Sarah Brightman's ISS Trip In Peril

RocketAcademy writes "Actress/singer Sarah Brightman's trip to the International Space Station may not happen in 2015 as scheduled. Space Adventures works with the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) to fly private citizens like Brightman on Soyuz taxi flights. Those taxi missions normally last eight days, but NASA and Roscosmos are considering a plan to extend the 2015 taxi flight to one month, so it can carry a scientist to perform some additional research aboard ISS. If that happens, Brightman will lose her seat. This situation points to the need for more flexible transportation options and new orbital facilities which are not subject to the same operational restrictions as ISS. SpaceX, Boeing, and Sierra Nevada are working on the transportation problem, while Bigelow Aerospace expects to begin launching its Space Station Alpha in 2015. So, the era of citizen astronauts visiting ISS may be drawing to a close."

Comments

With good reason

[Anonymous Coward]

ISS is a research platform.
Flying privately should only be done at great expense as it is since time and space is limited there.

And in other news, thinking of starting Space Flight Auction house.
Coming soon to a theatre near you!

Re:With good reason

[taiwanjohn]

I wonder what the future of ISS will be, when Bigelow and others are making space less expensive and more accessible. I haven't heard of too many "earth shattering" breakthroughs from the ISS program, and lately all the excitement has been in the private sector. (Sarah Brightman doesn't have anything to worry about, she'll just have to wait a couple more years and then get a much cheaper ride.) On the one hand, cheaper access to space will make it cheaper to maintain the ISS, but OTOH they may soon be outshone by private sector efforts.

I'm beginning to see the ISS in a similar light to the Shuttle... more time wasted in LEO, when we should be going places.

Re:With good reason

[tgd]

ISS is a research platform.
Flying privately should only be done at great expense as it is since time and space is limited there.

And in other news, thinking of starting Space Flight Auction house.
Coming soon to a theatre near you!

No, the ISS is, was, and was always intended to be a corporate welfare platform to keep defense contractors in business during the waning period of the cold war.

As the old joke went, "What is the purpose of the space shuttle? To build the space station! What is the purpose of the space station? To give the space shuttle somewhere to go!"

The real problem with space tourism going to the ISS is that the Russian space agency is getting the money, not the US taxpayers.

Re:With good reason

[thegarbz]

Really? What kind of a question is that?

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/index.html

Re:With good reason

[thegarbz]

No, the ISS is, was, and was always intended to be a corporate welfare platform to keep defense contractors in business during the waning period of the cold war.

Yes. Except for all the actual research that goes on. It's actually been quite a while since I've seen a webpage quite as long as the list of experiments they've carried out: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/experiments/experiments_by_expedition.html#1

Re:With good reason

[Anonymous Coward]

The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer is the biggest experiment up there, but you could reasonably claim that it doesn't need a human presence. The only reason it was bolted to the ISS was that the station had enough solar panels to power it and a convenient comms link already in place. The spectrometer is an energy and bandwidth hog.

There are a LOT of experiments done of the type "pack some of this stuff in a box and see how it reacts to being in freefall". Sometimes the stuff in the box needs prodding, or activating, or feeding. It's things like biological models for development and growth in low gravity, or manufacturing techniques, or fluid handling, and so on.

The ISS is serving as a test rig to prove that our spaceships don't have to be leaky deathtraps, while also trying to figure out ways that life support can be improved even further (e.g. growing crops in space, fully closed recycling loops, and so on).

It has a big impact in making space travel easier. SpaceX would not be able to dream of Mars if the only experience they could draw on for living in space was flying scrapheaps like Skylab or Mir. You'd have to be insane to want to go to Mars onboard something like Mir.

Re:With good reason

[Sarten-X]

I haven't heard of too many "earth shattering" breakthroughs from the ISS program, and lately all the excitement has been in the private sector.

So it's no different from any other government research?

I've been out of the research scene for a few too many years, but as I understand it, most of the research done about the ISS is fairly mundane stuff that can't be done on Earth - growing crystals in low gravity, testing materials' resistance to radiation, and the like. There's nothing inherently earth-shattering about knowing that this particular material survived slightly better than that particular material. When the discoveries from the ISS do finally make their way back to earth, they're simply "new technology" rather than "new technology developed in space".

Those new technologies, with their slightly-better lifespans and their slightly-lighter weight, will be part of the spacecraft that will actually let us go places. Thus far, we've done a fairly impressive job of not killing ourselves when venturing forth into the hostile environment outside our home, but we've seen how harsh the environment is. We know that we'll need better technology to make a human trip to Mars (or elsewhere) safely, or even to make unmanned trips to other planets cheaper and more reliable. Now's a good time to slow down, improve our abilities, then run off to extraterrestrial destinations again.

The race is exciting, but we still need a pit crew.

Re:With good reason

[drinkypoo]

It's actually been quite a while since I've seen a webpage quite as long as the list of experiments they've carried out

That's because NASA isn't breaking articles up into pages to increase impressions.

Re:With good reason

[Anonymous Coward]

I see a lot of brochure science and very little research. For the billions that its cost I would expect at least a few peer reviewed papers. Well really for that kind of money i would expect something either equivalent to the Higgs or a lot more than a few papers.

Some are linked to here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_research_on_the_International_Space_Station#References

After all the Higgs discovery was delayed for 2 decades for that orbital white elephant. And it cost a lot more and is still a money suck.

The ISS and LHC are funded from entirely separate budgets, and the LHC wouldn't have been built significantly faster even if more money had been thrown at it. It takes time to design and build a collider of the required size. Even if funding hadn't been withdrawn from the Tetravon it would've been detected by the LHC at about the same time. Certainly there wasn't a delay of 2 decades.

Re:With good reason

[Teancum]

In spite of links like the one above that seems to treat the International Space Station as a research platform, its real purpose was hardly to conduct research in weightlessness.

Keep in mind that the actual purpose of the structure is to perform two important tasks:

1. 1) To keep rocket engineers gainfully employed on a major engineering project.... especially engineers from the former Soviet Union so they don't sell their services to countries like North Korea and Iran.
2. 2) To act as a "vehicle" to transfer knowledge gained by Russia over the past several decades of doing elaborate construction projects in space (especially from Mir) and thus have American astronauts understand the difficulties and problems with large scale construction projects in space.

As to if that was worth the $100 billion spent on the International Space Station, that could certainly be debated. Note that has nothing at all to do with actual scientific research.

If anything, some really odd modules were cut from the design of the ISS that could have made it a viable research platform, but haven't flown (including a couple that were built and then mothballed because it couldn't be put on the manifest of the Space Shuttle). Since it is in orbit, I think it is a crying shame to let it go to waste and especially to threaten that it be dismantled and splashed into the Pacific Ocean.

I do agree with you though that for all of the money even to maintain the ISS there should be not just a bunch of peer reviewed papers, but a regular quality journal that would be eagerly reviewed from all of the research that is happening there. Definitely there should be roughly monthly papers based on some of the research that is happening there. Then again, there should also be more people up there doing research rather than the current skeleton crew that barely keeps up with the maintenance of the ISS (getting back to some of the modules that were cut that would have housed those researchers).

It doesn't help that America lacks a vehicle to even get to the ISS, with the possible exception of the Dragon capsule by SpaceX. Even that could only be used in a real emergency at the moment.

Re:With good reason

[tibit]

Sure, but that's all engineering, not issues inherent in a particular class of technology. Fungus, for example, needs both moisture and food to grow, there's no magic there. Either they had some organic surfaces that were edible by fungus, or there were deposits of human-origin dust (skin, hair, snot) over condensation. Those same problems are faced in regular buildings down on Earth. Im no Mir apologist, sure it was less pleasant AFAIK than even Skylab, but let's not pretend that Mir's problems were somehow special.

Re:With good reason

[MightyYar]

Certainly there wasn't a delay of 2 decades.

I think he's referring to the Superconducting Super Collider. It would have cost $12 billion, which was the same as the estimate for the US portion of the ISS at the time. The two projects were commonly discussed at the same time. It's probably a bit of an exaggeration to say it delayed Higgs by 20 years - maybe it was only 15. But it was designed to do around 2.5x the energy of the LHC, so we won't know what other science was delayed until we build a 40 TeV collider someday.

subject

[Legion303]

A singer/tourist might have to give up a spot to someone who will do science. What's the downside, again?

Re:subject

[thegarbz]

Well in space we wouldn't be able to hear her sing.

Actually on second thoughts, can we launch the entire pop music industry up there?

Re:subject

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm setting up a Kickstarter for Celine Dion.

"This situation points to the need..."

[nitehawk214]

Need? Because ISS's most important mission is giving rich people a place to float around in microgravity. That this is even an issue that a celebrity is getting bumped in favor of a scientist is absurd.

True cost...

[Dcnjoe60]

I understand the cost of flying a tourist there, but shouldn't they also be charged a portion of the cost of actually keeping them there? It cost a lot of money to develop the international space station. It costs a lot of money to maintain the international space station. And it costs a lot of money to operate the international space station. If I fly to Disneyland for a vacation, the flight is just one part of the cost of the trip. Likewise, to the ISS. For these space tourists, shouldn't they be paying for the full cost of their trip, particularly since almost all of it was funded by taxpayers of various countries?

Re:True cost...

[nedlohs]

What makes you think they aren't?

Re:True cost...

[Teancum]

That is a fair question, and it should be pointed out that the cost to travel to the ISS has been steadily going up faster than inflation (at least faster than the CPI). I'd say that those space tourists are more than paying for their share of the costs for getting into space.

Keep in mind that the point of these flights is to swap "emergency escape" vehicles in the form of Soyuz capsules. These are the lifeboats of the ISS where the people on the ISS can escape and return to the Earth if something really bad happens.... like a core module getting hit by a meteor. The Soyuz spacecraft have a limited amount of time they can be used in space, and to be safe they are replaced at regular intervals.

Since only two cosmonauts are needed to fly this spacecraft, there is really an "extra" seat in all of these flights.... hence the reason why Russia was willing to sell the flight opportunities to a company like Space Adventures. Previously (in the Soviet Union era) this "extra seat" was often used as a public relations tool where "guest cosmonauts" were offered a ride from mainly countries with good relations with the Soviet Union. In other words, these "tourists" have been going up for several decades now. People flying on the Soyuz are still expected to know how to operate the spacecraft, which is why even the "tourists" still have to spend six months or longer in a training program at Star City before they are allowed to fly.

This is no Disneyland vacation. Spacecraft capable of flying genuine passengers has yet to be built. Well, the Space Shuttle could have done that, but it was so expensive to operate that mere passengers weren't a viable option on that spacecraft either. Perhaps once the SpaceX Dragon is fully crew certified you might see some real tourists with much more limited training in spaceflight operations that are more completely "paying their own freight" to go into space. How many people do you know that in order to fly to Europe on a 747 need to be certified on that airframe as a commercial pilot (with multi-engine and instrument landing endorsements) before making the trip?

There's the element of uncertainty

[Anonymous Coward]

In 2015, they don't know if they'd be shipping the fat Sarah or the skinny Sarah up there, and they can't calculate the fuel requirements.

Re:WhoTF is Sarah Brightman?

[TheSkepticalOptimist]

If only there was some way of using the power of the interweb to look up someone by name and find out more about them. But true, E! News is the most relevant source about who's who.

Eight day turnaround?

[PPH]

I thought the whole point was to launch her into space, one way.

Re:It's not off yet

[charlesbakerharris]

So she's offered to refrain from singing?