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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."
The primary use for the space station is to practice with sending astronauts in space. The problem is that there's no actual use for people in space, so the practice is useless too. Sure, we all hear the stories that a human geologist could do stuff so much quicker than a remote controlled robotic rover. Of course, these stories never discuss how much extra time you'd need to get the human geologist there in the first place, and what it would cost. In the same time, and for less money, you can launch a few dozen unmanned missions, each to a different location, carrying different kinds of tools, and get more results.
They might want to be running a bunch of experiments on the way to and from Mars just to fill up the time. I doubt that they would want the days to end up looking like one another. Better for the people to be kept so busy that they don't notice the time passing by rather than trying to figure out what to do with time on their hands.
Can you name a single instance of a country that stopped all exploration until domestic debts were paid and all people reported that they were happy with things as they are?
I'd argue this given how little a budget has been given to NASA when compared to things like the F-22 and F-35 programs the US Government runs. People who bedevil the space program aren't looking at the big picture of return we've gotten over the years. Yeah they always can do better but they already have done exceptionally well especially when compared to some military defense contractor spending projects that would dwarf NASA and have no return of value other then money spent in someone's district and a product that was substandard and/or delivered late.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
Eliminating space program would mean that lots of R&D wouldn't be done anymore (domestically).
That's a dangerous gamble.
USA should trim the military budget first.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
And here you aptly demonstrate what "just about anyone" in their cluelessness doesn't grasp - there's a vast gulf between a thirty second conclusion, and actual analysis. Among other things, the Crew Survivability study discovered an unexpected failure mode in the titanium structures of the crew compartment.
I can completely guarantee you have no clue what you're talking about. The man-vs-machine debate is one of the loudest, deepest, and bitterest debates there is when it comes to space travel and exploration. There's many people who want NASA to be doing *more* science, and much less of anything having to do with people in space.
You're off by at least twenty years and a second world war's worth of engineering investment. You also fail to note that air travel has an economic function (in connecting existing destinations and enabling economic activity) - while space travel is largely a money pit.
conservatives spend bribing old people with freebies
So Social Security, Medicare, and Federal Pensions (collectively over half the budget) are conservative programs now? Man, when did that happen - I can't keep up with these shifts in the political landscape!
Meanwhile, the defense budget is only 1/6th of the federal budget and falling. The left got their way: America's military dominance is fading. The Pax Americana is ending.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Look at this way, modern humans have been around for about a quarter of a million years. The first migrations out of Africa were only about 30,000 years ago. If exploration were really some fundamental human constant, it seems odd that we spent 90% of our time in a relatively small portion of one continent.
The value of NASA has never been commercial. It is a pure research area. WE are learning how to live and work in space, which is an environment so alien to us that our bodies don't even function properly. That knowledge flows into the private commerce section of our economy and slowly brings benefits that we have yet to imagine.
I keep hearing this argument, in fact I've been hearing it for around 20 years. And during that time, we've spent hundreds of billions of dollars on NASA. So it's about time to ask... where is all this spin-off technology we've been promised for the past 20 years? Most of the major innovations we've seen are either military (GPS, internet) or commercial (cellular networks, smartphones). It's hard to point to a single transformative innovation to come out of NASA recently, and historically the military has done far more to spur technological innovation than NASA. I'm not arguing that building more F-35s is the best way to spur technological innovation, but it's worth taking a hard look at where our research dollars make the biggest difference, and I think it would be hard to show that NASA is the best way to do that.
Exceptions that prove the rule. Out of thousands of cultures, the number of premodern societies that attempted any serious, sustained exploration can be counted on one hand. And really, its doubtful that premodern migrations to the Americas were any kind of deliberate exploration effort. It was probably just nomads following the herds.
Look at this way, modern humans have been around for about a quarter of a million years. The first migrations out of Africa were only about 30,000 years ago. If exploration were really some fundamental human constant, it seems odd that we spent 90% of our time in a relatively small portion of one continent.
Actually, proto-humans migrated repeatedly out of Africa. Homo erectus, Homo antecessor, Homo neanderthalensis, and finally two waves of Homo sapiens moved out of Africa and into Eurasia. North America was colonized repeatedly by Homo sapiens, by the Amerindian, Navajo-Dene, and Inuit peoples. Migration probably is in the genes. Lineages that become widespread are harder to wipe out as a result of drought, famine, climate change, etc. so lineages with some innate tendency to disperse probably tend to survive. But it's kind of a moot point. The places they went to already had atmospheres, normal gravity, ambient temperatures, radiation shielding, abundant game and edible plants. Mars has none of that. It was simple enough to move out of Africa that a cave-man could do it, literally. It doesn't follow that because humans could and did repeatedly move from continent to continent that it's a good idea to try to colonize a cold, barren, airless wasteland millions of miles away.