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The International Space Station Turns 15 (time.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Today marks the 15th birthday of the International Space Station (ISS). Since Nov. 2, 2000 the ISS has hosted more than 220 people from more than a dozen countries. Time reports: "The ISS was little more than three pressurized modules, some supplies and a couple of solar wings to help keep it powered on the day the first crew climbed aboard. Today, the station is a flying piece of cosmic infrastructure the size of a football field, containing 15 pressurized modules, which afford the astronauts as much habitable space as a six-bedroom home. It weighs 1 million pounds (454,000 kg), runs on 3.3 million lines of software code and required 115 launches just to carry all of its components up to orbit."
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-05/galactic-gold-rush-private-spending-on-space-is-headed-for-a-new-record
It looks like the void is being filled rather sufficiently...
I love how Slashdot is a hotbed for people arguing that:
A) People who think that ISS, a permanent human presence orbiting our planet, is a huge financial boondoggle that we never should have done; and
B) Establishing a permanent human presence on the surface of Mars will be cheap and we should have done it long ago.
"Oh, goodness. Look at my wrist, I have to go." "But what about your clothes?" "I don't love these."
International Space Station is one of the best projects to happen in Space since space race ended. Most people think that the astronauts just float aimlessly in a big tube. However there are so much stuff to do, that every minute is accounted for and more astronauts required to do all scientific experiments planned.
The biggest problem was and is costs of going to space. NASA should have targeted this as soon as their budget started to shrink post Apollo. Instead they stretched the timelines and cancelled some programs.
Why with time Shuttle prices went up instead of down? If they couldn't make it cheap and fully reusable initially, why it was not improved over the following decades? Every flight should have had a couple of small changes to make it better and cheaper, use new stuff at the same time as old if you are not sure of its safety for couple of flights then remove old stuff.