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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.
The idea here is interesting but I'm not convinced for three reasons: first, the fact that massive staffs are used to plan out their days isn't necessary great evidence that it really is difficult: that could be administrative bloat. Second, for much of a trip to Mars days will end up looking very much like each other until one is actually on planet. They won't be doing much in the way of experiments on the way to Mars. Third of all, a 20-30 minute delay will not really create that many problems with getting plans from Earth unless one is in some sort of emergency situation.
Maybe they should start giving more responsibilities and capabilities to the expert systems running in the computers aboard to do all those tasks. Lets start the HAL series.
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.
The fact that NASA allows the astronauts so little authority now to make decisions implies their reluctance to trust human judgement in stressful conditions. Too many variables.
Send the robots first. Figure it out. Then the ones who need food.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
"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.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
The true value of our efforts in space comes from ambitious projects that inspire people to take up STEM subjects (e.g. not to trot out the same old stat, but the 7:1 return in the USA economy from the Apollo missions is a prime example). At the moment the ISS isn't doing a very good job in this area compared to the Mars probes or Rosetta, especially when you consider the cost of the ISS project.
If the ISS wants to ramp up its relevance and earn its tax dollars, then it should be focussing on more ambitious projects.
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.)
Best comment comeback to anti-space I have ever seen.
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?
Certainly one of the biggest boondoggles ever. At an estimated cost of $150B through 2015, that is $24 million per day! (based on 6250 days by end of 2015). Extending the math, that is just over $1.5 million per orbit.
And for what? What inventions or unique processes have been discovered or perfected and put into use on earth to better our own lives? What scientific results have been significant? (I won't even ask for memorably significant) What non-human experiments were done what could not have been done far cheaper by other means? Did the TV news ever lede with "An incredible scientific breakthrough by astronauts/researchers on ISS was announced today...."
Using just a third of that money, NASA (and lets be honest, almost the entire cost is paid by the US) could have spent over $6B more on exploratory missions to each of the other 8 planets (including Pluto). And still had $100B left over to spend on projects, scientific or otherwise, at home.
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! ~~
I have probably heard a hundred different times how eliminating a program that is only 1% of the budget will not fix the debt problem.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
scaling it for humans on all but eating, pooping and procreating. Slashdot serves no essential purpose other than to keep slashdotters busy with something on their mission to a grave. See how easy that was? We can play madlibs with that argument all day for any activity. Humans want more. Humans explore. Space included. Spending 1 out of every 100 tax dollar on it is a very small price to pay.
I'm sure that Spain, Portugal and England had similar discussions in the 1400s. After all, why try to innovate and just pay the exorbitant taxes levied by the Spice Road owners. Can anybody see the relevance today with Europe, Russia and China?
Such a quaint trolling...
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.
11? You are way, way off. 18 is the latest.
Love sees no species.
And of course you are the absolute reference on what is meaningless or not. Please reveal yourself, since the USA needs your guidance.
Hmm, I don't think we really want to replicate the diamond market model...
-- Counting backwards since 1984!
Exploration in the 1400s was taking a profitable venture (the spice trade, later precious metals) and finding new ways to make it more efficient (new trade routes). Discovery of new lands was incidental. Nobody wandered around the ocean without a particular destination in mind, that would have been suicide. So if we really follow your analogy, then we should stop manned space exploration, focus on activities that have immediate profit, and be satisfied knowing that new discoveries will take place whether we pursue them deliberately or not.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Why don't we skip Mars and set our sights on mining precious metals from the asteroid belt. Much more complicated, but:
Planetary Resources says that platinum from a 30-meter long asteroid is worth 25Ã"50 billion USD.
It costs more for the fuel to de-obit platinum safely than the value of platinum. We can't start there. We should either:
1. Find a country we really don't like, and declare it "America's new platinum mine", so we can skip the whole "safely" part of "de-obit platinum safely"; or
2. Start with a CHON asteroid. Most of the expense of space past LEO is the cost of the fuel to lift the fuel. If we could make endless fuel in orbit, well, whole new worlds of space exploration open up to us. (Plus then it's cost efficient to do the platinum asteroid thing.)
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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.
Actually too many to name. There have been thousands of countries, nations, empires, etc. and very few of them had any policy of active exploration. The romantic notion of exploration is a very recent development. Throughout most of history, wandering beyond the horizon would have been suicidally insane and very few to attempted it were ever heard from again.
That's old news to anyone actually paying attention. It was highlighted as a problem as far back as the Skylab SL-3 and SL-4 missions. In an email exchange with NASA scientists working with the Flashline Research Station back in 2002 (or so) I outlined the need to streamline communications and transfer some of the decision making and planning authority from the (simulated) mission control to the station commander and from the station commander to his subordinates. Unsurprisingly, the NASA study ended up reaching the opposite conclusion - the existing system worked,and there was no need to even seriously try any other system. That, ultimately, is why they don't have any real autonomy or practice having real autonomy.
So, the satellite networks for gps, communication and weather aren't worth it?
Of course the US is still the remaining superpower in world, look up the definition sometime. It probabably doesn't mean what you think it does.
You are wrong, the waves of peoples who came to the Americas and various Pacific islands prove you wrong.
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
Can you name any country that paid all domestic debts and all people reported that they were happy with things as they are?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
GPS was a pure military development. I'm pretty sure NASA had zilch to do with it.
Asteroids seem to deorbit pretty effectively on a fuel budget of zero.
Your return chunks of asteroid are their own ablative. Ideally you'd give them as optimal of a reentry shape and trajectory as possible, but you wouldn't brake them, you'd just aerocapture, and then give them just enough of a drogue chute that they don't disintegrate fully on impact.
I am a proud traitor to my species in alliance with my mother the Earth in opposition to those who would destroy her.
Energy
We can't keep using stored solar energy (fossil fuels) for much longer without making the planet uninhabitable. There is too much resistance to nuclear fission, and we don't seem to be bothering to exploit stored nuclear fission energy (geothermal). Even if we put up solar panels everywhere on this planet it wouldnt be enough, so we are either going to have to go out and put solar collectors in space, or develop our own fussion generators (which may need He3 that may be found on the moon, or in the long run collected form the atmosphere of the gas giants.
I really have a hard time understanding where you get the idea that US is so weak and irrelevant. We spend 1.7 trilliion dollars on defense on this planet and 36.6% (640 billion) of that is done in the US. China is the next most prolific spender on defense and they spend around a third of what the US spends (188 billion).
The comment about legacy yet relevant weapons really doesn't make sense to me.
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.
Creative Spelling Copyright (2002). May use without Persimmons
And, yet, America was (re)discovered, and everyone learned a fundamental truth in those times. New "spices" were discovered in the process. So, with your lack of vision, shall we leave access to space for the less timid?
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.
Yes.
We can already study space from right here in our computer chairs. Does getting 600 kilometers closer to Andromeda help anything?
If fact, it does. Being outside of the atmosphere means visible light telescopes are tremendously more useful. Radio telescopes on the far side of the moon would be far more effective. Studying each of the planets is far more effective if you're actually on or near them.
Yes we can create robots that go out there and study very specific things. They are planned well in advance, do only very limited things, and frequently fail because they're not totally autonomous and adapt poorly to the unexpected.... case and point: Rosetta's Philae lander....or any number of probes that have malfunctioned or been lost. If you put a single human out there, they can fix the problem. A person can conduct hundreds of experiments where a machine is limited to a few. A person can analyze and interpret results onsite, even design new experiments. A person can build things, onsite.
Robots have their uses. But they're not a replacement for humans. Not yet anyway.
Another important factor in your calculations: if we shut down NASA, thousands of people are now unemployed, meaning they're not paying payroll or income taxes. In other words, a lot of money the government pays NASA actually comes straight back to the government. I suspect that alters the percentages by a non-trivial amount.
That knowledge flows into the private commerce section of our economy and slowly brings benefits that we have yet to imagine.
Exactly how does learning to live and work in space bring commercial benefits ? Or is that "yet to imagine" ?
Asteroids seem to deorbit pretty effectively on a fuel budget of zero.
Only for a limited range of sizes. Too small, and they'll completely burn up. Too big, and they'll explode on impact.
"Throughout most of history, wandering beyond the horizon would have been suicidally insane and very few to attempted it were ever heard from again."
Not from the tracks our ancestors laid down. We left tools. We traded with other humans far from our homes as far back as we can find records. Humans have wandered over the horizon for as long as we have been on this planet. The archeological record demonstrates our many migrations from place to place as does our complicated genetic heritage. We are wanders by nature and our settling down into cities is recent, though with as much as we move around, we've not really stopped wandering. (I have lived in twelve cities and five states in less than 50 years.) Wandering over the horizon is suicide? Hardly. There is no land on this planet that we have not figured out how to live upon from the Inuit of the North, to the bases in Antarctica and every island and continent in between.
Creative Spelling Copyright (2002). May use without Persimmons
Knowledge is funny sometimes. It just doesn't follow narrowly defined lines. It just doesn't go where you think it will go.
One of the enduring legacies of Apollo was managing giant, hi tech endeavors with tens of thousands of people involved. Same sorts of endeavors that bring you giant aircraft, giant boats, enormous power projects, the Internet.
While you can argue about how safe or sane searching for knowledge really is, it's clear that it does have major effects on our economy and ecology.
So tune in, turn on and keep your antivirus programs running. It's a weird ride.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
NASA and the military have a long, close and contentious relationship. Remember, NASA does few things internally. It outsources most of the manufacturing to other companies. Which companies? Why the very same companies that comprise the military-industrial complex. The Shuttle was a joint Air Force / NASA program (that wasn't terribly smart but that is another story). Many NASA positions require military security clearances.
All of NASA's boosters derived from military stock.
At a lot of levels, they are one in the same.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
[Citation Needed]
"Too many to name" is not an excuse to not justify a statement. It should always be followed by notable examples so that sources and claims can be checked. Otherwise, it's an impossible statement to defend against and fact-check, and that kind of statement has no place in debate.
So, please, name a few so we can see how accurate that statement is.
Sure, why not? Its not like space is a limited resource than can be monopolized the first mover.
I'm all for doing science projects, and discovering unexpected things. I'm just in favour of doing them with a useful primary mission. Let's use our collective resources to find and implement a global replacement for fossil fuels, for instance. That's certainly a more pressing issue than learning how to circle around the Earth.
I can get to one hand only in the Europe: the Portuguese, the Spanish, the British, the Dutch and the Italians. I'm not as well versed in the history of other parts of the world, but I'm pretty sure that between Asia, Africa, and native populations of the Americas, you'll probably reach some multiple of that number.
Not really, what is the "spice" from space in your example?
On Arrakis, silly.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
The one thing this comment does not recognize is that national debt is not necessarily bad. As long as the debt to GDP ratio is reasonably consistent and less than a year (the US at 0.7 years now), we are not overleveraged.
"Who are you?" "No one of consequence." "I must know." "Get used to disappointment."
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.
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 defense budget is 20% of the federal budget, which is around 1/5th. America's defense budget exceeds that of the next 10 largest defense budgets *combined*. The U.S. still has unquestioned air superiority in every conflict it enters, a fleet of aircraft carriers to project that air power, ballistic missile submarines that can rain down nuclear death at a moment's notice, a rapidly growing drone army to silently hunt our enemies from the skies, electronic intelligence and cyberwarfare capabilities to spy on the whole world, and critically, the network of ships, bases, and air transport to rapidly move troops and supplies to conflict points anywhere on the globe and project that military force... America is the only remaining global military power. No one else- not China, not Russia- has that ability to project power beyond their regional sphere of influence. It's not limitless power, as shown by Iraq, Afghanistan, or even Viet Nam, but it still makes the U.S. the only remaining superpower. And if anyone's hurting the U.S. military preparedness, it's not the left, it's the generals who push for expensive toys like the F-35 instead of focusing on problems like counterinsurgency warfare.
You must be joking. The U.S. spends more on defense than the next eight countries combined [http://pgpf.org/Chart-Archive/0053_defense-comparison].
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.
Yes we can create robots that go out there and study very specific things. They are planned well in advance, do only very limited things, and frequently fail because they're not totally autonomous and adapt poorly to the unexpected.... case and point: Rosetta's Philae lander....or any number of probes that have malfunctioned or been lost. If you put a single human out there, they can fix the problem. A person can conduct hundreds of experiments where a machine is limited to a few. A person can analyze and interpret results onsite, even design new experiments. A person can build things, onsite.
It's a bullshit argument. The problem is that a robotic mission is going to cost on the order of 1% of a human mission to do the same thing. If there's a risk of the lander failing, the cheapest and easiest solution is to create two or three separate robotic probes which minimizes the chance of failure. Obviously a 100 billion dollar manned mission will be more capable than a 1 billion dollar robotic mission. But a 100 billion dollar robotic mission would be vastly more capable than a comparably expensive manned mission.
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.
Yes, most human settlement in new lands has taken place as short moves from existing settlements into new territory. That is human expansion, nonetheless, and has been responsible for most of our occupation of the whole Earth. Where long-distance exploration jumps come in is when a "giant step" is required, say to be first into a new continent. As soon as Musk or anyone else does this for an extraterrestrial destination, the usual legion of incrementalists will follow.
really have a hard time understanding where you get the idea that US is so weak and irrelevant
There's a long distance between "superpower" and "weak and irrelevant", no?
We once had a military to fight "two and a half wars", with simultaneous control of every ocean. That's a superpower. We're at around half that strength now. Our naval power is mostly older hulls, and new capital ships are not being built at replacement rate. We'll still be able to project power, no doubt, but not like we used to. Now responding in strength in one part of the world means leaving "opportunities" elsewhere for territorial aggression. Oh well, everyone kept going on about how we shouldn't be the world's police force, and I guess we won't be - at least not in 2 places at once.
The comment about legacy yet relevant weapons really doesn't make sense to me.
Most of our (expensive) strategic force: large naval vessels, bombers, etc, are mostly older now. As we're building far fewer bombers/carriers/fighters/etc than we used to, that means we have mostly old stuff in service now - but still usable today given our likely opponents (though B1B bombers are easy for current opponents to shoot down, only usable after we've already won, really, and will still be in service for 20 more years). For a reduced mission that will be fine, but it's becoming evident that if Russia of China decides to expand its borders a bit, we'll be writing them stern notes.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
At this point, send probes, not people.
Seems almost all the solar system's objects have been studied most effectively by probes.
Would rather see future space research be to study and send probes to promising 'Earth 2' exoplanets.
If another human-habitable planet is discovered, then might fuel real breakthroughs to get humankind finally spreading across the galaxy to colonize it.
It seems once we see a real Goal (which to me would be finding another human-habitable planet), then we really start working towards it.
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
Exactly - like I said, just pick someone we don't like, and deorbit all the chunks of asteroid we want to down on them, then just pick up the pieces. :)
Seriously, the scenario as I understand it is: we'd park an asteroid in a high orbit (you wouldn't want it dangerously low), maybe above GEO. Slicing off a chunk of platinum itself takes a bunch of energy, but lets pretend we could use a solar furnace or something (seems plausible). We've still got to change the orbit for a chunk of metal for a high orbit to a reentry trajectory - that's a non-trivial mass of fuel per kilo of payload, right? And the cost of getting that fuel to high orbit is nuts, so the economics don't work. But you're better at this math than I am - what do you come up with?
OTOH, if we start with a CHON asteroid in high orbit, and some automated way to process it into fuel (which I think you'd need to get it into orbit in the first place, but isn't that much of a stretch), then everything changes.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Relative spending doesn't matter the way you think it does. For example, it doesn't matter how much we spent if there's no aircraft carrier in a particular ocean the month we need one, and that requires a fixed minimum count of hulls. We've fallen below that count (and it will fall over time) - now we can pick a few places where we can project power, but as soon as we respond to one crisis, any asshole tinpot dictator can see we're tied up there and can send troops across his border.
All of which is only relevant if we want to be the world's police force, of course. Was it worth the cost, to have 70 years with no large-scale war? I think it was, but we're no longer willing to be everyone else's defense budget. We can continue to protect ourselves, no doubt, but I believe turbulent times are ahead if that's all we do.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
You've fallen for the "discretionary spending" sales pitch. This pie chart is a bit old, and still has some war spending that we don't have for 2014, but it's still informative. http://usdebtclock.org/ is up to the minute, and cites every number.
Mostly what the federal government does is mail checks to old and/or poor people. Stuff like infrastructure and NASA is collectively an afterthought, and much (most?) of that is pork. As others have said, our government is a pension plan with a military.
I'd like to see more NASA, more roads, more NSF, more building anything, but that's just not the focus of the federal government these days.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Not necessarily. Reducing the space program could mean more money for other research topics. NASA budget is twice that of the NSF. Does it really make sense to spend twice as much on space research as all other non-medical sciences combined?
Is convincing that army of ground support folks to relinquish their vice-like grip on the control they wield. There is a reason they are called "Controlllers" and "Directors".
That is a beautiful thought. Any of those remote telemetry stations in military bases? Had NASA been in charge of GPS, we wouldn't have destroyed the plans of the original satellites, nor the higher precision add-ons. We are out of spare GPS satellites and a replacement has yet to be launched.
Come to think of it: where are the GOES weather satellite replacements as well?
"We’ve got a permanent space colony, inaugurated a year before the setting of the iconic movie 2001: A Space Odyssey."
Sorry but this is one ludicrous comparison, it's akin to saying a man on the moon was inaugurated long before the 7 wonders of the world.
And where I quit reading as the rest was just going to be sensationalism.
The space program has technology as a by-product. The true goal of space is not about your personal wealth, but about the wealth of your children's children and even more far off generations... This is about the big picture. This is about more than just your petty greed. What about that is so hard to grasp? Why does everything have to offer you a return price tag for you to consider it's worth? But then, if most people are as self centered as you are, then maybe the human race does deserve to stay on this rock until it burns.
http://spinoff.nasa.gov/Spinof... http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki... http://www.discovery.com/tv-sh... http://science.howstuffworks.c... I googled that for you. Does that help?
You quote two excellent examples. Do you even read your OWN posts?
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
I'm betting those nations ended up doing exploration and 'research' in the name of commerce.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
It's taken us this long to get beyond subsistence.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Which is why you send as optimal of a size and shape as possible. Note that asteroids normally come in randomly and have random shapes. Humans can have a huge impact on the behavior by choosing an optimal shape and trajectory. And, as mentioned, drogue chutes could be used to further reduce the free fall velocity - not for a gentle impact, simply to keep the velocity down to a level that it won't completely obliterate itself in the atmosphere or on impact.
I am a proud traitor to my species in alliance with my mother the Earth in opposition to those who would destroy her.
By picking the shape and trajectory, we can have quite good accuracy on where to land the debris. Pick a piece of federal desert land and there you go.
Bad assumption right from the beginning. That's a terrible waste of energy. You mine an earth-crossing asteroid. Chunks mined off an earth-crossing asteroid can be put onto an earth-intersecting trajectory with only the tiniest of delta-V (you might have to wait a long time your payloads, but no problem there). The amount of delta-V is so low (dozens to hundreds of m/s) that you wouldn't even need to use a rocket, you could just kick it off with a railgun or similar. Then you don't brake it when it gets to earth - it brakes itself by crossing through Earth's atmosphere ("aerocapture"). There are various optional things one could do with the reentry chunks to assist, such as small rockets for trajectory adjustment en-route or small high-speed chutes to keep the asteroids from completely obliterating themselves on reentry / landing (no need for a soft landing, it's fine for them to hit moving at hundreds of meters per second). Both of these would be dwarfed orders of magnitude over by the mass of the return chunk.
All you, as a mining operation, need to do is get your operation up to the asteroid. You need to be able to mine off chunks, shaped appropriately for optimal reentry, and kick them off onto an ideal reentry trajectory toward your target impact zone - potentially with the various hardware systems described as above, but in the base case, not with anything at all. You need a source of power (solar, nuclear) for mining and to kick your chunks into their Earth-intercept trajectory. And of course you have to deal with a million and one details, starting with how to mine at all in microgravity and what targets would actually have commercially viable quantities of valuable minerals.
I am a proud traitor to my species in alliance with my mother the Earth in opposition to those who would destroy her.
Yeah, unlike the billions given to ILLEGAL aliens, wefare queens so they can continue to pop out more & more children. The "welfare" et al budget is many times that of Veterans, military, senior citizens payouts. Both parties in some part stopped long ago doing "the business of the country", and instead, concentrated on doing whatever keeps them in power.
The govt, state or federal doesn't give billions to illegal aliens. On the other hand, they pay sales taxes, income taxes and social security taxes like everybody else. Of course, if their employer pays them under the table or doesn't report and remit those taxes to the govt., well, the problem is with the employer, not the immigrant. As for "welfare," well let's be fare. If the so called job-creators actually created jobs with the record profits they are reporting, then maybe they wouldn't have to pay so much in taxes to support those on welfare. The so called welfare system is in place to allow employers to pay a sub-liveable wage. Put differently, if employers paid liveable wages, then there wouldn't be nearly as many people on the various assistance programs.
So, in summary - illegal aliens getting a free ride - that's because of employers breaking the law to increase profit; welfare and subsidy programs - if employers paid a liveable wage, they programs wouldn't be needed. You are correct, though, both parties stopped long ago dealing with the real cause of problems.
The countries did not exist but the explorers are from what today are those countries and there are plenty of them from after the 15th century, so you can substitute Spain and Italy with whatever country(ies) the explorers were from, at the time. You try again.
Maybe some of the other grown up Republics in the world can help carry some of the ball.
Japan should handle its own defense. The The Poles, British, French and Germans theirs.
If everyone chips in, then none of us have to be the hated police and tax man.
A heavily armed Europe and militarized Japan - what could possibly go wrong? Well, joking aside, it's for the best. Germany is poised to conquer Europe just by calling in its debts, and Japan is culturally quite distant from 80 years ago. Sucks to be Taiwan, but not everyone can be a winner.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
That makes some sense - of course, figuring out how to get something to carve platinum out to that asteroid will be the fun part, but I guess if you found just the right orbit that came in closer to the Sun for a bunch of easy power - maybe. Seems more likely than Slashcode ever getting Unicode support, anyhow.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
It takes 50 staffers to make the schedules? Sounds like bloatware.
America's military dominance is still more than enough to ensure no nation will take up arms against the US. The current threat to Pax Americana isn't military action from another nation, but US military actions abroad that foster insurgency and terrorism. Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq have shown that military dominance isn't enough to win a war against a determined population.
Any such journey is definitely worth it because what matters here is the JOURNEY itself and not the DESTINATION! Even all our lives is one such journey!
http://popularbloggingtopics.c...
Yes, on the face of it, the US military budget is larger than the combined budgets of the next 10 or so (it fluctuates a bit), but the claim is always issued by people and groups who intend to decieve the general public who do not pay attention to details.
First, The US government pays more money for each bit of hardware. Most US military hardware is made by highly-paid unionized workers with expensive retirement programs and even the raw materials are obtained in a more-expensive way because of US environmental regulations. China, as a contrasting example, can get its raw materials from unregulated strip mines and use nearly slave labor (compared to the US). Therefore an American tank will always cost vastly more than a Chinese or Russian tank. There's a famous saying that "quantity has a quality all its own".
Second, the US military is an all-volunteer force. The US government must, therefore, provide wages and benefits to its service personnel and this is actually where most of the US defense budget goes (even though we have fewer people in uniform than, for example, China). Indeed, a large part of the US military budget includes benefits for retired servicemembers and those disabled by their service.
Third, much of the US military spends its time defending our allies. We station people in South Korea, for example, who do NOTHING to protect the American people and in fact would be a trip wire that would drag the US INTO a war rather than defend us from one. This makes diplomats giddy and helps politicians pat each other on the back, but it has actually a negative defensive value. This has gotten so bad that a new situation has arrived in which the UK has currently cut its navy so severely that they do not have enough engineers to man their ships and the US has had to lend them some sailors. As an American, I am happy to see us do it for such an old ally.... BUT I wish the people there would WAKE UP and support a military strong enough to defent its own nation. Winston Churchill would be completely embarrassed and shocked by the state that current UK politicians (of all parties) have put their nation's military into.
Social Security started as a conservative program, being invented by that flaming liberal Otto von Bismarck. Bismarck wanted to make socialism look less attractive.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
is that really good, that we're dependent on others to have a supply chain for food, instead of having means of each producing our own? That's a less robust situation for civilization, best to rectify that problem before we become even more unstable.
We can still project force anywhere we like. Nobody else can. Two and a half wars was perhaps reasonable after WWII, although we weren't going to be doing much else in a land war with the Soviet Union or China, but the world has somewhat equalized since then. I still don't see who's going to challenge us in any ocean.
We haven't responded with strong military force to many acts of territorial aggression since WWII, and our response has sometimes been delayed (liberating Kuwait in 1991, for example), so I don't see that we've lost much deterrent effect. We never were in shape to do a full-scale attack on Russia/the Soviet Union or China for border expansion. Since WWII, China has tried terrritorial expansion a few times, and I don't remember us doing anything warlike about it.
Modern ships and planes last a long time, and are generally refittable with the latest sensors, weapons, and electronics, so we don't really need to build over the replacement rate (we're probably building ships faster than needed for replacement purposes, just to keep shipyards in business). The B1B is still perfectly usable in any war we're likely to get into for the next twenty years, since governments that have advanced air forces generally have some interest in staying peaceful.
I'm really not seeing what we'd be buying with larger armed forces.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I can give you one example of a country that stopped exploration for political reasons. At one time, China had large fleets going all over the Indian Ocean, until the maritime folks wound up on the wrong side of a civil war. That probably hurt China seriously a couple of centuries later.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
The B1B is still perfectly usable in any war we're likely to get into for the next twenty years, since governments that have advanced air forces generally have some interest in staying peaceful.
I'm really not seeing what we'd be buying with larger armed forces.
The reason we've only been fighting insurgencies and the like is because we've had so large a military that no one would risk provoking us into a "high intensity" war. I fear that we've lost that deterrent.
I don't believe that Russian and China are beyond expanding their borders. Maybe it's not our job in the first place to prevent that (though I'd like to think it's a good result), but we won't be doing that preventive job much longer.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
The cry of "Put the Astronauts in Charge" is as old as the Mercury program. The plain truth is that NASA needs to be scrapped, and we need to start over with a new agency that has a MISSION. Today, it's a jobs program who's main function is coming up with reasons to keep the budget increases in place year after year, and it's not doing that great of a job at that.
This should be written in to EVERY FEDERAL AGENCY, that after so many years, they are disbanded, the paperwork shredded, and we just start over.
This is exactly what happens in Corporations when they suffer big losses, or get acquired. It is a natural, evolutionary cleansing process that governments never do... It's a big part of the reason we have such an alarming deficit... All government agencies are on an auto-pilot growth program - that has nothing at all do with RESULTS and everything to do with getting funds in the congressional district that pays for the contributions to the politician's PAC.
Murphy was an optimist
I don't think anybody wants to fight the US in a high-intensity war. Such affairs are expensive, and the US can do a great deal of damage no matter what.
As far as Chinese territorial expansion goes, I don't remember us getting militarily involved when they had an armed border dispute with India, or when they tried taking part of northern Vietnam. You seem to be suggesting taking up military burdens we didn't before.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
The Vietnam war was a proxy fight between us and China, because we weren't going to fight directly (for centuries, whenever two world powers got angry and didn't want to fight directly, one of them would invade Vietnam and the other would fight them there - it's bizarre). We certainly protect Taiwan today, we're still in the Korean DMZ though not like before, we've had troops in Europe since WWII to deter Russian aggression, though only in certain directions. And of course we've been all over the Middle East.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
So Social Security, Medicare, and Federal Pensions (collectively over half the budget) are conservative programs now?
Who cares what label is put on them? The real issue is that those programs were ALREADY PAID FOR. Congress stole the money with some sleight-of-hand back in the 80s and now here we are all yelling and screaming about how the government wastes so much money paying for all the fucking old people and by the way, why didn't they just work and save like I am doing now?
That is all bullshit. Social Security and Medicare were paid for and funded until all of the money was outright stolen. If you don't like paying for Social Security and Medicare because it will not be around when you and I retire, then go blame some dead politicians. They stole it and spent it.
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
I wasn't talking about the Vietnam War, but some time afterwards when China attacked Vietnam.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes