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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.
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.
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.
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
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.)
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! ~~
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
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.