probes, more telescopes, more scientific satellites, etc. which might have had more scientific profit.

Management speak

[Swampash]

We're just now turning the path to be able to go full force on our science.

what. the. fuck. does. that. mean...?

Re:Management speak

[auLucifer]

It means they're now going to turn their science up to 11!

Re:Management speak

[qmaqdk]

what. the. fuck. does. that. mean...?

Full force science looks like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5oc-70Fby4

Is the ISS Really Worth $100 Billion?

[Culture20]

Location, Location, Location.
How many other houses are in orbit?

RE: Is the ISS Really Worth $100 Billion?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Wonce apon a time ... I was a Hell of an Engineer."

In the early days of the Post-Cold War Era, i.e. 1991 to 1993, the International Space Station (ISS) was intended to be the reason for the continued existance of the National Aeornautics and Space Administration (NASA).

No ISS ... No NASA.

Times change ... but money is still money!

With kind regards.

Compared to bailing out banks...

[zkiwi34]

$100 billion on the ISS is vastly more useful in any sense.

Figuring up the true cost

[theendlessnow]

Buying the ISS is cheap.. only about $1 million or so. But the U-Haul fees!! Sheesh.

No..

[Anonymous Coward]

A space station SEEMS like a good idea, progress in space. But ours is worthless. 100 billion could have paid a boatload of unmanned missions to places. On the other hand, spending 100 billion on the space station isn't wasteful at all in comparison with the trillions the US government is throwing away.

Yes.

[drolli]

If the money keeps people building rockets for transporting people to the ISS together instead of rockets for transporting nukes to each other, then yes, i prefer the money to be spent on the ISS and not on building nukes and carrier systems to target each other.

There are some experiments where human attendance may be helpful and learning about long-term spaceflight will be only possible if we come as close as possible to the conditions of a long-term space-mission.

Hypocrisy.

[Gerafix]

Hypocrisy is rampant upon the people complaining in here. Especially if they're Americans. Really $100 billion over ten years? That comes out to about what $35 bucks a YEAR for each American? Most Americans spend more on McDonald's each WEEK feeding their rotund meatbags. What's with all the anti-science hate in America? Oh that's right... America is the most religious (read: ignorant) country in the world. Well, besides Turkey.

Re:Hypocrisy.

[Amiralul]

And keep in mind that the US is not the only player here. The 100 billion dollars will be divided between Russia, Japan, Canada. Off course, NASA takes the biggest chunk here, but anyway, in the end it really comes up to probably around 25$/year for each American.

Re:Hypocrisy.

[nyctopterus]

Actually, I think you'll find the Slashdot resentment of the ISS is borne out dashed childhood dreams of star-trekking across the universe, and current dreams of being randian giants, if only the damn government would get off their backs--stupid government, stealing all their precious research money!

We can have people circling the earth in LEO

[Anonymous Coward]

Or for that same 100 billion dollars we could have sent out over 100 interplanetary probes. Explain to me how circling the earth in a 100 billion dollar club house is more important than exploring new worlds.

Re:We can have people circling the earth in LEO

[GodfatherofSoul]

Because ONE astronaut with a pick and shovel is worth more than the 100 probes you could send there.

Opportunity cost

[khallow]

The key problem with the ISS as I see it, is that what has been done: people in space, demonstration of orbital assembly, space science, and technology development, could have been done for less. IMHO we could have launched an equivalent to the ISS with somewhat skinnier components for no more than a third the price. There was only two things we needed to do. We needed to keep the Russians out of the critical path, and depend on the Atlas V and Delta IV for lifting components and people to the ISS. We probably could drop the cost of the station under $10 billion, if in addition, we only tried for a three person station and still achieve most of the desired benefits of the ISS.

This is the thing that people typically don't get about the way that NASA does things and how messed up the the funding process is. NASA spends vastly more than they have to do modest things in space and it's been getting worse over the decades. Recently, NASA spent somewhere above $9 billion to figure out that the Ares I (or the "Stick") wasn't going to work. While I didn't know the full extent of the engineering difficulties with the Ares I, I could and did state that the Ares I was a bad idea simply because it was a rocket intended to be launched about a hundred times over its lifetime. That's not a lot of launches to spread development and infrastructures over. As it turned out, there were numerous major engineering problems that came from stubbornly keeping ATK's Solid Rocket Motor as the first stage. At the same time, lower cost wasn't one of the benefits gained.

Here's my take on the situation. Even if you think having 6 people in space is worth any price, particularly $100 billion. Ask yourself this, is it worth 60 people in space? Is it worth a return to the Moon (even if that ends up just being sortie missions for a while)? Money doesn't grow on trees. Once you spend it, you lose what else you've could have spent with it. I'm not asking for perfectly optimal spending. Nor am I asking for the hungry children to get fed first before we can do real work. I'm asking that we use some common sense and mount an effort that uses money and other resources reasonably effectively.

Re:Opportunity cost

[geekoid]

You are really clueless on costs and the effort required for a project this large.
Added to the fact you are using hindsight into the mix means your post is logically shit.

Re:Opportunity cost

[khallow]

You are really clueless on costs and the effort required for a project this large.

Added to the fact you are using hindsight into the mix means your post is logically shit.

If you contributed something useful], I could discuss it. Hindsight wasn't required to know that requiring the Shuttle and the Russians were going to drive the price up by a considerable amount. The rest of your post is garbage.

The Experience

[Vyse of Arcadia]

I'd think the experience of learning how to live long-term in space alone would be worth $100 billion. Scientific experiments up there are just a bonus.

the payoff isn't in science alone

[Black Parrot]

Part of the payoff comes in the form of practical experience with living and working in space.

List of experiments

[Anonymous Coward]

Before you judge ISS please take some time to browse the list of experiments that have been performed onboard her to date.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/experiments/Expedition.html

May be not

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you suggesting that it is worth more than an album full of songs? I don't believe it.

Dr. Evil

[__aatirs3925]

Dr. Evil doesn't approve because no space sharks with "lasers" attached to their head were created with one hundred billion dollars.

Einstein said it best...

[Anonymous Coward]

If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it?
        -- Albert Einstein

Like Red Hat 9 - only 10 ^ 2 more so..

[ljwest]

I remember opening my brand new Red Hat 9 manual and reading in those first pages that I was holding about a billion dollars of software in my hand. It went banging on about the delights of open source for another half a page, but I never got any further. I immediately listed my sweet find on amazon - offering a hefty 20% discount off the (Like New) book. But even at 800 million US, I couldn't get a byte (sorry). Obviously I had nothing to lose and reduced the asking price to a mir eight figures (sorry), but still no joy - and I never did get cups to work. But it's got me thinking. Other slashdotters must have had similar experiences. Surely we can scrape together another 99 copies of the said tome between us, and then we can offer the International Space Station Cooperative the full $100 billion, and we'd all know one way or the other. Let me know.

Experience

[Alcoholist]

Because when we do find that habitable exoplanet we're going to need people who know how to get us there. We need to get some of us off this rock. In terms of space research, that space station is the best we've got right now and if we let it fall into the weeds, we've got nothing. I say we push that sucker all the way, because if you really want to get out to the stars, you better goddamn know what it takes.

Simple Truth

[MissNoItAll]

ISS equals processed dirt. Program costs equal processed money. Dirt goes to space. Money stays on earth. How difficult was that? We all need to see that space is the very best kind of welfare. Before you can collect it, you have to get off your butt, maybe even educate yourself and then 'oh my God', do something useful.

Light bulbs?

[Anonymous Coward]

This just in: Light bulbs, what are they worth, and why do we need them?

Arguing about "worth" is difficult

[petard]

Especially on any kind of absolute scale, when the amounts get so large. It's easier if you consider it in relation to other large governmental expenditures. Fox News (which tends to under-estimate war cost, IMO) has estimated the cost of the Iraq war at >$700B. How does the ISS stack up to that in terms of value to the world? Is it worth about 1/7 of that? More? Less? I'm not sure it stacks up as well against every other possible use of $100B, but I'd personally much rather have another 6 space stations than what we've gotten in exchange for our other $600B spent on war.

Re:Arguing about "worth" is difficult

[master_p]

With $600B, USA could have built an Orion-class spaceship in space, complete with nuclear propulsion, rotating modules for gravity, manned and unmanned shuttles for landing to/taking off planets, huge science labs, etc. We could already have visited Mars by now.

Re:Arguing about "worth" is difficult

[geekoid]

No opinion. It is a fact that fox news continually underestmates the wars.

Re:Arguing about "worth" is difficult

[geekoid]

for 600 billion? bwahahaha.

In one word: Yes.

[TheDarkMaster]

Only a complete moron measures something important as the conquest of space solely in terms of money...

We must learn to live and travel through space, period. This small planet where we live on does not have infinite space, nor will sustain us forever.

Mapping progress

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not where we get, it's what we learn in the process.

Space Program Needs A LOT MORE Money Put Into It!

[Anonymous Coward]

The space program has more than paid for itself. New technologies have come from it, and other technologies have been pushed forward as a result of it. Medical research, environmental, bio-sciences, weather and atmospheric, material sciences, quality control, computer, propulsion... ALL have benefitted and been pushed forward bythe space program. Any person who says we should not spend more on research in space is an absolute moron!

Depends on the group of people you ask

[sosaited]

I am sure for a lot people, having an annual $500+ billion Defence budget is overkill, while others whine about spending fraction of that on science and education. It depends on which context and purpose you take it in, and if it is benefiting some people in power in some disguised way.

Re:Basic science is fine but...

[Anonymous Coward]

In the first half of the last century, could you have imagined all the uses for earth orbit satellites? Before we had computers it might have been hard to envision all the potential uses. Dont count out new discoveries.

good

[Anonymous Coward]

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Missing the Point

[Stormy Dragon]

The real purpose of the manned space program is to create large numbers of highly paid jobs in various key congressional districts, thereby assuring the reelection of politicans. Everything beyond that is purely coincidental.

Libertarian mods need to get over themselves.

[mozumder]

Unfortunately, libertarians are the real-life trolls.

Nobody accepts their viewpoints, as they largely represents people that are widely ridiculed, such as the tea-partiers.

AMS

[phlegmofdiscontent]

Perhaps this helps justify the cost.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_Magnetic_Spectrometer

It's basic physics, maybe not quite on the scale of the LHC, maybe not quite as useful as the HST has been, but still worthwhile. Yes, $100 billion is a lot to spend if this was the sole reason for its existence, but the $100 billion is a sunk cost at this point and the AMS certainly helps with the return on that investment.

On the other hand, $100 billion is a lot of investment that could have been put into other science projects. I've begun to question the point of NASA. Ideally, they would be the forefront of technological demonstrations. They would take risks, some of which wouldn't work but would lead the way for private industries to succeed. They would fund basic science probes such as Cassini or the Mars rovers, which no private company is going to fund at this point but which produce significant returns. The NASA I envision is far from reality and I don't know how it can get from here to there.

Is $100 billion worth an orbiting apartment? Not really. Is it worth a $1 trillion space tourism/commerce industry 10 to 15 years from now? Definitely. Let's just hope that comes to fruition.

Re:AMS

[geekoid]

They are still at the fore front.
They take the risks that are necessary. Bigger risks would require more money.
The ones that work out lead the way for industry.
They still fund exploration. They have a butt load of probes.

Your post makes no sense. Maybe you should go to NASA's website and educate yourself. Yeah, yeah, I know that would take actual effort.

Re:Wrong Answer

[Animats]

Microcomputers were developed based on needs by NASA to have computers that were light enough to be on a spacecraft because you couldn't fit a room-sized mainframe on an Apollo spacecraft or on the Lunar Excursion Module. So, let's see. We have this little space race thing that ends in the 1970s with NASA pouring money into little teeny solid state computing devices and you get the Apple ][ computer in 1977. And the IBM PC four years later. The last Apollo spacecraft was designed around 1967 more or less so I have to ask the naysayers what they're expecting to see in about ten years now that the ISS is complete. because everybody knows NASA science doesn't contribute to anything down here on earth.

No, they weren't. Microcomputers were developed because of a desire to get the parts count down for electronic desk calculators. That's why the Intel 4004 was built. The Intel 8008 was built to get the parts count down for the Datapoint 2200 terminal, although it was late and Datapoint had to use another approach.

The Apollo Guidance Computer wasn't even close to being a single-chip computer. It was a nice piece of electronics packaging, but it had 5600 gates in 2800 packages. Integration was at the level of a single-chip dual NOR gate. It did the job, but was a technological dead end.

The entire platform needs to be revamped.

[ModernGeek]

Honestly, I think the entire ISS/Space Shuttle platform should be revamped. I think that the shuttle has a good niche, but I don't see a reason as to why the shuttle shouldn't stay in space, while allowing the crew to return in a capsule-based vehicle.

The shuttle is good at reaching things and plucking them out of the sky, and the robotic arm is really nice. I don't see why they don't leave the robotic arm in space, or in a shuttle like vehicle. I like the idea of a shuttle-like vehicle that stays docked with the ISS with the arm attached so that it can go out, do things, and come back to the ISS to refuel, while the astronauts return home in a capsule.

Using the current Space Shuttle to deliver parts for the ISS is so awful. The modified Saturn V that delivered SkyLab, which was 60% the size of the ISS, was launched in ONE FLIGHT. Now that I think about it, I really think that I am talking about Constellation .... -_-

Re:The entire platform needs to be revamped.

[IrquiM]

Honestly, I think the entire ISS/Space Shuttle platform should be revamped. I think that the shuttle has a good niche, but I don't see a reason as to why the shuttle shouldn't stay in space, while allowing the crew to return in a capsule-based vehicle.

Sure, if you leave out the costs of the damned thing, the niche is good. If you look at everything, it's just a big waste of money! You'd have to redesign the shuttle completely if you want it to stay in space. It's probably a lot cheaper to design a completely new space thug.

Re:The entire platform needs to be revamped.

[AmiMoJo]

It would cost too much. If you want to refuel at the space station you have to get the fuel up there in the first place, which means supply ships, and then store it in a purpose built storage module and finally figure out a safe way to refuel in space.

The shuttles are reaching the end of their serviceable lifetime anyway. They use 1970s technology and updating it is an expensive proposition. It makes more sense to design something new, perhaps launched from an aircraft like commercial manned spacecraft are. Rocket launches are dangerous... IIRC the statistic for the Shuttle is a 1 in 100 chance of catastrophic failure. It makes sense to send cargo up on a rocket and humans via aircraft.

The Russian Soyuz modules are the most popular manned spacecraft because they are (relatively) cheap, very reliable and give the crew a good chance of survival if things go wrong. They have similar issues due to old technology but because they are simpler and have been upgraded over the years the problems are not nearly as bad. Europe, Japan, South Korea, China and India are also developing in that area so cost reducing co-operation is possible.

Re:The entire platform needs to be revamped.

[rtb61]

The cost for one offs is a fallacy. The prototype of anything is always phenomenally expensive, simply fact of business life. If you only make one of a very complex custom device it will be very expensive, be it a car, plane or space station.

You seriously want the space station to be cheaper, than don't build one, build hundreds, incorporate all the required satellite services in them and as many other commercial services as imaginable and the cost per space station will drop.

Of course crack that gravity thing ie. build a gravity drive and the price will collapse all together. High capacity micro energy fields upon a macro scale sound interesting, high energy electron flows trapped within negative ion fields, charging those fields.

Re:The entire platform needs to be revamped.

[Teancum]

The one advantage that the Shuttle has together with the Buran but no other vehicle ever sent into space is the ability to bring substantial tonnage of equipment FROM space to the surface of the Earth. You can send stuff up on an ordinary disintegrating pyramid of aluminum and rocket fuel, but bringing it back down takes some extra effort.

Unfortunately the Shuttle was used so seldom to bring stuff back down that this is a capability which can mostly be ignored. It is also something that is now being lost with the retirement of the Space Shuttle.

The ISS was also an example of a modular approach to spaceship construction, and as a demonstrator project it does a pretty good job of that too. Unfortunately one of the advantages of a modular approach is that you can take advantage of economies of scale to mass-produce parts, and in the case of the ISS almost every part and module was unique in its construction and development. A production run of one doesn't really give you any sort of economy of scale.

As for the Constellation Program, it did what others are doing in terms of going into space for 5x-10x the cost using systems that are by design intended only to help key members of congress get re-elected through government spending to contractors who have donated to various political campaigns. I wish I could be more enthusiastic about the next great thing NASA has come up with to put people into space, but I simply don't get it. Besides, Constellation is mostly dead as well and likely won't be flying. The Ares-I-X test flight may be the only real piece of equipment to make it off the ground with that program, and that was mostly a joke.

Re:The entire platform needs to be revamped.

[Migraineman]

"Plucking things out of the sky" isn't cost effective. You'll note that the Shuttle hasn't done that often. If your satellite costs $300M to build, a new one costs almost an order of magnitude less than the $1B Shuttle mission plus the refurbishment costs of the old bird.

As for leaving the arm in space, that would restrict missions using the arm to orbital planes that the arm happens to be stowed in. Changing your orbital plane is hugely expensive.

Re:The entire platform needs to be revamped.

[Enigma2175]

The modified Saturn V that delivered SkyLab, which was 60% the size of the ISS

Where are you getting that number? The mass of the ISS is ~370,000 Kg, Skylab was 77,000 Kg. The pressurized volume of the ISS is 837 cubic meters, for Skylab it was only 283 cubic meters. I am no fan of the Shuttle program but at least get your numbers straight.

Re:The entire platform needs to be revamped.

[CrimsonAvenger]

IIRC the statistic for the Shuttle is a 1 in 100 chance of catastrophic failure. It makes sense to send cargo up on a rocket and humans via aircraft.

The Russian Soyuz modules are the most popular manned spacecraft because they are (relatively) cheap, very reliable and give the crew a good chance of survival if things go wrong.

Note, for reference, that the Shuttle has had two loss of crew accidents in its history, while the "very reliable" Soyuz has had only two loss of crew accidents in its history.

Note also that there have been more Shuttle flights than Soyuz flights.

Re:The entire platform needs to be revamped.

[AmiMoJo]

Wrong and wrong. Also note that Soyuz can fly without a crew and is often used just for cargo. The shuttle has to be manned.

Re:Afro-American Racism Against Whites and Asians

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey when you could be hosed or have dogs sicked on you for your skin color at one point and it was ok I think your allowed to vote in one election based on skin color to balance it out

Well, it's better than...

[BeShaMo]

Even if the ISS was not generating a single item of scientific value, which is frankly a ridiculous notion, it's still 100 Billion not spend on a war against some impoverished nation somewhere no body have ever heard of.

MIR

[Anonymous Coward]

If it really would be worth that amount of investment I don't think the Russians would have abandoned MIR so readily.

Much better use: elections!

[Anonymous Coward]

only 3.5 billion were spent on current campaigns. Imagine how much better politicians the US would have with 100 billion campaign money!

What else would $100,000,000,000 bought?

[Rogerborg]

There is nothing as important as basic resea- oh, wait, fusion power.

Right now, the only reason to go into space is to mine helium-3 for all those fusion plants that we need to start building in earnest real soon now. Real soon.

in 1000 years ...

[joeyspqr]

what is going to be remembered about the 20th century?

nuclear weapons
going into orbit
information networks

Re:in 1000 years ...

[geekoid]

Fighting the Germans with muskets and stealth bombers.

Re:in 1000 years ...

[Enigma2175]

what is going to be remembered about the 20th century?

Whalers on the Moon?

Two thoughts...

[The Dodger]

You know, it's probably just as well that no one ever did a discounted cash flow forecast on the Apollo programme. We'd never have gone to the moon.

On the subject

[KiwiCanuck]

was TARP worth $700+ Billion? I'd say the space program was a better ROI.

Re:Basic science is fine but...

[AmonRa1979]

So, should we not pursue research unless there is a clear benefit from the technology it produces? Or perhaps we should only reach for the stars (okay, other planets for now) when war threatens us. If we followed those lines of thinking, we wouldn't have some amazing technology that we have today. The LASER would never have been reported on as there was no immediate benefit from it. Quite simply, you cannot say that research is practical or not until after it has been done. The results aren't known before you start. New technology comes from the most interesting places and it would be a mistake to not try to push ourselves beyond the limits of what people think possible.

I'm curious, though... what have we ever done that wasn't costly at first? Cost never comes down until something becomes readily available. It will never become readily available until we actually do it. No one will ever discover/make something better than a rocket until we actually do the research to make something better than a rocket. In this case we actually have a clear benefit of producing a better rocket... making it safe(er) to send someone to Mars (for example). Sending someone to Mars has a clear benefit... a probe can only do so much in its exploration. Probes are very slow and are not nearly as versatile as a person. As far as the knowledge gained from exploring Mars? No one knows for certain every tid-bit of knowledge that could be gained from it because the only thing that comes close to this was sending people to the moon. Why not try to send someone to Mars?

Uses for the ISS

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of science that has been done via the ISS is around how human bodies are affected by weightlessness and what have we learned? Human bodies definitely are not suited to a weightless environment. Oh, hang on a second, they are still considering manned Mars missions, so perhaps we didn't learn very much...

I always thought that the most obvious use of a space station & humans in space would be as a repair/service outpost for all those sattelites up there that cost billions themselves and that fail for one reason or another, or run out of fuel, especially when we saw the Shuttle capability to capture sattelites and return them to earth. Actually perhaps that's the 2nd most obvious use, the other one is as a manned base for a space telescope, making those Hubble repair type missions unnecessary as repairs/upgrades would be done on-site. I was most disappointed when they did neither.

The other point that I could never understand, is why burn the thing up when it's life is complete, as it took so much cost to get it out of Earth's gravity well, why not send it to the moon afterwards as a resource for a future Moon base, or into a Moon parking orbit for the time being. Even if you were to crash it onto the Moon surely some useful resources would survive.

Robin

100 Billion dollar real estate...

[DarthVain]

You know what they say: "Location, Location, Location!"

SHortsighted

[geekoid]

Yes, it is worth 100 billion. It is incredibly short sighted to look soley at specific experiments looking for an immediate payback.

You should look at all the technology and developments just to get it into space. He also completly ignores the value if large international common goals. Also the technology involved in supporting each experiments.

He also needs to realize the most experiments do NOT in and of themselves, turn into immediate profits

On a different note: I know there are misspellings, but I'm not going to bother and fix them until slashdot fixes the bug that doesn't allow me to right click on the word and select the correct spelling...sometimes.

Your political ignorance is infuriating.

[geekoid]

Since we have already gotten 650 billion (+interest) back, I would say that yes, it was worth it. It may have been the only damn thing George Bush did that was worth a damn. And ti was a good move by the current administration to extend it.
As it looks right now, we will soon have the remaining 50 billion dollars back.

If you are going to make political comments, then for fuck sake, back them with some facts not shit you learned from political ads. What next? going to blame the 1.4 trillion dollar deficit on Obama, even though it was 1.4 trillion when he came into office?

So sick of you people basing politics on ignorance.

Make money from the space station

[slapout]

Want to make money off the space station? Use it to manufacture some trinket -- beads or something. And then sell them back here on earth. People will pay money for things from space.

Re:Basic science is fine but...

[hey!]

In the first half of the last century, could you have imagined all the uses for earth orbit satellites?

Yes. Not ALL of the uses of course, but surely many of them: spying, storm tracking, land-use remote sensing, communications certainly. GPS? No, I wouldn't have thought of that one.

It's obvious that satellites are useful, because up to the minute knowledge of the Earth has obvious utility. You can't argue from analogy without examining the circumstances of the case you are reasoning from.

Before we had computers it might have been hard to envision all the potential uses.

Does this mean it would have been rational to invest in the development of a personal computer in 1960? At every stage of the development of the computer, funding came because of useful developments expected in the near future.

This is not to discount basic research, but travel to Mars is predominantly applied research. The basic research aspects could be done for much less money near the Earth. Which is not to suggest I'm against going to Mars. I'm against going to Mars under the dubious assumption that the enterprise will be a success in purely economic terms.

Dont count out new discoveries.

I haven't. But it is best not to count *on* new discoveries either.

Putting things into Perspective.

[JamReadyTeacups]

This $100 Billion wasn't necessarily all spent by the U.S. alone, the ISS was split 7 ways (albeit a lion share of it probably fell on NASA/US funding). The ISS was meant to be completed on a much faster timetable than it panned out. Columbia's crash completely threw their construction scheduling for a loop, and pushed the dates back on lots of research projects. The ISS is now finally at a point to become "Fully Operational", just without the planet-cracking laser Darth Vader got to play with. We will see a lot of great information come out of this.

What is it worth?

[spacecomputer]

When assembly is complete with STS-134 and the addition of the AMS experiment, the validity of the question will be equivalent to asking if the Alaska purchase was worth it.

To stop is to die

[Anonymous Coward]

It was China's Zheng He who initiated The Century of Seafaring -- that great process of both East and West turning to the sea. Following the routes that he pioneered, great numbers of Chinese people set forth into the world. It was this great exploration of the seas by East and West that ultimately brought the peoples of the world together into a global community.

However, with the conservativeness and rigidity of feudalism, both the later Ming and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties became self-fettered, forbidding any maritime activities and hence impeding the further development of China's navigation cause and the advancement of navigation technologies. Hence, China's navigation gradually fell from the pinnacle of its prosperity.