The advantage of Skylab is that it was one huge piece of equipment, and the ISS is a whole bunch of small pieces. While the ISS does have more components and much more mass, Skylab certainly is very comparable in terms of raw physical volume.
And yes, the "density" in terms of the amount of metal per m^3 is much more for the ISS.
Habitable volume of Skylab: 361 m^3 Habitable volume of the ISS: 373 m^3 Habitable volume of Mir: 350 m^3
All three stations were of comparable size, interestingly enough. Yes the ISS is slightly larger, but not by a whole lot. And Skylab was quite a bit more open with fewer structural issues in the way.... it was built inside the fuel tanks of the 3rd stage of a Saturn V rocket.
The fact of the matter is, you can do a lot more with robots than with people. One of the things holding back our progress is the stubborn insistence on sending men to do a machine's job, consuming huge amounts of resources and money that could have been spent actually accomplishing things rather than making "Buck Rogers" PR out of serious business.
Every time I see this kind of sentiment, I just cringe. On multiple levels, I think this is simple flat out wrong. There is a role for both manned and unmanned exploration of the Solar System and space in general. The two kinds of exploration fill complimentary roles, not competitive roles.
Frankly, it really annoys me that Dr. Sagan brought up this idea in the first place and popularized the notion that we could kill the Astronaut Corps and somehow have more money left over for the Jet Propulsion Lab. He is the origin of the notion, together with highly jealous oceanographers who thought their pet science projects should get priority on science funding as well.
Yes, there is a kernel of truth to the notion that some forms of exploration are better left to robots. Certainly the initial reconnaissance should be done remotely, and the use of robotic probes can certainly leverage a manpower shortage that is always going to be the case in space exploration anyway for the next couple thousand years or more.
Still, there is nothing like having somebody actually there, feeling the dirt, smelling the dust, responding to the physical environment and doing something that no other human has ever done before in the history of mankind. The benefits of a manned space exploration program have already paid off many, many times in terms of opening up horizons that never existed before, and introduced new ways of thinking and even whole new concepts and memes that are still going through society today.
If it wasn't for manned spaceflight, the modern environmental movement simply wouldn't exist. Seriously, prove me wrong here. And it took people, real folks doing stuff up there, to really kick those ideas into mainstream culture. Previously, environmental concern was for very fringe activists that were mostly ignored.
I use environmentalism just as but one of many examples of ideas and concepts that came from space and the experiences of people. No, I don't think that would have ever been developed from robotic exploration where every view is managed by committee.
I don't mind the analogy. "No Buck Rogers, No bucks" makes sense too, so far as if NASA doesn't do anything spectacular that nobody will care what happens to the agency.
For NASA's part, they put on a pretty good show. For almost any agency of the Federal government, NASA has one of the best public relations office of anybody I've ever seen or met. They also know how to leverage media coverage on the cheap and get it to go far and wide.
I stand by my assertion that you need more lawyers and lobbyists in Washington D.C. than engineers. A team with patience, an abundant cash reserve, good connections with P.R. firms, and participation with the campaigns of several key congressmen (with of course the appropriate campaign contributions) are the best way to get into space.
That takes significant overhead. What is sort of funny is that in spite of having that sort of ratio of lawyers to engineers, they can still build vehicles that are cheaper than can be constructed by a government agency. That such vehicles are being made by companies like Bigelow, SpaceX, and Orbital Science should be remarkable enough.
Anyway, thanks for the feedback. Over time these political problems will be fixed, and somebody somewhere will wake up to what is happening. The FAA-AST was a brilliant move, as it introduced a bureaucracy that was dedicated to explicitly commercial spaceflight and has some folks who by law simply must appear before congress to testify about commercial spaceflight. This is an agency which is not NASA, which helps all that much more. How profound of a change that has been can be seen simply by the fact that there now is an independent space sector to the U.S. Economy that isn't 100% dominated by government interests.
In regards to the Enterprise, it was intended to make it into space. The original plan by NASA was to retro-fit the Enterprise to fly into space once the initial landing and approach tests were completed. An older vehicle that was used as a test article was eventually converted into the Challenger, and the Endeavor had a somewhat similar history. Both when the Challenger blew up and the Columbia burned up, the thought of finishing the job to make the Enterprise fully spaceflight worthy had been brought up, but rejected due to the costs involved in such a conversion. That is certainly much closer to going into space than most other vehicles that I can think of.
Clearly the Enterprise did fly on its own as an independent vehicle on at least three different occasions, and did contribute significantly to the development of the Space Shuttle program that we know today. For me, it clearly belongs in any list of shuttles that you could mention, and does count as a prototype by every definition of the word.
Now if you want to quibble over the Pathfinder, that is one you can certainly debate. That is the vehicle which was used to be a full mock-up of the Shuttle that could be used to train technicians assembling the parts of the Shuttle and to check ground clearances for moving the Shuttle around if they just wanted to see if it could fit or not. It certainly seems better to screw up on a cheap hunk of steel that won't ever go into space than to make a mistake on a vehicle that cost over a billion dollars to build in the first place. That hunk of steel was never intended to go into space at any time, and barely looks like a Shuttle.
It's not as if human use of "machine learning" algorithms is any faster. It takes about 12 months for our neural networks to figure out that the noises we make elicit a response from our parents. And according to people like Chomsky, our neural networks are designed for language acquisition.
I don't know who you are quoting for this, or what the 12 months is measuring in terms of from birth or from conception, but I will assure you that my children certainly recognized my voice even when they were in my wife's womb. I have a seven month old daughter right now that not only can figure out the noises, but is responding and addressing myself, my wife, and my other kids by name. I'm not saying that she is ready to orally give a doctoral dissertation discussion, but she is communicating and displaying signs of intelligence far better than most AI algorithms that I've encountered.
Still, I do agree that there is something more here about human intelligence that isn't being discussed, and that there is more to this whole thing that we consider language acquisition that is more than simply pouring data into a CPU.
BTW, as a parent, it does surprise me at how little a human child really knows at birth. I've raised other creatures like kittens, frogs, hermit crabs, and nearly every phylum and class of the Animal Kingdom. I will admit that I haven't raised other non-human primates, but it is interesting to see just how little a human starts with and how critical it is for a parent to teach some of the most fundamental things in life. I'm talking how to breath, eat, sleep, and even cry. Most other animals seem to figure things out just fine without all that much assistance. Kittens and puppies take a bit more effort but also seem to respond more in human terms after you have done the training. A newborn is definitely an interesting experience that is incredibly demanding in terms of time and resource commitments just to be able to get that kid to have some modest abilities at self-sufficiency.
We do have the raw blueprints that supposedly explain how it is put together as well, but we are having a bit of a problem reading those blueprints and creating a working model. Some of that is understanding the raw machinery to get everything to work, so there needs to be some work on how to move from these blueprints to organized systems, but at least we are headed in the correct general direction.
Well, my wife and I were able to produce a couple of working models that seem to be doing fairly well and exhibit what I believe is a form of intelligence, but using that system of following the blueprints is not the goal here. It also takes 18 years (give or take a few years either way) to produce an intelligence that is worth anything, and the costs of the organic matter that drives those intelligences can be extraordinarily high as well, not to mention the power consumption and other maintenance costs.
What is keeping people from going to Mars on their own dime is not really so much a factor that there are a whole bunch of unknowns about getting there (which is a problem, but not insurmountable), but rather a government willing to even let people do it in the first place.
The regulatory steps that a company must go through in order to get into space is huge, and it becomes a business nightmare to consider that even if you have some of the best and brightest engineers on the Earth that are helping to design a system for going into space, and even if you build the vehicle, that there is a high likelihood that the license to fly the thing won't ever happen. On top of that, the regulator uncertainty is there where you can be performing tests on components one day, and the next day some bureaucrat randomly interprets the flight rules and decides that the test can no longer be performed in that fashion.
This is the issue facing private spaceflight today. The bureaucracy governing spaceflight is oppressive and draconian, and counter productive in terms of encouraging the development of space. If it doesn't belong to NASA, in the past it simply wouldn't fly at all. It took a special act of Congress to be able to let AT&T spend their own money to fly the Telstar satellite, and they paid a double premium over what it cost NASA to fly other similar projects. That was just the first of a great many attempts to have private commercial spaceflight in any degree. Read up on the Constoga I rocket for a real eye opener, or how NASA effectively killed off Mircorp just when they were starting to make a profit.
For a very interesting and recent presentation that discusses the problems that a businessman who has dealt with getting stuff into orbit and doing stuff in space. Rather than merely talk about it... he even hired astronauts (actually cosmonauts) to go up into space for the company he ran (they actually got up there, not merely were hired to talk about it) and has done other stuff in space that is amazing from a commercial perspective:
The problems facing businesses working in space are daunting, and most of that is political instead of technical. I swear that there are huge factions of the U.S. government that are determined to kill off the entire U.S. spaceflight industry and are making a deliberate policy decision to see to it that Americans never leave this planet again. Not that it is merely a waste of taxpayer money, but that nobody should be allowed to spend money in that fashion in any circumstance. Going into space is hard enough but with the bureaucratic overload, it seems legitimate almost impossible. It certainly takes tilting at windmills to get anything done, together with greasing the skids by having almost as large of a lobbying presence in Washington D.C. as you have engineers actually building the thing in the first place.
Correction: SpaceX has come forward and is building the capability for resupplying the ISS. NASA didn't want to use SpaceX, and the Washington D.C. office for NASA has some egg on its face for even considering the idea. In the time that it has taken NASA to launch a dummy rocket that has almost no relationship with the final vehicle that will actually fly, and with a projected cost exceeding $100 billion, SpaceX has designed from scratch an entirely different launch capability and has done that for less than $1 billion. Yes, I know SpaceX has a contract for more than a billion dollars, but the R&D to build the rocket cost less than that. The price tag for delivery of the supplies is cash on the barrel head for actually getting those supplies delivered.
NASA is using SpaceX as a customer, not using SpaceX as a sub-contractor who happens to be building a component for a NASA spacecraft. That is a huge difference.
NASA's plan was to be using Progress and Soyuz vehicles for resupplying the ISS. That went over real well with the American Congress and is to me incredibly embarrassing. That is still the current plan, and the SpaceX deal is sort of a back-up plan "just in case".
Also don't forget that Orbital Science Corporation is also providing the same service.... and for more money and fewer flights and tons of delivered goods than SpaceX. Go figure that one out. SpaceX is simply grateful they have a contract in hand at all, and look like they may be the first to reach the ISS.
Something I don't get, and is unanswered in general. When the ISS was first assembled back in 1998, it was asserted at the time that this was going to be the first permanent outpost of humanity in space. One of the reasons for making that statement, besides the fact that the ISS was designed to be modular so sections could be replaced if they started to fail, was that it was so incredibly huge that it simply couldn't be safely deorbited. The first ISS crew (aka Expedition 1) was asserted to be the first people in a future succession of a permanent occupation of space. At the time (I swear it was on/. as well, but I could be mistaken.... it would take digging into the archives to find this) it was suggested that eventually the ISS would have to be moved to one of the Lagrangian points. It was a NASA spokesman at the time that asserted it was going to be permanent, and most of the popular press at the time.
It may be true that NASA never really intended this to be kept up, but it does seem like something that shouldn't be shut down a couple of years after construction is completed as well. It just seems so incongruous the current attitude about how the ISS is going to be used now compared to when it was first launched.
Perhaps I'm getting senile in my old age and not remembering things very clearly.
BTW, in regards to liability, the U.S. Federal Government directly takes liability on the impact of anything sent up by the USA. By international law and treaty, this is also true of all space faring nations. If somebody's house is damaged in say, Australia, they can make a claim for it in their own court system and by treaty the U.S. government has to pay up. For a private individual to go into space, they are required by the FAA-AST (the U.S. agency that governs private space flight) to have these liability policies in place just to get approval for launch. BTW, Skylab did fall uncontrollably from the sky, and it is even possible that some unlucky freighter could be in the middle of the Pacific Ocean when something falls in there as well, even if it is a target zone. It is international waters, which implies that anybody has access to it. The government will issue a "notice to mariners" warning about possible dangers, and it is up to a ship captain to decide if they will be there or not. Yeah, I get the idea of the policy you mention, but it is already covered by the law and treaty regardless.
I have long argued that the purpose of the ISS was to transfer spaceflight operations knowledge and orbital construction techniques from the Soviet (yes, I'm using that term correctly here) space program to NASA. It could be argued that such a technology transfer didn't require $100 billion that it cost to put the ISS up into space, but that was one of the major accomplishments that happened.
Also, it put well over half it not nearly the entire NASA astronaut corps into Star City in Russia, where the cosmonauts do their training and research. In some ways, it has sort of merged together the two manned spaceflight programs in a way that would have been flat out unthinkable in the 1960's. Of course that also has Russian cosmonauts running around Johnson Spaceflight Center doing essentially the same thing.
[The ISS] is a fragile structure in an dangerous environment. One collapsed strut and the thing could be a tangled mess.
Not quite. Yes, a damaged strut could cause problems, but so could damaged struts or other integral structural supports for any kind of building or vehicle. A couple of loose lug nuts on your car could cause problems too.
As for a dangerous environment, for those citing that spaceflight is so dangerous, how is this any different than trans-oceanic sea travel or trans-continental international air travel? Both are incredibly dangerous, where thousands of people have died in the past even attempting to figure out how to do both of those human activities. While I've never crossed an ocean on a ship personally, I have crossed an ocean on an airline, as have millions of other people. The world we live in today would not exist if that kind of activity didn't happen. And people even today still die from incidents resulting from the dangers that people are exposed to while making these major crossings across our planet, in spite of supposedly sound vehicles and technologies and safety protocols to ensure that permit this to happen on a large scale.
As for what science is left to be done on board the ISS, one right off the top of my head is solar power satellite technologies, where there is currently in orbit the equivalent of a smaller municipal power generation plant (capable of powering a whole housing subdivision) that gets no realistic review by the dreamers who keep proposing these things. This is real science here for an aspect of the ISS that by itself could have a profound impact on humanity.
What are the long term maintenance needs for operating a massive solar power array? What kinds of problems happen when you start to deal with substantial amounts of energy that is concentrated in one place on a space vehicle? How do you cope with the environment of space on mechanical systems used for tracking the Sun when they fail? What even happens when you have a mechanical gear box exposed to the environment of space to move these panels?
All of these questions and many more can be answered by reviewing literature about the ISS, and some of these are long-term studies that would provide some incredibly useful scientific data simply by keeping the ISS in orbit for as long as reasonably possible. Certainly this is only scratching the surface and other significant issues regarding materials research on the components of the ISS would also provide incredibly valuable data as well. Of any vehicle that has been put into space, the ISS also has the most complete recycling system for life support. It isn't quite a closed loop and does require some consumables, but it is also testing technologies that would be important to future spaceship (this is a SHIP rather than a mere craft) construction in the future.
I promise that information gleaned from operating the ISS will be used for many centuries into the future, and future engineers and researchers will rue the day that the ISS is abandoned.
The only thing that might be arguable is if it might be better to deorbit the ISS and use the money that is currently bei
True the US pays the lion share of the bill, and the Russians control Access. Gaak! how did that happen?
NASA had to give up something when they forced MIR to be deorbited. Giving the Russians the ability to control access to and from the station was one of the things they gave up in the glorious compromise that is the ISS.
As far as how effective NASA is at dealing with these major large scale projects, I have my doubts about the effectiveness of NASA. They do a good job at very basic R&D, including pure science for the sake of science and the quest for knowledge in general. When it comes to rehashing solved engineering problems like figuring out how to put an astronaut into orbit around the Earth, they tend to do a lousy job of things.
Considering that in two years NASA won't have any way of getting an astronaut into orbit on American vehicles, eggs is certainly on their face and should be highlighted for the series of projects in the graveyard of ideas that any one of which should have been permitted to get to completion. Most of them were better ideas than the current Constellation architecture.
Bigelow Aerospace, what a joke, their inflatable 'stations' have nothing of value... "Genesis II contains numerous systems not flown on its predecessor such as additional cameras, sensors, a Biobox, a reaction wheel and the interactive Space Bingo game."
They don't have any life support nor are inhabitable in any way. But fortunately the have Space Bingo and 'Fly Your Stuff', it smells like a ridiculous sham to me.
I know this is responding to an anonymous coward post that really doesn't know his stuff, but I'll continue on some more in spite of that. This is sheer ignorance on the part of this poster and simply must be responded to.
Yes, it has life support and even docking mechanisms. The "biobox" even mentioned by this poster is some actual living creatures that were on board that vehcile. I think they were cockroaches or other insects, together with some plants to verify the life support systems operations. The Genesis II and the earlier Genesis I modules were intended to be demonstrator projects that could verify both the equipment operations, including explicitly life support, and ground control operations including setting up the equivalent of NASA's mission control and several tracking stations to maintain communications with the vehicle.
The games and stuff mentioned here were included explicitly as a part of the public relations effort, and didn't really cost anything extra in terms of putting them on the vehicle. As for cameras and sensors.... what do you think is on the ISS?
I should note that the Bigelow vehicles are based upon and actually an upgrade of an earlier technology and concept that was supposed to be already on the ISS. It was called the TransHab. The really sad part of this is that the module was actually built and made 100% functional, waiting deployment to the ISS. Budget cuts alone and somebody lacking vision on how to deal with the ISS are responsible for this not being a current module on the ISS. It isn't the only completed module that will never get into space either, and even more surprising is that the docking points to extend the ISS are still available in theory to put up these modules. Unfortunately, these modules on the ground that aren't slated to go up aren't even being maintained, so it would a while to send these up even if the desire was there to do that.
If you want to say that the ISS is a joke of a station and has nothing of value, I suppose that might be true. Otherwise, study what is there and don't be ignorant.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying this is all Obama and I am an American but... to think that just because one nation wants to let their science programs slip even more doesn't mean that anyone should pull the plug on anything.
After the ISS is completed, the annual cost of maintaining it will be $4.5 billion a year. By comparison, the total budget of the ESA for 2010 is $5.4 billion (3.74 billion Euros). Keep in mind that's what the ESA spends for all of its projects -- the portion for human spaceflight and exploration is half a billion dollars.
You say it is $4.5 billion per year? I would love to see a private contractor be simply offered the opportunity to:
Build a heavy launcher capable of sending large payloads into orbit
Put up a privately-built spacestation with interior volume at least equal or greater than the current internal volume of the ISS
Have power generation capabilities of at least double the current power levels, including at least double the current energy storage in terms of batteries.
Includes facilities, life support, and other ammenities to support a crew of at least 8 astronauts
Includes multiple docking berths for both Russian Soyuz and American space craft docking standards
Be capable of operating this space station, once built, for at least 5 years including ground support and consumable supplies
I argue that if you offered a space prize equal to $4.5 billion for the first company to put up a space station with a guaranteed lease agreement for $500 million per year after that for an additional 5 years, you would have companies tripping over themselves just to get such a vehicle built. I'm not talking $4.5 billion for the whole thing, but just for competing for an X-Prize type contest to get this as a one time deal.
Instead of one, I bet there would be two or three of these things built as well.
Too bad NASA would never consider doing that. For me, if they could simply de-orbit the ISS today, shut down the Shuttles completely and vacate KSC, and then offer for private contractors to get launch pads at KSC for their own heavy lift vehicles, no only could this happen and be affordable, but I think you would find that such a space station would be built well before 2020.
Heck, Robert Bigelow at Bigelow Aerospace has already offered to send up a space station module with the same volume as the ISS for about $1 billion (give or take some). It is even already designed, and all he is waiting on now is a customer to fly it. BTW, he does have experience operating space stations too, as he has two of them in orbit right now.
I'm not questioning the amount of money you have quoted here, as the number feels correct too. It just seems like NASA is incredibly wasteful of the money they have, and that it practically is the very definition of how to spend money in the most foolhardy method possible. Yes, I do know why it cost so much more to run it as a government operation, which is seriously getting off topic to go further.
I'm sort of puzzled: What sort of costs are associated with continued operations on the ISS?
Building the thing in the first place was certainly incredibly expensive, and things like the electrical generation capacity of that vehicle is amazing for doing all sorts of test... space solar power tests just to give an example. It certainly is the equivalent of a small municipal power generation facility in terms of the watts generated. How much has been suggested to be spent on just that one idea alone, that is already in operation and in space?
The only real expenses that I see are maneuvering thruster fuel, food and other general consumables, and of course the ground support stations and centers. The ESA has even addressed this particular issue, and questioned some of the incredibly wasteful spending just to accomplish this task alone that could be done at a much cheaper price.
It is sad that NASA won't even consider other alternatives for access to the ISS or that there may be legitimate solutions to keep it going for at least another decade if not longer. Then again, it was NASA that forced MIR to crash into the Pacific by playing political games. It wasn't costs that were so great that MIR couldn't have stayed aloft, nor congressional budget considerations either. Russia wanted to keep MIR going, but NASA threatened to kick them out of the ISS if MIR wasn't deorbited.
Who ever said that the law had to make sense. The state governments want their money, and if you live in that state you can't do things like purchase items in another state to avoid paying taxes.
Supposedly we live in a representative democracy, so take it up with your elected representatives next time they come by asking for your vote. If you think this is bullshit, tell those folks precisely that, and make sure your voice is heard on this issue. Or run for political office and try to cut the bullshit from our government. There certainly are heaps of that stuff laying around most state capitals, not to mention the federal capital.
The difference here is that California requires a different product for what is actually sold within their state. Yes, I thought of the California emission standards when this was brought up, and it is a similar kind of issue... a variation of the theme as well.
Nothing is so cut and dried when it comes to the law, and certainly this electricity "carbon tax" fee was thought to be proper or else it wouldn't have been passed in the first place.
The fact that this is going to be a contest of wills between two different state governments is what will make this an epic legal battle, and one that will almost certainly go before the Supreme Court. It will have precedent setting potential regardless of its outcome, either to open a whole new real of state taxes or to shut off a way for states to act. More likely, it will be some sort of weird compromise that will ultimately result, where the precedent still won't be so clear.
I expect that I will be dead by then due to natural causes, so I really don't care. I might be a very silver haired great-grandpa complaining about the stupid kids that have been roped into fixing the bug, letting people know that back in the 1970's when I first started to program that nobody thought their software would last that long.
As can be seen, even I can make an innocent mistake, but again... who is counting or caring.
It would be more like California putting a special tax on Oregon cheese made from cows that have been given homone treatments or have been genetically modified.
It is essentially a regulation on how that product has been made, where the state legislature is creating rules for the creation of that product as it happens in another state. Just as cheese doesn't matter what cow has actually produced the milk to make the cheese, electricity doesn't matter where it has been produced either. If it has been made with nuclear or coal as the energy source, the electrons have the same "push" and deliver the same energy requirements to the end users.
This is Minnesota going beyond its authority and invading the sovereignty of North Dakota to regulate the power plants in another state.
Even if this isn't a "tariff", it is a regulation on how power is to be produced by a governmental authority that is well outside of its jurisdiction. Permitting regulations of this nature essentially allow states to impose regulatory authority on how products are produced in other states, including child labor laws or if they are produced by unionized labor or not.
I'm sure the AFL-CIO would love to get some state like Michigan or even Minnesota in this case to pass a law that all goods sold in the state from elsewhere must be made by union labor. That would be essentially the same thing here.
This is a huge issue with potentially monumental consequences if it is permitted to stand as a law, where this would be a precedent setting case to allow states to essentially regulate how and where goods sold in their states can be made.
The Minnesota law isn't being called as a tariff, but rather that is what the popular press is calling it. Minnesota is simply calling this a power generation fee, something well within the authority of its utility regulation board/commission.
The problem is if it can be considered a tariff in the sense that it is targeting the interstate commerce of a commodity (in this case electricity) coming from another state and regulating how that commodity is manufactured. The argument is that it becomes a tariff when they have imposed some sort of regulations and have specified how that electricity is to be made in the first place (without coal to avoid this fee).
BTW, I dare you to show me when Fox News ever said "Will Obama eat your children?" An 11 o'clock news for "Fox News" is something I'd really like to see, as that presumes the late night news broadcasts of most affiliates, and Fox typically airs their evening news an hour earlier than their competitors at the local affiliates, of which really isn't "Fox News" either. Fox News might sensationalize mundane news stories, but this is going over the top.
That is the question: Can they impose a tax based on how that power is generated, if it is generated in another state?
Presumably electricity that is generated from wind, solar, or nuclear power is not taxed in the same manner... so the question begs to be asked? Can you distinguish electricity made from other sources as something "different" from electricity made by coal? I think not.
Essentially, it turns this fee into a regulation of how power is generated in another state, where the state government has no authority to impose those regulations. It is a state sovereignty issue, where it could be argued by North Dakota that they can produce electricity with the most inefficient and wasteful methods using coal explicitly to produce CO2 as a matter of state policy, and there is nothing Minnesota can do to stop that. They can't selectively treat any kind of electricity as something different based on its source. Any fees on electrical power generation must be equally applied to all states, and to producers within its own state, equally.
Minnesota could regulate and impose fees on coal plants within its own borders, but apparently that has been happening and several Minnesota companies are going to North Dakota to generate that electricity due to cheaper costs and fewer regulatory hurdles being imposed by that state. This law is an attempt to stop that from happening, but the point is that North Dakota is another state. Of course there are many in Minnesota that think Fargo is simply the name for "West Moorhead", at least in the state legislature.
The problem with a tax like you are proposing here is that it can't be levied by a state government on goods imported from another state. Simply put, a state can't regulate the commerce of another state.
Furthermore, electricity is identical no matter how it is generated, so the source can't be distinguished unless you are explicitly engaging in that sort of regulation of entities in another state. Minnesota can regulate what is going on within its own borders, but that is the limit of what it can do. States can also regulate what comes into the state, but they can't tax those goods except to pay for the border stations... sort of like how states like California and Arizona regulate the importation of agriculture products going into those states and have inspection stations on the highways going into those states. They can pay a modest "fee" for fruit coming into the state to pay for those inspectors, but that is it. It can't be a true revenue source.
The same thing applies here for electricity.
If this was a federal tax, that would be a different story. But that would have to be an act of Congress, and not a state legislature.
Personally, this is my most hated part of the Constitution- it prevents economic experimentation and competition between the States.
I take it that you haven't read any early American history.
The tariff wars between New York and New Jersey were legendary, and were an explicit reason for this clause being put into the Constitution in the first place. For the few brief years after the Battle of Yorktown and before the U.S. Constitution was ratified, New York and New Jersey engaged in a trade war the likes of which have only been seen between England and France... perhaps even worse. Much of this centered on Manhattan and New York City, where goods in transit across the Hudson River were heavily regulated and there were bands of pirates/smugglers and other kinds of incredible headaches for all involved. Taxes of over 100% and even up to 1000% on some goods were imposed just to cross the Hudson River. It nearly started an all out war between those two states, where both armies and navies were being assembled for just that very purpose, and some shots were exchanged between uniformed military forces of both states.
There is a good reason why this clause was put into the Constitution in the first place, and a damn good reason why it should be respected and not tampered with for even a well meaning cause like "global warming".
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The advantage of Skylab is that it was one huge piece of equipment, and the ISS is a whole bunch of small pieces. While the ISS does have more components and much more mass, Skylab certainly is very comparable in terms of raw physical volume.
And yes, the "density" in terms of the amount of metal per m^3 is much more for the ISS.
Habitable volume of Skylab: 361 m^3
Habitable volume of the ISS: 373 m^3
Habitable volume of Mir: 350 m^3
All three stations were of comparable size, interestingly enough. Yes the ISS is slightly larger, but not by a whole lot. And Skylab was quite a bit more open with fewer structural issues in the way.... it was built inside the fuel tanks of the 3rd stage of a Saturn V rocket.
The fact of the matter is, you can do a lot more with robots than with people. One of the things holding back our progress is the stubborn insistence on sending men to do a machine's job, consuming huge amounts of resources and money that could have been spent actually accomplishing things rather than making "Buck Rogers" PR out of serious business.
Every time I see this kind of sentiment, I just cringe. On multiple levels, I think this is simple flat out wrong. There is a role for both manned and unmanned exploration of the Solar System and space in general. The two kinds of exploration fill complimentary roles, not competitive roles.
Frankly, it really annoys me that Dr. Sagan brought up this idea in the first place and popularized the notion that we could kill the Astronaut Corps and somehow have more money left over for the Jet Propulsion Lab. He is the origin of the notion, together with highly jealous oceanographers who thought their pet science projects should get priority on science funding as well.
Yes, there is a kernel of truth to the notion that some forms of exploration are better left to robots. Certainly the initial reconnaissance should be done remotely, and the use of robotic probes can certainly leverage a manpower shortage that is always going to be the case in space exploration anyway for the next couple thousand years or more.
Still, there is nothing like having somebody actually there, feeling the dirt, smelling the dust, responding to the physical environment and doing something that no other human has ever done before in the history of mankind. The benefits of a manned space exploration program have already paid off many, many times in terms of opening up horizons that never existed before, and introduced new ways of thinking and even whole new concepts and memes that are still going through society today.
If it wasn't for manned spaceflight, the modern environmental movement simply wouldn't exist. Seriously, prove me wrong here. And it took people, real folks doing stuff up there, to really kick those ideas into mainstream culture. Previously, environmental concern was for very fringe activists that were mostly ignored.
I use environmentalism just as but one of many examples of ideas and concepts that came from space and the experiences of people. No, I don't think that would have ever been developed from robotic exploration where every view is managed by committee.
I don't mind the analogy. "No Buck Rogers, No bucks" makes sense too, so far as if NASA doesn't do anything spectacular that nobody will care what happens to the agency.
For NASA's part, they put on a pretty good show. For almost any agency of the Federal government, NASA has one of the best public relations office of anybody I've ever seen or met. They also know how to leverage media coverage on the cheap and get it to go far and wide.
I stand by my assertion that you need more lawyers and lobbyists in Washington D.C. than engineers. A team with patience, an abundant cash reserve, good connections with P.R. firms, and participation with the campaigns of several key congressmen (with of course the appropriate campaign contributions) are the best way to get into space.
That takes significant overhead. What is sort of funny is that in spite of having that sort of ratio of lawyers to engineers, they can still build vehicles that are cheaper than can be constructed by a government agency. That such vehicles are being made by companies like Bigelow, SpaceX, and Orbital Science should be remarkable enough.
Anyway, thanks for the feedback. Over time these political problems will be fixed, and somebody somewhere will wake up to what is happening. The FAA-AST was a brilliant move, as it introduced a bureaucracy that was dedicated to explicitly commercial spaceflight and has some folks who by law simply must appear before congress to testify about commercial spaceflight. This is an agency which is not NASA, which helps all that much more. How profound of a change that has been can be seen simply by the fact that there now is an independent space sector to the U.S. Economy that isn't 100% dominated by government interests.
In regards to the Enterprise, it was intended to make it into space. The original plan by NASA was to retro-fit the Enterprise to fly into space once the initial landing and approach tests were completed. An older vehicle that was used as a test article was eventually converted into the Challenger, and the Endeavor had a somewhat similar history. Both when the Challenger blew up and the Columbia burned up, the thought of finishing the job to make the Enterprise fully spaceflight worthy had been brought up, but rejected due to the costs involved in such a conversion. That is certainly much closer to going into space than most other vehicles that I can think of.
Clearly the Enterprise did fly on its own as an independent vehicle on at least three different occasions, and did contribute significantly to the development of the Space Shuttle program that we know today. For me, it clearly belongs in any list of shuttles that you could mention, and does count as a prototype by every definition of the word.
Now if you want to quibble over the Pathfinder, that is one you can certainly debate. That is the vehicle which was used to be a full mock-up of the Shuttle that could be used to train technicians assembling the parts of the Shuttle and to check ground clearances for moving the Shuttle around if they just wanted to see if it could fit or not. It certainly seems better to screw up on a cheap hunk of steel that won't ever go into space than to make a mistake on a vehicle that cost over a billion dollars to build in the first place. That hunk of steel was never intended to go into space at any time, and barely looks like a Shuttle.
It's not as if human use of "machine learning" algorithms is any faster. It takes about 12 months for our neural networks to figure out that the noises we make elicit a response from our parents. And according to people like Chomsky, our neural networks are designed for language acquisition.
I don't know who you are quoting for this, or what the 12 months is measuring in terms of from birth or from conception, but I will assure you that my children certainly recognized my voice even when they were in my wife's womb. I have a seven month old daughter right now that not only can figure out the noises, but is responding and addressing myself, my wife, and my other kids by name. I'm not saying that she is ready to orally give a doctoral dissertation discussion, but she is communicating and displaying signs of intelligence far better than most AI algorithms that I've encountered.
Still, I do agree that there is something more here about human intelligence that isn't being discussed, and that there is more to this whole thing that we consider language acquisition that is more than simply pouring data into a CPU.
BTW, as a parent, it does surprise me at how little a human child really knows at birth. I've raised other creatures like kittens, frogs, hermit crabs, and nearly every phylum and class of the Animal Kingdom. I will admit that I haven't raised other non-human primates, but it is interesting to see just how little a human starts with and how critical it is for a parent to teach some of the most fundamental things in life. I'm talking how to breath, eat, sleep, and even cry. Most other animals seem to figure things out just fine without all that much assistance. Kittens and puppies take a bit more effort but also seem to respond more in human terms after you have done the training. A newborn is definitely an interesting experience that is incredibly demanding in terms of time and resource commitments just to be able to get that kid to have some modest abilities at self-sufficiency.
We do have the raw blueprints that supposedly explain how it is put together as well, but we are having a bit of a problem reading those blueprints and creating a working model. Some of that is understanding the raw machinery to get everything to work, so there needs to be some work on how to move from these blueprints to organized systems, but at least we are headed in the correct general direction.
Well, my wife and I were able to produce a couple of working models that seem to be doing fairly well and exhibit what I believe is a form of intelligence, but using that system of following the blueprints is not the goal here. It also takes 18 years (give or take a few years either way) to produce an intelligence that is worth anything, and the costs of the organic matter that drives those intelligences can be extraordinarily high as well, not to mention the power consumption and other maintenance costs.
What is keeping people from going to Mars on their own dime is not really so much a factor that there are a whole bunch of unknowns about getting there (which is a problem, but not insurmountable), but rather a government willing to even let people do it in the first place.
The regulatory steps that a company must go through in order to get into space is huge, and it becomes a business nightmare to consider that even if you have some of the best and brightest engineers on the Earth that are helping to design a system for going into space, and even if you build the vehicle, that there is a high likelihood that the license to fly the thing won't ever happen. On top of that, the regulator uncertainty is there where you can be performing tests on components one day, and the next day some bureaucrat randomly interprets the flight rules and decides that the test can no longer be performed in that fashion.
This is the issue facing private spaceflight today. The bureaucracy governing spaceflight is oppressive and draconian, and counter productive in terms of encouraging the development of space. If it doesn't belong to NASA, in the past it simply wouldn't fly at all. It took a special act of Congress to be able to let AT&T spend their own money to fly the Telstar satellite, and they paid a double premium over what it cost NASA to fly other similar projects. That was just the first of a great many attempts to have private commercial spaceflight in any degree. Read up on the Constoga I rocket for a real eye opener, or how NASA effectively killed off Mircorp just when they were starting to make a profit.
For a very interesting and recent presentation that discusses the problems that a businessman who has dealt with getting stuff into orbit and doing stuff in space. Rather than merely talk about it... he even hired astronauts (actually cosmonauts) to go up into space for the company he ran (they actually got up there, not merely were hired to talk about it) and has done other stuff in space that is amazing from a commercial perspective:
http://www.spacevidcast.com/2010/01/14/jeffrey-manber-presents-can-capitalism-survive-in-space/
The problems facing businesses working in space are daunting, and most of that is political instead of technical. I swear that there are huge factions of the U.S. government that are determined to kill off the entire U.S. spaceflight industry and are making a deliberate policy decision to see to it that Americans never leave this planet again. Not that it is merely a waste of taxpayer money, but that nobody should be allowed to spend money in that fashion in any circumstance. Going into space is hard enough but with the bureaucratic overload, it seems legitimate almost impossible. It certainly takes tilting at windmills to get anything done, together with greasing the skids by having almost as large of a lobbying presence in Washington D.C. as you have engineers actually building the thing in the first place.
Correction: SpaceX has come forward and is building the capability for resupplying the ISS. NASA didn't want to use SpaceX, and the Washington D.C. office for NASA has some egg on its face for even considering the idea. In the time that it has taken NASA to launch a dummy rocket that has almost no relationship with the final vehicle that will actually fly, and with a projected cost exceeding $100 billion, SpaceX has designed from scratch an entirely different launch capability and has done that for less than $1 billion. Yes, I know SpaceX has a contract for more than a billion dollars, but the R&D to build the rocket cost less than that. The price tag for delivery of the supplies is cash on the barrel head for actually getting those supplies delivered.
NASA is using SpaceX as a customer, not using SpaceX as a sub-contractor who happens to be building a component for a NASA spacecraft. That is a huge difference.
NASA's plan was to be using Progress and Soyuz vehicles for resupplying the ISS. That went over real well with the American Congress and is to me incredibly embarrassing. That is still the current plan, and the SpaceX deal is sort of a back-up plan "just in case".
Also don't forget that Orbital Science Corporation is also providing the same service.... and for more money and fewer flights and tons of delivered goods than SpaceX. Go figure that one out. SpaceX is simply grateful they have a contract in hand at all, and look like they may be the first to reach the ISS.
Something I don't get, and is unanswered in general. When the ISS was first assembled back in 1998, it was asserted at the time that this was going to be the first permanent outpost of humanity in space. One of the reasons for making that statement, besides the fact that the ISS was designed to be modular so sections could be replaced if they started to fail, was that it was so incredibly huge that it simply couldn't be safely deorbited. The first ISS crew (aka Expedition 1) was asserted to be the first people in a future succession of a permanent occupation of space. At the time (I swear it was on /. as well, but I could be mistaken.... it would take digging into the archives to find this) it was suggested that eventually the ISS would have to be moved to one of the Lagrangian points. It was a NASA spokesman at the time that asserted it was going to be permanent, and most of the popular press at the time.
It may be true that NASA never really intended this to be kept up, but it does seem like something that shouldn't be shut down a couple of years after construction is completed as well. It just seems so incongruous the current attitude about how the ISS is going to be used now compared to when it was first launched.
Perhaps I'm getting senile in my old age and not remembering things very clearly.
BTW, in regards to liability, the U.S. Federal Government directly takes liability on the impact of anything sent up by the USA. By international law and treaty, this is also true of all space faring nations. If somebody's house is damaged in say, Australia, they can make a claim for it in their own court system and by treaty the U.S. government has to pay up. For a private individual to go into space, they are required by the FAA-AST (the U.S. agency that governs private space flight) to have these liability policies in place just to get approval for launch. BTW, Skylab did fall uncontrollably from the sky, and it is even possible that some unlucky freighter could be in the middle of the Pacific Ocean when something falls in there as well, even if it is a target zone. It is international waters, which implies that anybody has access to it. The government will issue a "notice to mariners" warning about possible dangers, and it is up to a ship captain to decide if they will be there or not. Yeah, I get the idea of the policy you mention, but it is already covered by the law and treaty regardless.
I have long argued that the purpose of the ISS was to transfer spaceflight operations knowledge and orbital construction techniques from the Soviet (yes, I'm using that term correctly here) space program to NASA. It could be argued that such a technology transfer didn't require $100 billion that it cost to put the ISS up into space, but that was one of the major accomplishments that happened.
Also, it put well over half it not nearly the entire NASA astronaut corps into Star City in Russia, where the cosmonauts do their training and research. In some ways, it has sort of merged together the two manned spaceflight programs in a way that would have been flat out unthinkable in the 1960's. Of course that also has Russian cosmonauts running around Johnson Spaceflight Center doing essentially the same thing.
Not quite. Yes, a damaged strut could cause problems, but so could damaged struts or other integral structural supports for any kind of building or vehicle. A couple of loose lug nuts on your car could cause problems too.
As for a dangerous environment, for those citing that spaceflight is so dangerous, how is this any different than trans-oceanic sea travel or trans-continental international air travel? Both are incredibly dangerous, where thousands of people have died in the past even attempting to figure out how to do both of those human activities. While I've never crossed an ocean on a ship personally, I have crossed an ocean on an airline, as have millions of other people. The world we live in today would not exist if that kind of activity didn't happen. And people even today still die from incidents resulting from the dangers that people are exposed to while making these major crossings across our planet, in spite of supposedly sound vehicles and technologies and safety protocols to ensure that permit this to happen on a large scale.
As for what science is left to be done on board the ISS, one right off the top of my head is solar power satellite technologies, where there is currently in orbit the equivalent of a smaller municipal power generation plant (capable of powering a whole housing subdivision) that gets no realistic review by the dreamers who keep proposing these things. This is real science here for an aspect of the ISS that by itself could have a profound impact on humanity.
What are the long term maintenance needs for operating a massive solar power array? What kinds of problems happen when you start to deal with substantial amounts of energy that is concentrated in one place on a space vehicle? How do you cope with the environment of space on mechanical systems used for tracking the Sun when they fail? What even happens when you have a mechanical gear box exposed to the environment of space to move these panels?
All of these questions and many more can be answered by reviewing literature about the ISS, and some of these are long-term studies that would provide some incredibly useful scientific data simply by keeping the ISS in orbit for as long as reasonably possible. Certainly this is only scratching the surface and other significant issues regarding materials research on the components of the ISS would also provide incredibly valuable data as well. Of any vehicle that has been put into space, the ISS also has the most complete recycling system for life support. It isn't quite a closed loop and does require some consumables, but it is also testing technologies that would be important to future spaceship (this is a SHIP rather than a mere craft) construction in the future.
I promise that information gleaned from operating the ISS will be used for many centuries into the future, and future engineers and researchers will rue the day that the ISS is abandoned.
The only thing that might be arguable is if it might be better to deorbit the ISS and use the money that is currently bei
True the US pays the lion share of the bill, and the Russians control Access. Gaak! how did that happen?
NASA had to give up something when they forced MIR to be deorbited. Giving the Russians the ability to control access to and from the station was one of the things they gave up in the glorious compromise that is the ISS.
As far as how effective NASA is at dealing with these major large scale projects, I have my doubts about the effectiveness of NASA. They do a good job at very basic R&D, including pure science for the sake of science and the quest for knowledge in general. When it comes to rehashing solved engineering problems like figuring out how to put an astronaut into orbit around the Earth, they tend to do a lousy job of things.
Considering that in two years NASA won't have any way of getting an astronaut into orbit on American vehicles, eggs is certainly on their face and should be highlighted for the series of projects in the graveyard of ideas that any one of which should have been permitted to get to completion. Most of them were better ideas than the current Constellation architecture.
Bigelow Aerospace, what a joke, their inflatable 'stations' have nothing of value... "Genesis II contains numerous systems not flown on its predecessor such as additional cameras, sensors, a Biobox, a reaction wheel and the interactive Space Bingo game."
They don't have any life support nor are inhabitable in any way. But fortunately the have Space Bingo and 'Fly Your Stuff', it smells like a ridiculous sham to me.
I know this is responding to an anonymous coward post that really doesn't know his stuff, but I'll continue on some more in spite of that. This is sheer ignorance on the part of this poster and simply must be responded to.
Yes, it has life support and even docking mechanisms. The "biobox" even mentioned by this poster is some actual living creatures that were on board that vehcile. I think they were cockroaches or other insects, together with some plants to verify the life support systems operations. The Genesis II and the earlier Genesis I modules were intended to be demonstrator projects that could verify both the equipment operations, including explicitly life support, and ground control operations including setting up the equivalent of NASA's mission control and several tracking stations to maintain communications with the vehicle.
The games and stuff mentioned here were included explicitly as a part of the public relations effort, and didn't really cost anything extra in terms of putting them on the vehicle. As for cameras and sensors.... what do you think is on the ISS?
I should note that the Bigelow vehicles are based upon and actually an upgrade of an earlier technology and concept that was supposed to be already on the ISS. It was called the TransHab. The really sad part of this is that the module was actually built and made 100% functional, waiting deployment to the ISS. Budget cuts alone and somebody lacking vision on how to deal with the ISS are responsible for this not being a current module on the ISS. It isn't the only completed module that will never get into space either, and even more surprising is that the docking points to extend the ISS are still available in theory to put up these modules. Unfortunately, these modules on the ground that aren't slated to go up aren't even being maintained, so it would a while to send these up even if the desire was there to do that.
If you want to say that the ISS is a joke of a station and has nothing of value, I suppose that might be true. Otherwise, study what is there and don't be ignorant.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying this is all Obama and I am an American but... to think that just because one nation wants to let their science programs slip even more doesn't mean that anyone should pull the plug on anything.
After the ISS is completed, the annual cost of maintaining it will be $4.5 billion a year. By comparison, the total budget of the ESA for 2010 is $5.4 billion (3.74 billion Euros). Keep in mind that's what the ESA spends for all of its projects -- the portion for human spaceflight and exploration is half a billion dollars.
You say it is $4.5 billion per year? I would love to see a private contractor be simply offered the opportunity to:
I argue that if you offered a space prize equal to $4.5 billion for the first company to put up a space station with a guaranteed lease agreement for $500 million per year after that for an additional 5 years, you would have companies tripping over themselves just to get such a vehicle built. I'm not talking $4.5 billion for the whole thing, but just for competing for an X-Prize type contest to get this as a one time deal.
Instead of one, I bet there would be two or three of these things built as well.
Too bad NASA would never consider doing that. For me, if they could simply de-orbit the ISS today, shut down the Shuttles completely and vacate KSC, and then offer for private contractors to get launch pads at KSC for their own heavy lift vehicles, no only could this happen and be affordable, but I think you would find that such a space station would be built well before 2020.
Heck, Robert Bigelow at Bigelow Aerospace has already offered to send up a space station module with the same volume as the ISS for about $1 billion (give or take some). It is even already designed, and all he is waiting on now is a customer to fly it. BTW, he does have experience operating space stations too, as he has two of them in orbit right now.
I'm not questioning the amount of money you have quoted here, as the number feels correct too. It just seems like NASA is incredibly wasteful of the money they have, and that it practically is the very definition of how to spend money in the most foolhardy method possible. Yes, I do know why it cost so much more to run it as a government operation, which is seriously getting off topic to go further.
I'm sort of puzzled: What sort of costs are associated with continued operations on the ISS?
Building the thing in the first place was certainly incredibly expensive, and things like the electrical generation capacity of that vehicle is amazing for doing all sorts of test... space solar power tests just to give an example. It certainly is the equivalent of a small municipal power generation facility in terms of the watts generated. How much has been suggested to be spent on just that one idea alone, that is already in operation and in space?
The only real expenses that I see are maneuvering thruster fuel, food and other general consumables, and of course the ground support stations and centers. The ESA has even addressed this particular issue, and questioned some of the incredibly wasteful spending just to accomplish this task alone that could be done at a much cheaper price.
It is sad that NASA won't even consider other alternatives for access to the ISS or that there may be legitimate solutions to keep it going for at least another decade if not longer. Then again, it was NASA that forced MIR to crash into the Pacific by playing political games. It wasn't costs that were so great that MIR couldn't have stayed aloft, nor congressional budget considerations either. Russia wanted to keep MIR going, but NASA threatened to kick them out of the ISS if MIR wasn't deorbited.
Who ever said that the law had to make sense. The state governments want their money, and if you live in that state you can't do things like purchase items in another state to avoid paying taxes.
Supposedly we live in a representative democracy, so take it up with your elected representatives next time they come by asking for your vote. If you think this is bullshit, tell those folks precisely that, and make sure your voice is heard on this issue. Or run for political office and try to cut the bullshit from our government. There certainly are heaps of that stuff laying around most state capitals, not to mention the federal capital.
The difference here is that California requires a different product for what is actually sold within their state. Yes, I thought of the California emission standards when this was brought up, and it is a similar kind of issue... a variation of the theme as well.
Nothing is so cut and dried when it comes to the law, and certainly this electricity "carbon tax" fee was thought to be proper or else it wouldn't have been passed in the first place.
The fact that this is going to be a contest of wills between two different state governments is what will make this an epic legal battle, and one that will almost certainly go before the Supreme Court. It will have precedent setting potential regardless of its outcome, either to open a whole new real of state taxes or to shut off a way for states to act. More likely, it will be some sort of weird compromise that will ultimately result, where the precedent still won't be so clear.
I expect that I will be dead by then due to natural causes, so I really don't care. I might be a very silver haired great-grandpa complaining about the stupid kids that have been roped into fixing the bug, letting people know that back in the 1970's when I first started to program that nobody thought their software would last that long.
As can be seen, even I can make an innocent mistake, but again... who is counting or caring.
Let me guess, you're the one who found this guy to be "insightful"?
Read the other posts by this guy, and then come back with your own conclusion. Most of them are just like this one, and full of ad hominem attacks.
It would be more like California putting a special tax on Oregon cheese made from cows that have been given homone treatments or have been genetically modified.
It is essentially a regulation on how that product has been made, where the state legislature is creating rules for the creation of that product as it happens in another state. Just as cheese doesn't matter what cow has actually produced the milk to make the cheese, electricity doesn't matter where it has been produced either. If it has been made with nuclear or coal as the energy source, the electrons have the same "push" and deliver the same energy requirements to the end users.
This is Minnesota going beyond its authority and invading the sovereignty of North Dakota to regulate the power plants in another state.
Even if this isn't a "tariff", it is a regulation on how power is to be produced by a governmental authority that is well outside of its jurisdiction. Permitting regulations of this nature essentially allow states to impose regulatory authority on how products are produced in other states, including child labor laws or if they are produced by unionized labor or not.
I'm sure the AFL-CIO would love to get some state like Michigan or even Minnesota in this case to pass a law that all goods sold in the state from elsewhere must be made by union labor. That would be essentially the same thing here.
This is a huge issue with potentially monumental consequences if it is permitted to stand as a law, where this would be a precedent setting case to allow states to essentially regulate how and where goods sold in their states can be made.
The Minnesota law isn't being called as a tariff, but rather that is what the popular press is calling it. Minnesota is simply calling this a power generation fee, something well within the authority of its utility regulation board/commission.
The problem is if it can be considered a tariff in the sense that it is targeting the interstate commerce of a commodity (in this case electricity) coming from another state and regulating how that commodity is manufactured. The argument is that it becomes a tariff when they have imposed some sort of regulations and have specified how that electricity is to be made in the first place (without coal to avoid this fee).
BTW, I dare you to show me when Fox News ever said "Will Obama eat your children?" An 11 o'clock news for "Fox News" is something I'd really like to see, as that presumes the late night news broadcasts of most affiliates, and Fox typically airs their evening news an hour earlier than their competitors at the local affiliates, of which really isn't "Fox News" either. Fox News might sensationalize mundane news stories, but this is going over the top.
That is the question: Can they impose a tax based on how that power is generated, if it is generated in another state?
Presumably electricity that is generated from wind, solar, or nuclear power is not taxed in the same manner... so the question begs to be asked? Can you distinguish electricity made from other sources as something "different" from electricity made by coal? I think not.
Essentially, it turns this fee into a regulation of how power is generated in another state, where the state government has no authority to impose those regulations. It is a state sovereignty issue, where it could be argued by North Dakota that they can produce electricity with the most inefficient and wasteful methods using coal explicitly to produce CO2 as a matter of state policy, and there is nothing Minnesota can do to stop that. They can't selectively treat any kind of electricity as something different based on its source. Any fees on electrical power generation must be equally applied to all states, and to producers within its own state, equally.
Minnesota could regulate and impose fees on coal plants within its own borders, but apparently that has been happening and several Minnesota companies are going to North Dakota to generate that electricity due to cheaper costs and fewer regulatory hurdles being imposed by that state. This law is an attempt to stop that from happening, but the point is that North Dakota is another state. Of course there are many in Minnesota that think Fargo is simply the name for "West Moorhead", at least in the state legislature.
The problem with a tax like you are proposing here is that it can't be levied by a state government on goods imported from another state. Simply put, a state can't regulate the commerce of another state.
Furthermore, electricity is identical no matter how it is generated, so the source can't be distinguished unless you are explicitly engaging in that sort of regulation of entities in another state. Minnesota can regulate what is going on within its own borders, but that is the limit of what it can do. States can also regulate what comes into the state, but they can't tax those goods except to pay for the border stations... sort of like how states like California and Arizona regulate the importation of agriculture products going into those states and have inspection stations on the highways going into those states. They can pay a modest "fee" for fruit coming into the state to pay for those inspectors, but that is it. It can't be a true revenue source.
The same thing applies here for electricity.
If this was a federal tax, that would be a different story. But that would have to be an act of Congress, and not a state legislature.
Article I Section 10 States can't create Tariffs.
Personally, this is my most hated part of the Constitution- it prevents economic experimentation and competition between the States.
I take it that you haven't read any early American history.
The tariff wars between New York and New Jersey were legendary, and were an explicit reason for this clause being put into the Constitution in the first place. For the few brief years after the Battle of Yorktown and before the U.S. Constitution was ratified, New York and New Jersey engaged in a trade war the likes of which have only been seen between England and France... perhaps even worse. Much of this centered on Manhattan and New York City, where goods in transit across the Hudson River were heavily regulated and there were bands of pirates/smugglers and other kinds of incredible headaches for all involved. Taxes of over 100% and even up to 1000% on some goods were imposed just to cross the Hudson River. It nearly started an all out war between those two states, where both armies and navies were being assembled for just that very purpose, and some shots were exchanged between uniformed military forces of both states.
There is a good reason why this clause was put into the Constitution in the first place, and a damn good reason why it should be respected and not tampered with for even a well meaning cause like "global warming".