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5,200 Days Aboard ISS, and the Surprising Reason the Mission Is Still Worthwhile
HughPickens.com writes Spaceflight has faded from American consciousness even as our performance in space has reached a new level of accomplishment. In the past decade, America has become a truly, permanently spacefaring nation. All day, every day, half a dozen men and women, including two Americans, are living and working in orbit, and have been since November 2000. Charles Fishman has a long, detailed article about life aboard the ISS in The Atlantic that is well worth the read; you are sure to learn something you didn't already know about earth's permanent outpost in space. Some excerpts:
"Life in space is so complicated that a lot of logistics have to be off-loaded to the ground if astronauts are to actually do anything substantive. Just building the schedule for the astronauts in orbit on the U.S. side of the station requires a full-time team of 50 staffers.
Almost anyone you talk with about the value of the Space Station eventually starts talking about Mars. When they do, it's clear that we don't yet have a very grown-up space program. The folks we send to space still don't have any real autonomy, because no one was imagining having to "practice" autonomy when the station was designed and built. On a trip to Mars, the distances are so great that a single voice or email exchange would involve a 30-minute round-trip. That one change, among the thousand others that going to Mars would require, would alter the whole dynamic of life in space. The astronauts would have to handle things themselves.
That could be the real value of the Space Station—to shift NASA's human exploration program from entirely Earth-controlled to more astronaut-directed, more autonomous. This is not a high priority now; it would be inconvenient, inefficient. But the station's value could be magnified greatly were NASA to develop a real ethic, and a real plan, for letting the people on the mission assume more responsibility for shaping and controlling it. If we have any greater ambitions for human exploration in space, that's as important as the technical challenges. Problems of fitness and food supply are solvable. The real question is what autonomy for space travelers would look like—and how Houston can best support it. Autonomy will not only shape the psychology and planning of the mission; it will shape the design of the spacecraft itself."
"Life in space is so complicated that a lot of logistics have to be off-loaded to the ground if astronauts are to actually do anything substantive. Just building the schedule for the astronauts in orbit on the U.S. side of the station requires a full-time team of 50 staffers.
Almost anyone you talk with about the value of the Space Station eventually starts talking about Mars. When they do, it's clear that we don't yet have a very grown-up space program. The folks we send to space still don't have any real autonomy, because no one was imagining having to "practice" autonomy when the station was designed and built. On a trip to Mars, the distances are so great that a single voice or email exchange would involve a 30-minute round-trip. That one change, among the thousand others that going to Mars would require, would alter the whole dynamic of life in space. The astronauts would have to handle things themselves.
That could be the real value of the Space Station—to shift NASA's human exploration program from entirely Earth-controlled to more astronaut-directed, more autonomous. This is not a high priority now; it would be inconvenient, inefficient. But the station's value could be magnified greatly were NASA to develop a real ethic, and a real plan, for letting the people on the mission assume more responsibility for shaping and controlling it. If we have any greater ambitions for human exploration in space, that's as important as the technical challenges. Problems of fitness and food supply are solvable. The real question is what autonomy for space travelers would look like—and how Houston can best support it. Autonomy will not only shape the psychology and planning of the mission; it will shape the design of the spacecraft itself."
Different ways of looking at it:
The space program has been, on average, 1.15% of the US budget. Giving it a proportional share of the debt means that it contributed 204 billion.
Even if you consider space exploration as entirely frivolous, it has only contributed 508 billion to the debt (before interest). That amounts to 2.85% of the debt.
Yes, the US needs to get its "house in order". Yes, NASA needs to produce better results in order to justify its existing budget. On the other hand, attacking the space program will do very little to address the debt problem. Actually, it will do very little to address the deficit. (Again assuming that space exploration is completely frivolous, it only accounted for 2.48% of the deficit in 2013.)
There has to be proof, in safety-critical processes
First: Why? everything in life is a risk. If you put out an add looking for volunteers for a mission that is almost 100% guaranteed to kill the volunteer, you will still get many thousands of times the number of volunteers as you need...
Second: There is no such thing as proof. the very concept is for mathematicians, politicians and idiots; none of whom deal in the real world. The real world is dangerous, and people are notoriously bad at planning for the unexpected. The amount of danger increases as a function of the energy involved, making spaceflight very dangerous by definition. The people involved accept that risk, but what good is installing 3 redundant hydraulic systems when a single fault in the leading edge of a wing severs all three... A better use of weight and cost would be two systems with armor... (Might have saved Columbia, or at least gotten the crew to a slow enough speed and low enough altitude that they could have survived breakup/bailout). Redundant systems have a demonstrated usefulness, but they fail completely when face with area effects, and yet, redundancy is used to "prove" low odds of failure, that simply do not pan out in reality. Fukushima was supposed to survive a one in a thousand years tsunami...
flight 232 had all three hydraulic system severed in what was supposed to be a 1 in a billion event...
Kegworth was a result of redundant engines being useless because the wrong engine got shut down...
"Proof" in mechanical systems is usually demonstrated through redundancy which only gets you so far: Not nearly as far as the engineers are taught...
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
I don't know where you get your 1/6th figure. US military spending for fiscal 2014 according to the wikipedia page is 43% of the total amount budgeted. Only 1.4% goes to NASA and 0.6% for the National Science Foundation.
Creative Spelling Copyright (2002). May use without Persimmons
That's 43% of discretionary spending, which is itself about 30% of total spending. Spending Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid are both individually 1.5x as large as medical spending.
Here's that in pie chart form and in infographic form. All numbers from the Congressional OMB.