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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."
NASA, as far as astronauts go, is very "ground control" centric. To wit:
"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."
What the true scope of their work is not given.I suspect that a few do the "schedule" part.. it is a 24/7 operation. The rest are doing logistics: What supplies are needed, do we have power, oxygen, fuel.
However, ISS is a very labor intensive thing. To get a document signed off can take dozens of signatures from all over the place. Most of the signatories are really signing to say "nope, this document doesn't impinge on anything I'm responsible for", but still, you need the document signed.
But ultimately, everything is manually done: typically with processes developed in the 70s to use systems designed in the 70s. Send a request to do X to person Y, who verifies that time is available, then they send it to person Z who verifies that power is available, who then sends it to person A, who verifies that there's no conflict with operation Alpha, Beta, then person B verifies there's no conflict with operations Charlie, Delta, and Echo.
ISS operations is like a small village of 10,000 people each of whom have their specialized area of expertise.
"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.
I'm sorry, but that just flies in the face of reason. If its true, then NASA is doing something badly wrong. It should not take 50x as long to figure out what order to do things as it does to actually do them. I could understand a complex operation like a spacewalk taking 50 man hours to plan for a one hour project, but the majority of things that people do simply do not benefit from that extreme level of planning.
A good example of the over-thinking that NASA does is the Columbia Crew survivability report. Many tens of thousands of hours were spent on the analysis that concluded the same thing that just about anyone could have stated after 30 seconds of deliberation: There were many different factors involved in supersonic re-entry, most of which are fatal, and there is no known technology that could have saved the crew from any significant portion of those factors. Yet NASA felt it necessary to spend millions on that part of the investigation...
If people want to continue NASA in any meaningful way, two decisions need to be made: First, what do we really want NASA to accomplish? (meaning we the people, NOT we the NASA), and how much will it really cost.
I can virtually guarantee that no one cares if NASA achieves any more science. What people want NASA to be achieving is the engineering of going into space and staying there. Everything else costs more than it is worth, and should be undertaken only if the costs can be partially subsidized by the engineering projects needed to achieve cheap space travel.
Given the progression of human engineering expression, space travel should be accessible to a significant minority of the worlds population. 35 years after the wright brothers, the entire upper middle class could afford to fly. 35 years after Apollo, only a handfull of people have even been to the moon, and less than 100 individuals could afford to pay out of pocket to do so today, and even if they did, they would have to wait 10 years for someone to put together a dedicated mission.
NASA has failed in its primary responsibility to the American people: Make space travel commonplace.
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Or we could cease the pissing contest of getting people to Mars first, ASAP, and continue with our low Earth orbiting ISS investment, and do our long-range exploration and tests using cheaper rocket engines and instruments, which are working very well, especially over time. Hopefully with less financial and environmental costs over time. I'm not anti-science, but can't these questions wait to be resolved, until like 100 years from now at least? Technology always gets cheaper and we have other priorities for the budget.
I mean really, Putin has single handedly-topped his Sochi Olympics with Cold War II. And I'm sorry to invoke a Godwin on a science budget thread, but those Islamic State monsters are on at least the level of Nazis.
Instruments seem better suited for deep space exploration and performing actual science than humans, and they can certainly do it up there longer and dare I say for less money. Doesn't the ISS do a lot of grade-school experiments for kids to keep them interested in studying science in school? We can do better with our science budget.
You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.
And exactly what should they produce then? What do you consider results? And why should we listen to you?
NASA has produced results. Perhaps not the results you like, perhaps they were not as profound or as glitzy as you would like, but they got results. Including a smooth-running ISS, a mars rover that goes on and on and on and on and on, and a new launch system.
Now, I understand that proving that you are a hoopy frood by slagging of NASA on /. is too tempting for some people, but that doesn't mean it is a sane point of view.
Which highlights what I'd really like to see added to the ISS - a farm module. Test a farm module on the ISS, getting the concept ready for a Mars mission. Do we really plan to send something on the order of 2 years of consumables on a Mars mission, recycling only the water? We need much more complete recycling, and we'll need it for any permanent presence anywhere beyond Earth. For that matter the only reason we don't need it on Earth is because we've got this giant biosphere that has handled the details pretty well for us, up until the past several decades.
I rather like the idea of such a farm module even on Earth. No doubt it would be designed for compactness, efficiency, and minimal hand-holding. Sounds good to me - put one of those in the back yard and cut the grocery bills. (I realize that the initial outlay is likely prohibitive, but the idea is neat.) There are also likely places on Earth where such a thing would be worthwhile, say Antarctica or other inhospitable locations.
(Note that I didn't say that a farm module would use sunlight - that might not work for Mars, and probably not beyond.)
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