ISS Completes 100,000th Orbit of Earth (phys.org)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: The International Space Station, the space laboratory that showcases cooperation between Russia and the United States, on Monday orbited Earth for the 100,000th time, Russian mission control said. Traveling at an altitude of about 250 miles (400 kilometers) and a speed of about 17,500 miles (28,000 kilometers) per hour, the space station circles the Earth once every 90 minutes. The ISS has now traveled 2.6 billion miles "or about the distance of 10 round trips to Mars," NASA said on the station's official Twitter feed. From two modules, it has grown to 15 modules, occupying a space the size of a football pitch and represents around $100 billion in investment. "Such a long lifespan of the ISS proves that mankind has the necessary technologies for constant presence in orbit, that we have the potential for further space exploration," said Matyushin.

Comments

Re:Track it here

[clovis]

NASA will send you a txt message on the days that the ISS will be passing overhead at dawn or dusk.
It's way cool to actually see it going over and to think about the people up there.
https://spotthestation.nasa.go...

But this is my favorite. It's downward looking webcams from the ISS.

http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/HDEV/

Re:the real question

[silentcoder]

>OK, but not really worth $100 billion.

But the Iraq war was worth 1.7 Trillion dollars and counting ? Afghanistan was worth the 1 trillion bill it had run up in 2014 already ? I imagine it's a bit higher now.

For comparison - Bush never actually counted the wars against the deficit (worst accounting ever) - Obama did, figuring if America spends money on this stuff it ought to be written down somewhere. Think about that. It means the wars alone make up a third of the deficite increase written up during his terms (ironically, representing money the guy before him actually spent but didn't write down).

Nearly three trillion dollars spent killing brown people. Another trillion odd paying all the other soldiers and military staff and defense projects and the rest of a killing machine 13 times larger than anybody else has (because twice as large while just as effective would not be as good for hawkish politician's egos and their friend's pocketbooks).
What has the military cost, in total, since the ISS was launched ? I can't find a clear figure but even in 1998 when the ISS was first launched the military budget for the year was 399 Billion - FOUR TIMES what the ISS has cost us in TOTAL.

I would argue that if we can afford to spend apparently about half the global GDP on trying to kill each other over 20 years - we can damn well afford to spend a hundred billion on developing the techniques and technologies for long term space exploration - which is the ISS's single most valuable research contribution.

You can't just say "X" is a big number, whether a number is big depends on context. In the context of government spending and priorities, the ISS is near the top of the list of the BEST things ever done with your tax money.