I have looked at what it can do. It can do DAMN LITTLE. The value of zero gee to science is vastly overhyped. Noone wants it except the kept second-rate scientists NASA's been funding.
Training for Mars? Ridiculous. Manned mars missions are so far away (mostly because they are of so little value) that the current astronauts will be long gone by the time they occur. Moreover, what exactly does sitting in the station train them for? How to use the zero gee toilet?
Laumching vehicles to Mars does *not* require a station. You can assemble a Mars vehicle in orbit by itself before sending it off. If it did require a station, it would not be ISS: it would be insane to assemble the vehicle in ISS's high inclination orbit.
What your comments about ISS reveal is the amazing depths people will go to to avoid admitting their cherished notions of the future aren't grounded in reality. NASA has been exploiting that character flaw for decades. Wise up and stop being such a fool.
And you need to think more clearly about what's required to set up self-sustaining colonies on Mars. Building ISS is not on the critical path. Indeed, it's so far off the critical path that any 'lessons learned' will have been lost by the time they might be needed.
ISS might appeal to people with limited, linear imaginations. Upon closer examination, it is truly worthless.
And do what? Watch the asteroid all the way to impact?
No, discover if any are actually going to hit us in the next century. In the unlikely event that we detect such, THEN invest the large amount of money needed to deal with the problem.
And, no, we are not extinct if we cannot stop an asteroid. We are a *bit* smarter than dinosaurs, and can preserve enough organisms to restart the biosphere (or enough of it for our purposes) after the immediate post-impact effects die away.
The idea that ISS is a necessary step to learning how to set up self-sustaining ET colonies is about as sensible as the idea that climbing trees is an important first step to landing a man on the moon. The problems that stop us from setting up self-sustaining ET colonies are not those addressed by ISS. It's an irrelevant sideshow.
ISS will do diddly squat to shield society from asteroid impacts. Think for a minute -- even after an asteroid impact, Earth is still more habitable than Mars. For the cost of ISS we could protect and support hundreds of thousands of people for decades in bunkers while the post-impact winter dies down.
Moreover, settting up a colony on Mars that can completely sustain itself is not possible with our current technology. Think for another minute -- just how much industrial infrastructure is needed to make all the components that go into Mars habits, equipment, spacesuits, etc.? The answer is an enormous amount. You'd need to land the population of a small country on Mars just to run the stuff.
If you really want to protect us from asteroids, get some of NASA's money that being sucked down by ISS and devote it to an enhanced telescopic search program for potentially dangerous NEOs. If we find one on a collision course then we can talk about developing the technology to divert it.
There's an endless stream of blue sky crap about space research. I've learned to heavily discount this propaganda, and even then the actual results are disappointing.
But for a forum where people discuss the development of sweeping new technologies, there sure are a lot of credulous fools here.
Where did you people leave your ability to think critically? Why are you so willing to accept the breathless promises of the people feeding at the government trough?
The painful truth is you've been suckered. The supposed benefits and potential of the space station, and manned space travel in general, have been insanely overhyped.
Well, if you actually paid any attention to what the space station is about, you'd realize that it IS about other scientific endeavors.
We have been paying attention to the ISS and, no, it is not about science. The experiments on it are mickey mouse science, with little or no support from the broader scientific community. Scientific review panels have repeatedly said that the science done on ISS cannot justify the station's construction.
That companies cannot do something is not an argument that the government must do it, if the government is also bad at it.
For something like massive space expenditures, the correct answer may be that no one should do it. Maybe at some point in the future technology will have advanced enough that companies or government can get around their institutional shackles. Until then, it's just flushing money down the drain.
Of course the SRB can be shut off -- there's a shaped charge running down the side that ruptures the casing when the destruct signal is sent. This would destroy the stack, of course, but in your scenario that's already happened.
These charges were used after the Challenger stack broke up.
Possibly yes. The cost of labor on the moon will be ludicrously high, and a good fraction of the cost of aerospace objects (which are already $1000+/lb) is labor.
Now throw in the unfortunate fact that replacements for the processes of entire terrestrial industries will have to be developed to make anything on the moon. That cost will have to be amortized. It would be cheaper to just use that enormous expenditure to instead reduce launch costs from Earth.
are there enough minerals on the moon to build space stations/ships/domes/etc using its supplys?
Sure. But the cost of building things on the moon is orders of magnitude higher than doing it on Earth, and there's no demand for it anyway, so why bother?
Yes, scientific research often requires government funding (either directly or by subsidy). This is a feature of things involving positive externalities.
The problem with this sort of thing, though, is that it's difficult for the government to determine what's actually good for society, vs. what just satisfies political interests. NASA gets funded not because space is important, but because it employs many people in many congressional districts (or sends money to private contractors who do).
This problem will occur with *any* large government program. It certainly happened with the shuttle and the space station, and is a good part of the reason why each is such a disaster. It would also apply to any large future government space activity like a mission to Mars.
Whats better, 30,000 people employed, or 30,000 people unemployed?
False dichotomy. Many of those people could be employed doing something that is actually useful, even if it's just flipping burgers.
But your point is well taken. To prevent unemployable people from building up, enrollment in aerospace engineering departments at universities should be sharply curtailed.;)
Building armored refuges on Earth where a group of people could survive the post-impact winter with enough food/etc. to restart civilization and restock the biosphere would be FAR cheaper than colonizing space. Besides, after the impact the earth would *still* be more habitable than anywhere else in the solar system.
That would be an entirely new vehicle. The fundamental problem is that the demand for launches is so low that we'd never recoup the development cost. The lack of demand is just another sign that there's not a whole lot worth doing in space.
Because, of course, companies that focus exclusively on short-term returns have consistently demonstrated that this approach is best for their employees, customers, and long-term viability.
You left out 'shareholders', who are the ones that really matter. The purpose of a company is to legally maximize shareholder value. Period. Companies that ignore short-term issues usually don't do this. Successful companies can play long-term planning games, but, as I said, this is almost always a waste of effort. I am sure you can think of situations where it led corporations to make horrible mistakes.
The Apollo program was a ten-year plan, and it worked as advertised. Or are you a Moon Hoaxer?
The Apollo program successfully landed 12 men on the moon.
It was also a terrific example of the failure of long-term planning. Or do you think the goal of Apollo was the construction of those Saturn V lawn ornaments at KSC and JSC? Landing men on the moon became a pyrrhic accomplishment, done at great cost for no significant ultimate benefit.
Even if it's just on a small scale it seems to me many companies would pay to have experments done for them in no/micro gravity. Or even sending their own scientist to do lab experments.
Companies look at the cost and realize it's not worth it. They can get a hundred staff-years or more of work on the ground for the cost of sending one employee into space.
The value of microgravity to science has been greatly overhyped. But should that surprise you?
All this adds up to: "If you put research in the private sector, anything that does not have an obvious, short-term ROI gets abandoned".
Yes -- and this is a good thing.
Long term planning is vastly overrated. It's a waste of time at best, and a dangerous delusion at worst. Reality changes too quickly for planning to be anything but an exercise in fantasy beyond about, say, five years.
Government has a place in supporting basic scientific research that has a good chance of being applicable in many different futures, but STS and ISS aren't basic scientific research, they're massively expensive engineering and operational efforts.
Rotary Rocket no longer exists -- the company ran out of money some time ago. All its assets were auctioned off. It never raised more than a small fraction of the money that would have been necessary to achieve those grandiose dreams. Probably a good thing; paper or powerpoint spaceships are much easier than real ones.
Oh, there's *interest*. There's interest in lots of things that end up not making economic sense. At the end of the day, all the interest in the world won't save a company that can't earn a profit.
This is the old, tired analogy of spaceflight with exploration of the new world. Like any analogy, it depends on a real similarity existing between the two concepts being compared.
But space exploration isn't just moving over to a new continent that is already supplied with air, water, soil, and exploitable inhabitants. The Spanish achieved a net profit in a time shorter than the 'space age' has already existed.
Moreover, technology advances faster these days than it did then, so commercial interests *should* have shorter time horizons. The appeal to 'long term thinking' is often a refuge for ideas that just can't offer a competitive ROI.
The private sector doesn't want anything to do with manned spaceflight, unless a government is footing the bill. It's simply not even close to profitable, breathless nonsense about microgravity manufacturing or space tourism notwithstanding (those Russian tourist flights would not make economic sense unless ISS resupply were paying for the lions share of the launch.)
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I have looked at what it can do. It can do DAMN LITTLE. The value of zero gee to science is vastly overhyped. Noone wants it except the kept second-rate scientists NASA's been funding.
Training for Mars? Ridiculous. Manned mars missions are so far away (mostly because they are of so little value) that the current astronauts will be long gone by the time they occur. Moreover, what exactly does sitting in the station train them for? How to use the zero gee toilet?
Laumching vehicles to Mars does *not* require a station. You can assemble a Mars vehicle in orbit by itself before sending it off. If it did require a station, it would not be ISS: it would be insane to assemble the vehicle in ISS's high inclination orbit.
What your comments about ISS reveal is the amazing depths people will go to to avoid admitting their cherished notions of the future aren't grounded in reality. NASA has been exploiting that character flaw for decades. Wise up and stop being such a fool.
And you need to think more clearly about what's required to set up self-sustaining colonies on Mars. Building ISS is not on the critical path. Indeed, it's so far off the critical path that any 'lessons learned' will have been lost by the time they might be needed.
ISS might appeal to people with limited, linear imaginations. Upon closer examination, it is truly worthless.
And do what? Watch the asteroid all the way to impact?
No, discover if any are actually going to hit us in the next century. In the unlikely event that we detect such, THEN invest the large amount of money needed to deal with the problem.
And, no, we are not extinct if we cannot stop an asteroid. We are a *bit* smarter than dinosaurs, and can preserve enough organisms to restart the biosphere (or enough of it for our purposes) after the immediate post-impact effects die away.
The idea that ISS is a necessary step to learning how to set up self-sustaining ET colonies is about as sensible as the idea that climbing trees is an important first step to landing a man on the moon. The problems that stop us from setting up self-sustaining ET colonies are not those addressed by ISS. It's an irrelevant sideshow.
ISS will do diddly squat to shield society from asteroid impacts. Think for a minute -- even after an asteroid impact, Earth is still more habitable than Mars. For the cost of ISS we could protect and support hundreds of thousands of people for decades in bunkers while the post-impact winter dies down.
Moreover, settting up a colony on Mars that can completely sustain itself is not possible with our current technology. Think for another minute -- just how much industrial infrastructure is needed to make all the components that go into Mars habits, equipment, spacesuits, etc.? The answer is an enormous amount. You'd need to land the population of a small country on Mars just to run the stuff.
If you really want to protect us from asteroids, get some of NASA's money that being sucked down by ISS and devote it to an enhanced telescopic search program for potentially dangerous NEOs. If we find one on a collision course then we can talk about developing the technology to divert it.
Spinoffs are greatly overstated, usually by people with agendas. BTW, Tang was developed in the 1950s in the private sector.
Yeah, and monkeys could fly out of your butt too.
There's an endless stream of blue sky crap about space research. I've learned to heavily discount this propaganda, and even then the actual results are disappointing.
But for a forum where people discuss the development of sweeping new technologies, there sure are a lot of credulous fools here.
Where did you people leave your ability to think critically? Why are you so willing to accept the breathless promises of the people feeding at the government trough?
The painful truth is you've been suckered. The supposed benefits and potential of the space station, and manned space travel in general, have been insanely overhyped.
Well, if you actually paid any attention to what the space station is about, you'd realize that it IS about other scientific endeavors.
We have been paying attention to the ISS and, no, it is not about science. The experiments on it are mickey mouse science, with little or no support from the broader scientific community. Scientific review panels have repeatedly said that the science done on ISS cannot justify the station's construction.
That companies cannot do something is not an argument that the government must do it, if the government is also bad at it.
For something like massive space expenditures, the correct answer may be that no one should do it. Maybe at some point in the future technology will have advanced enough that companies or government can get around their institutional shackles. Until then, it's just flushing money down the drain.
Of course the SRB can be shut off -- there's a shaped charge running down the side that ruptures the casing when the destruct signal is sent. This would destroy the stack, of course, but in your scenario that's already happened.
These charges were used after the Challenger stack broke up.
Possibly yes. The cost of labor on the moon will be ludicrously high, and a good fraction of the cost of aerospace objects (which are already $1000+/lb) is labor.
Now throw in the unfortunate fact that replacements for the processes of entire terrestrial industries will have to be developed to make anything on the moon. That cost will have to be amortized. It would be cheaper to just use that enormous expenditure to instead reduce launch costs from Earth.
are there enough minerals on the moon to build space stations/ships/domes/etc using its supplys?
Sure. But the cost of building things on the moon is orders of magnitude higher than doing it on Earth, and there's no demand for it anyway, so why bother?
Yes, scientific research often requires government funding (either directly or by subsidy). This is a feature of things involving positive externalities.
The problem with this sort of thing, though, is that it's difficult for the government to determine what's actually good for society, vs. what just satisfies political interests. NASA gets funded not because space is important, but because it employs many people in many congressional districts (or sends money to private contractors who do).
This problem will occur with *any* large government program. It certainly happened with the shuttle and the space station, and is a good part of the reason why each is such a disaster. It would also apply to any large future government space activity like a mission to Mars.
Whats better, 30,000 people employed, or 30,000 people unemployed?
;)
False dichotomy. Many of those people could be employed doing something that is actually useful, even if it's just flipping burgers.
But your point is well taken. To prevent unemployable people from building up, enrollment in aerospace engineering departments at universities should be sharply curtailed.
Ah, the 'asteroid' canard.
Building armored refuges on Earth where a group of people could survive the post-impact winter with enough food/etc. to restart civilization and restock the biosphere would be FAR cheaper than colonizing space. Besides, after the impact the earth would *still* be more habitable than anywhere else in the solar system.
That would be an entirely new vehicle. The fundamental problem is that the demand for launches is so low that we'd never recoup the development cost. The lack of demand is just another sign that there's not a whole lot worth doing in space.
Because, of course, companies that focus exclusively on short-term returns have consistently demonstrated that this approach is best for their employees, customers, and long-term viability.
You left out 'shareholders', who are the ones that really matter. The purpose of a company is to legally maximize shareholder value. Period. Companies that ignore short-term issues usually don't do this. Successful companies can play long-term planning games, but, as I said, this is almost always a waste of effort. I am sure you can think of situations where it led corporations to make horrible mistakes.
The Apollo program was a ten-year plan, and it worked as advertised. Or are you a Moon Hoaxer?
The Apollo program successfully landed 12 men on the moon.
It was also a terrific example of the failure of long-term planning. Or do you think the goal of Apollo was the construction of those Saturn V lawn ornaments at KSC and JSC? Landing men on the moon became a pyrrhic accomplishment, done at great cost for no significant ultimate benefit.
Even if it's just on a small scale it seems to me many companies would pay to have experments done for them in no/micro gravity. Or even sending their own scientist to do lab experments.
Companies look at the cost and realize it's not worth it. They can get a hundred staff-years or more of work on the ground for the cost of sending one employee into space.
The value of microgravity to science has been greatly overhyped. But should that surprise you?
All this adds up to: "If you put research in the private sector, anything that does not have an obvious, short-term ROI gets abandoned".
Yes -- and this is a good thing.
Long term planning is vastly overrated. It's a waste of time at best, and a dangerous delusion at worst. Reality changes too quickly for planning to be anything but an exercise in fantasy beyond about, say, five years.
Government has a place in supporting basic scientific research that has a good chance of being applicable in many different futures, but STS and ISS aren't basic scientific research, they're massively expensive engineering and operational efforts.
Rotary Rocket no longer exists -- the company ran out of money some time ago. All its assets were auctioned off. It never raised more than a small fraction of the money that would have been necessary to achieve those grandiose dreams. Probably a good thing; paper or powerpoint spaceships are much easier than real ones.
Sorry. I usually avoid cliches like the plague. :)
Oh, there's *interest*. There's interest in lots of things that end up not making economic sense. At the end of the day, all the interest in the world won't save a company that can't earn a profit.
This is the old, tired analogy of spaceflight with exploration of the new world. Like any analogy, it depends on a real similarity existing between the two concepts being compared.
But space exploration isn't just moving over to a new continent that is already supplied with air, water, soil, and exploitable inhabitants. The Spanish achieved a net profit in a time shorter than the 'space age' has already existed.
Moreover, technology advances faster these days than it did then, so commercial interests *should* have shorter time horizons. The appeal to 'long term thinking' is often a refuge for ideas that just can't offer a competitive ROI.
The private sector doesn't want anything to do with manned spaceflight, unless a government is footing the bill. It's simply not even close to profitable, breathless nonsense about microgravity manufacturing or space tourism notwithstanding (those Russian tourist flights would not make economic sense unless ISS resupply were paying for the lions share of the launch.)
No it isn't, unless you've stupidly got yourself stuck in an aerospace career and need the constant flow of federal money.