Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
I hear they are coming out with a new flavor .. of tang.
That has to be worth something.
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.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
"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?
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
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.
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?
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.
It's easy to see it's not a tough decision, since we have both!
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
Put it on eBay and find out what it's worth,
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
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.
Strange how much human accomplishment and progress comes from contemplation of the irrelevant. - Scott Kim
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
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.
Swedish plasma phys. PhD student; MSc EE; knows maths, programming, electronics; finance interest; seeks opportunities
Semper Non-sequitor!
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
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.
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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.
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.
Has ANY prototype, in the history of industrial manufacture, been, in and of itself, worth what it cost to make?
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.
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.
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.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
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.
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.
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...
So, a month's rent, spent over more than ten years. Would that really have made a noticeable difference in your life?
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.
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.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
For $300 it had better be one hell of a nice meal.
But yeah.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
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.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
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.
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?)
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?
Privacy is terrorism.
Probably the biggest benefit of the ISS is the ability to be a stopping point for manned travel to other moons/planets.
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.
Jerry Espensen, is that you?
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
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.
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.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
we could have sent up thirty Hubble telescopes ($5B).
Just sayin'.
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?
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.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
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.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
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.
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.)
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.
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....
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
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.
No, there is no "-1 I'LL NEVER ADMIT BEING WRONG!!!" mod.
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.
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.
You're suggesting that space didn't give us technology? Seriously?
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
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.
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?
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
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.
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).
DNA -- National Dyslexic Association
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".
This is my footer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
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."
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 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...
I don't read AC A human right
Sure it would. And all would be just the same. Except a little different.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Anybody heard of this concept before ? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindsight_bias
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.
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.
DNA -- National Dyslexic Association
We'll compromise.
$100 billion for space
$100 billion for welfare and war
$100 billion for tax cuts
$300 billion in debt.
$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.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
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.
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.
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.
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
Let's convince NASA that the space station is a money pit and they should sell it to Virgin Galactic at scrap prices.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
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.
I said that exact thing the last time I fled from the United States to Canada to get my health care.
"His name was James Damore."
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.
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
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.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
"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
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?
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.
Gods don't kill people, people with gods kill people.
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.
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.
what. the. fuck. does. that. mean...?
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=usa+gdp+%2F+usa+population
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.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
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.
Location, Location, Location.
How many other houses are in orbit?
$100 billion on the ISS is vastly more useful in any sense.
Buying the ISS is cheap.. only about $1 million or so. But the U-Haul fees!! Sheesh.
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.
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.
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?
http://www.donarmstrong.com
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.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
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.
$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)
$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".
Support SETI@home
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 $65k/year gross. And when it comes time to tighten the company belt, well you're 7% more expensive than the new guy who's just as good as you, so you get to collect unemployment. (Damn socialism.)
To a significant extent the benefits of income tax cuts accrue to the employer rather than the employee. Every personal income tax cut is a cut in labor costs to large corporations. That's why Republicans like them.
Oh.... You thought they were trying to help you? Unless you're bankrolling campaign ads, I don't think they much care about your take home pay.
Support SETI@home
Something I found extremely disturbing when comparing proposed space travel budgets as opposed to government overspending: The (extremely bloated) nasa mars mission plan in the early 90's, which called for orbital fuel depots, a quadrupling of the size of the ISS, lunar bases and ship yards plus a whole host of other stuff cost 450B$, 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.
"People don't want to learn linux" hasn't been a valid excuse since '03.
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.
Support SETI@home
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.)
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.
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.
Support SETI@home
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.
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.
I think we should do research - I don't think it should be funded by compulsory wealth confiscation.
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.
Anonymous comments are as pathetic as the anonymous "sources" that contaminate gutless journalism from the New York Time
Part of the payoff comes in the form of practical experience with living and working in space.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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
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.
Dr. Evil doesn't approve because no space sharks with "lasers" attached to their head were created with one hundred billion dollars.
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.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
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.
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.
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.
Bibo Ergo Sum.
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.
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!"
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.
.sig: file not found
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.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
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.
Because ONE astronaut with a pick and shovel is worth more than the 100 probes you could send there.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
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.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Sig: I stole this sig.
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 $100 billion on food stamps. If you disagree, try to explain why.
Unless, of course, some of that research money can be spent on making the armed services less expensive to run. (Such as reducing the use of "liquid fossil fuels". http://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/11/01/2033248/Saving-Lives-On-the-Battlefield-With-Green-Tech )
That said, I don't know of any military being financially savvy. They'd probably just spend the saved money on something else.
And keep in mind that the US is not the only player here. The 100 billion dollars will be divided between Russia, Japan, Canada. Off course, NASA takes the biggest chunk here, but anyway, in the end it really comes up to probably around 25$/year for each American.
So, what's your plan, and when are you going to implement it?
I think you mean *not* using fire. And, I agree with you.
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.
Then apparently you don't know my neighbors!
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.
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.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
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!
Mod parent up.
what is going to be remembered about the 20th century?
nuclear weapons
going into orbit
information networks
+1 fashionably cynical
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.
was TARP worth $700+ Billion? I'd say the space program was a better ROI.
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.
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?
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
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.
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
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?
"I must not fear. Fear is the mind killer." -Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear
You know what they say: "Location, Location, Location!"
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.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
No it wouldn't. 300 dollars would just postpone where you are at...by a few weeks.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
If that's true, then probably a dollar came from you.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
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.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
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.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
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.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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.
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.
Remember, Amateurs built the ark. Professionals built the Titanic
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?