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Getting the Most Out of the Space Station (Before It's Too Late)
bmahersciwriter writes: NASA administrators are strategizing a push to do more science on the International Space Station in the coming years. The pressure is on, given the rapidly cooling relations between the U.S. and Russia, whose deputy prime minister recently suggested that U.S. astronauts use a trampoline if they want to get into orbit. Aiding in the push for more research is the development of two-way cargo ships by SpaceX, which should allow for return of research materials (formerly a hurdle to doing useful experiments). NASA soon aims to send new earth-monitoring equipment to the station and expanded rodent facilities. And geneLAB will send a range of model organisms like fruit flies and nematodes into space for months at a time.
Ol' Mother Russia should not forget that NASA pays them good monies to send our astronauts into space. Space X is slowly becoming a viable option and American commercialized companies will carry far more weight with NASA than Russia will. Putini should also strongly consider the effects of the US (and US's allies) in implementing trade sanctions and embargos on his nation and how quickly things can go south without a single bullet needing to be fired.
It always seemed like a mistake to get involved in such a venture with the Russians. Any joint venture with two co-equals with somewhat cold relations seems destined to lead to problems as each side has conflicting goals (sometimes unrelated to the joint venture).
No matter where you go, there you are.
Have to laugh at the stupid Russia Deputy prime minister, as if we cant get to space on our own.
Jack of all trades,master of none
In any direct economic confrontation with Russia US will get impacted a lot less than Russia. This was true during cold war days, this is more so true today. Russia's refusal to provide orbital delivery will only serve one purpose - channel money away from Russian space program toward NASA or Space-X.
Now, if Russia wanted to negatively impact US, then they'd mass produce tech and sell to anyone/everyone willing to pay. This would remove technological edge from US and enrich Russia.
the space program had disasters under air force too. you must be young. plenty of successes under NASA for 1960s until now
Fruit flies don't live for "months". It's 8 weeks in case you were interested.
Nematodes last about 2 months, so that one's ok.
I refuse to sign
So are you suggesting that it was up to the Americans and Russians to determine the choices a sovereign people should make? How about if someone made those choices for you? Oh Wait, they already do...
Easy. Just open all the doors. That'll get just about everything that isn't tied down out.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Remember Skylab? It was America's first space station, and lasted 1973-1979 (before it burned up on re-entry). We got a lot of good science out of that station, and maybe it's time we do it again.
Finding God in a Dog
It's nice to see that even the Russian conspiracy theorists take a "blame Obama" approach to politics. It's a small world.
The Apollo Program showed it was capable of getting people to the moon, but the point of NASA isn't just getting people to the moon over and over, the point is to eventually establish a permanent, expanding presence in space. Pointing a V-2 rocket up at the sky is effective but is also a dead end.
And of course the space program had problems under the Airforce.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
The problem of NASA is the politicians coming in and changing the direction of it's primary focus every couple of years. Plus they see it as a job stimulus project which would exist even if it was moved back into the military (for example, tanks that the military doesn't want).
You're blaming NASA.
Why don't you blame who is in charge of NASA?
Let me hint who it is: They're the opposite of Progress
the fault of the USAF!
The USAF demanded the ability to launch, retrieve/deploy a payload, and return to earth in a single orbit. They also wanted the ability to get into a polar orbit, which required a huge cross-range capability not in the original design.
After forcing all this crap into the design (and sinking billions on a shuttle launch/landing facility at Vandenberg AFB), they gave up on the project entirely, leaving NASA stuck with a vehicle that was no longer optimized for what NASA wanted to do with it.
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
So are you suggesting that it was up to the Americans and Russians to determine the choices a sovereign people should make? How about if someone made those choices for you? Oh Wait, they already do...
First, sovereignty isn't an absolute, especially when Russia and Ukraine were in fact a single sovereign country until very recently. Crimea is historically Russian and was only part of "Ukrainian" territory in the USSR because of an internal administrative boundary change.
Hell, throwing your "choices a sovereign people should make" back at you: what about the parts of Ukraine that are heavily Russian and WOULD rather be part of Russia?
Obama didn't just allow the Ukrainians their own choice - he actively supported the rebels against the pro-Russian government. Given Russian interests in the Ukraine, especially in the Crimea where Russia maintains a significant military presence, and the clearly stated importance Russia placed in Ukrainian status, Obama still helped topple the government there.
That's the mess Obama needlessly stepped into. And made worse. Then walked away from spouting hashtags while people died.
But it gets worse - after fomenting a rebellion everyone in Europe knew the Russians would respond to militarily (which is why they didn't support Obama, resulting in the "Fuck the EU" comment), Obama seemed surprised by the Russian response. Hmm, exactly like Obama was surprised by the reaction to his deserter-for-five-terrorists deal. (Is "Chuck Hagel did it!" our fifth excuse for that PR disaster now?)
Uh, what great successes did AF have before the "late 50's"? Launching captured existing German rockets?
Table-ized A.I.
The mistakes in the Space Shuttle design was made for the Air Force:
Only because NASA made too much rocket and had to get Air Force funding to cover the funding gap. One bad decision lead to another.
"Blame Obama" has been popular for a long time, all the way back to about 2001 or so, so far as I can tell...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
The USAF did develop the Atlas ICBM (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SM-65_Atlas) in the late 50's which had little to do with the Germans. The Germans were over in Huntsville working for the Army where they developed the Redstone IRBM and its successors, which included the Saturn line of boosters. But in the meantime the USAF developed the Titan line of boosters independently of the German/NASA/Huntsville team.
In the early space program the Huntsville team had the first visible successes with their derivative of the Redstone launching the first US satellite and the first US astronaut. However the first US manned orbital mission was launched aboard an Atlas and the two-man Gemini missions after that were launched aboard Titans, though all the manned programs were funded and managed through NASA. Of course it was Saturns which launched all the Apollo missions.
The OP's contention that NASA messed up the space program is an ignorant crock, though. On the other hand, the USAF certainly screwed up the Space Shuttle with their requirements for the vehicle.
"The Air Force was mildly interested, but demanded **a much larger vehicle**, far larger than the original concepts."
Nonsense. NASA would have been able to fund a small vehicle without Air Force involvement. Note that the current Wikipedia article you quote (which incidentally asserts the above without citation) also claims that NASA had already designed a vehicle too large for existing funding and only went to the Air Force to get additional funding.
Also we have original concepts mentioned in the Wikipedia article like launching a reusable launch vehicle on a Saturn V. Do you really think the final Space Shuttle is larger than a Saturn V launch?
So here's a summary of my arguments - NASA already had the ability to fund a small RLV, the cooperation with the USAF was voluntary, and they already had other huge original concepts in mind before they approached USAF. I think there's a simple explanation for this particular claim - historical revisionism.
What about aiding the push for better trampolines?
Table-ized A.I.
I would camp on the Moon in a heartbeat... and I would bring my kids,... and a telescope. And we would marvel at the wonders of the Earth and eat freeze-dried ice cream sandwiches.
I generally meant space missions. Perhaps they made great rockets, but there is more to space exploration than rockets. Military projects usually get deeper pockets than civilian projects, I would note. Civilian programs tend to get more scrutiny, in part because the military understandably has to keep most things secret, and second because Republicans are more critical of civilian projects than military ones for some reason.
Table-ized A.I.
And that's gas that isn't traded in Russian currency. The U.S. can huff and puff its imperialistic hypocritical fascist coup supporting chest as much as it wants, but it can't do anything of significance as long as giving up Russian energy supplies would throw the continent into a depression. That, and Russia still has it's Security Council veto pen, and recent American efforts to make another round of "regime change" have stalled everywhere but Ukraine.
Ah, you're right. USAF didn't do squat for space exploration as we usually define it. Their boosters were great enablers though. I guess I jumped on your, "captured existing German rockets" statement which doesn't credit the enormous amount of rocket development done in the 40's and 50's independent of the Germans. I read a fascinating recent bio of von Braun, however, which concludes that the V-2 probably pushed rocket development ahead by10 years over the natural progress of technology in the mid-20th century. A lot of interacting factors led to the rapid development of the 40's, 50's, and 60's though.
If we want to continue to have an expanding economy sooner or later we're going to have to use the resources available off planet. The human race is built for expansion and until we get into space in a big way we will continue to be vulnerable to all sorts of things. If we don't expand into space we have no real future in the long run.
"Well, cancelling our programs to save billions better-spent, votewise, on social programs, and paying Rooskies to ferry us up there to build goodwill and keep their scientists and engineers employed in non-terrorist jobs seemed like a good idea at the time."
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
before we have a trampoline gap!
But seriously we can find ourselves in a situation with no space station. Like there is no Shuttle, Orion is decades away, we are depended on Musk to make Dragon2 work. After Apollo there was concern at the time if US would have a manned space program in early 1970s when still debating Shuttle, and it could have been no Shuttle meaning Apollo-Soyuz in 1975 could have been the last time US put people in space. Hear Dale Myers talk about this per MIT OC course in 2005, https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Everyone is spending a lot of time arguing budgets. That's a big chunk of hardware in orbit, c'mon you guys it may not be ideal but it's something.
mfwright@batnet.com
The X-37? It has been launched into orbit by Lockheed Martin Atlas V rockets that use Russian RD-180 engines.
No man. The DoD wanted Shuttle to be a lot larger so they could launch big reconnaissance satellites with it. The USAF also wanted the ability to do polar launches from Vandenberg plus a lot of cross-range capability so it could fly back to where it launched from. Both those features made the Shuttle immensely expensive and bloated.
The original Shuttle proposals by Max Faget were supposed to launch only astronauts not humongous cargo.
The most useful and relevant modules would have been those that can provide artificial gravity - everybody is banking on this for enabling long term space habitation but we have just about zero on-orbit experimental data. If they only do one more thing with the ISS, that would be it. Japan even built a module for this, but it didn't get deployed so it is now just a museum piece.
For your reading enjoyment:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N...
AFAIK the US controls most of the electrical power supply panels and the Russians do orbital reboosts and have most of the toilets. So it cannot run 100% without both.
The US launched a captured V-2 into space (but not orbit) in 1946 with a camera. Perhaps there were USAF-built rocket space missions after these V-2 experiments, but I am not aware of any until the "Sputnik scare" pushed military rockets into space use for a brief time until NASA took that over.
Table-ized A.I.
So what? Again, NASA could have solved this problem, with money to spare, by scaling down the Max Faget vehicle till it fit in the budget.
Assuming the people actually controlling the money were interested in two different launcher projects that is. The same people that pushed through the F-111 one plane fits all.
Well then sooner or later we'll have to build a social model with no economic growth. We aren't "built" for expansion anymore than we're "built" to live under the water; we can do it as long as we can bring in extra energy. Left to nature, the death rate is quite high and we're mostly built to reproduce, suffer and die young.
There was no human race a million years ago, and there won't be one in another million; evolution is still happening you know.
We never had a "long term" future.
Grow up.
The USAF people already had Titan III and were expecting to keep it.
no need to jump from high place, just jump along with a very heavy weight that gets removed to the side when the trampoline is at maximum displacement
The republicans (actually neo-cons and tea*) are doing their utmost to kill private space. As such, these same neo-cons/tea* that claim that Russia is an enemy and that we should not spend 1 B to get 3 private space companies going starting next year, will instead send another 2B to putin to launch us, 3-5B/year until 2025 to build the SLS, and another 2-3 B over the next 5 years to build an engine for ULA's use.
IOW, Putin can count on the GOP constiting of traitors who will continue to help him.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
USAF had decent flying shapes in the 50's. None could handle re-entry temps. Spam-in-a-can could. And it supported defense research (ICBMs).
On the other hand, we had the USAF Man in Space Soonest program. The acronym proved prophetic, as we missed getting into space first.
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
Shuttle was supposed to replace Titan with the use of the Shuttle-Centaur stage. USAF had Titan III like NASA had Saturn V.
What level of gravity do humans need to THRIVE for long periods of time? (That is so that they do not suffer from bone density loss, cardio-muscular problems, etc.) Is it 1/6 gee (moon)? 1/3 gee (mars)? Or will humans need a full 1 gee to live and, eventually, safely REPRODUCE?
If the answer is humans need a full gee, then we might as well just resign ourselves to limiting our trips into the solar system to quick jaunts and robotic explorers. (While you *might* convince colonists to spend say an hour a day doing exercises to maintain their health, no way would you be able to make a fetus do them). We'll need to re-engineer humans before we can make a serious effort to colonize another world. (The only rocky planet with anything near our level of gravity is Venus and it is a hellhole). That's why the loss of the centrifuge planned for the ISS that would examine the effects of "partial gravity" (as opposed to the "micro-gravity" the ISS currently has or the regular gravity that we have) on biological systems was so disappointing. Literally it would have told us whether or not colonization of space was really feasible in the near future. (It probably wasn't going to be big enough to hold people but just seeing how partial gravity affected laboratory mice would go a long way to answering these questions).
Perhaps if we can dump the Ruskies, with the money saved with using Space-X's rockets we could build a decent centrifuge to make these (literally) VITAL studies. Maybe we don't even need to attach it to the ISS; just take two of Bigelow's(?) inflatable habs, add a cable and spin! (Just by changing the cable length you could alter the g-forces so no additional propulsion other than the initial thrusting would be required). But that's the deluxe model, you could just take the Dragon capsule and have a cable attached to its spent second stage and spin THAT (the center of gravity might not be in the "middle" but it should work fine). Keep it in orbit for a few generations of mice and dissect them when they return.
While we're at it, we should probably look into circadian rhythms... (but maybe mars, with it's 24-1/2 hour "day" is close enough).
Wow - you've really wound the clock back as far as when everyone was using tweaked V2 rockets and the British had just as advanced a rocket program as the USAF - good job!
For a while after NASA started the USAF improved their own rockets a great deal due to an extent to some people being involved in projects for both.
To a lot of people involved in making rockets, the USAF and NASA were customers instead of the sources of the technology themselves.
Instead of running scientific missions such as the Curiosity rover, Europa Clipper, Mars Sample Return, Terrestrial Planet Finder... This is NASA management being hopeless anti-science/pro-pork again.
Please, for the love of god, don't let this opportunity go to waste. :)