Science or Cool

[kerbiloid]

Maybe, but it seems to me that the ISS project was:

US/NASA:
to be busy with something explainable and to keep using the built equipment (first of all, Shuttle);
the way to share the long-term orbital flight things tested on Mir and Salyut, rather than just 1..2 week long flights of Spacelab and limited abilities of Skylab (no engines, no refuel, just 9 months or so in total, etc)

RU:
obviously to get money for space flights

JP:
use a crewed orbital base built by others to keep there pure lab modules

EU:
all of above

Edited December 6, 2018 by kerbiloid

[DDE]

2 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

EU: all of above

No joke. Columbus used to be a space station project of its own.

2 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

and limited abilities of Skylab (no engines, no refuel, just 9 months or so in total, etc)

Don’t forget being irreplaceable.

[Canopus]

32 minutes ago, DDE said:

No joke. Columbus used to be a space station project of its own.

Yes it was called "Columbus Man-Tended Free Flyer", but consisted of not much more than a lab and a service module though, so nothing was lost when Columbus was just simply attached to what was then called Freedom.

[DDE]

1 hour ago, Canopus said:

Yes it was called "Columbus Man-Tended Free Flyer", but consisted of not much more than a lab and a service module though, so nothing was lost when Columbus was just simply attached to what was then called Freedom.

Not in the 1990s it weren't.

https://falsesteps.wordpress.com/2012/08/25/mtffcolumbus-europes-space-station/

[Canopus]

@DDE What are you saying? It was combined with the Space station Freedom plans in 1991.

[DDE]

59 minutes ago, Canopus said:

@DDE What are you saying? It was combined with the Space station Freedom plans in 1991.

Actually, it was roughly 1991 when it became a separate station seeing as Space Station Fred was looking dangerously like a sinking ship.

[Canopus]

25 minutes ago, DDE said:

Actually, it was roughly 1991 when it became a separate station seeing as Space Station Fred was looking dangerously like a sinking ship.

Everything i read says otherwise. MTFF was a study from 86 and was finally dropped in 91.

Quote

Cost escalation of the US Space Station Freedom, and financial difficulties in Russia, led to a summer 1993 briefing of NASA by NPO Energia on Mir-2. In November 1993 Freedom, Mir-2, and the European and Japanese modules were incorporated into a single International Space Station

Kibo and Columbus were supposed to be part of Freedom even earlier though. This Painting is from 87 and shows a European pressurized module next to a Japanese lab.

and this paper from a conference in 92 mentions Columbus as part of Freedom. https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19930013812.pdf

Edited December 6, 2018 by Canopus

[tater]

ESA building their own crew vehicle (shown above) would have been pretty interesting. Such a small, Dreamchaser sized craft would no doubt still be flying

[Kerbal7]

10 hours ago, Terwin said:

There was a request for for the benefits provided by the ISS project and I listed some of them.

But in the real-world, most of those technologies would not have been invented for decades, if ever.

In any case, the ISS is both a political tool(international cooperation), and an investment in the future.  In hind-sight it is entirely possible that we could have made better investments, but once again, the reality is that those investments would never have been made.

5

I was unimpressed with the list you provided knowing it cost $150,000,000,000.  For example, LASIK was on your list. I was wearing corrective lenses before the ISS. 150 Billion dollars later I'm still wearing corrective lenses and no worse for wear. I see many other people wearing corrective lenses too. So the ISS hasn't been all that for the ophthalmologist.

And I don't believe the meager scientific progress ISS has achieved wouldn't have happened anyways or is too trivial to bother with. E.g., growing lettuce in microgravity. Who cares? Not me. Robotic arms? I have little doubt we'd have seen the same advancements in robotics without the ISS. Maybe more if the money had been put into robotic explorers on the moons of Jupiter. They use robotic arms too.

Its political value is dubious. With a $150,000,000,000 cooperative space project, we hear Russia election this and Putin that daily. Start a giant student exchange program, much cheaper. Maybe more effective.

I have no problem with having a space station. I have a problem with having a 150 Billion dollar space station when resources are limited. If I'd have had $150,000,000,000 to invest in the space program, it certainly wouldn't have gone into that space station.  

[tater]

Is there a source for the claim that LASIK has anything at all to do with ISS? It was done before any additional components might have been added as a result of anything on ISS, and as a cash procedure, there's a powerful business case to improve it, anyway (the lasik guys I know drive pretty fancy cars).

[DDE]

14 hours ago, Canopus said:

Everything i read says otherwise. MTFF was a study from 86 and was finally dropped in 91.

Then you’re not talking about the same station 

The fully free-flying Columbus was a contingency plan should Freedom, and later the ISS fail, beginning in 1991 and ending around 2001, inspired by its early 1990s financial woes. None of that contradicts your evidence.

[KerikBalm]

On 12/4/2018 at 11:04 PM, tater said:

it has returned far less than the same hundreds of billions would spent on medical research on Earth. T

...

ISS, otoh, has real political and geopolitical goals, which were in fact the purpose of it.

Well, not just medical, but yea... its a political project.

Almost everything else would be cheaper if just sent up on unmanned sats

[Terwin]

11 hours ago, Kerbal7 said:

I have no problem with having a space station. I have a problem with having a 150 Billion dollar space station when resources are limited. If I'd have had $150,000,000,000 to invest in the space program, it certainly wouldn't have gone into that space station.  

I specifically argued that the money for the space station was primarily a way for elected members of the US legislature to send money to their districts/states.  This was not 'money for a space station' this was 'money for buying reelection' which had something to do with space as an excuse, that NASA managed to turn it into a functioning space station is an irrelevant foot-note to the people who had the authority to allocate the funds.

No part of that is an argument that the space station is an efficient way to spend money on science, but rather that the ISS is a way to squeeze science out of money that was going to be spent anyway.

 

In any case, this is at least the second time the goal-posts have been moved.  The original question was if there was any utility in having the space station, and that was later changed to ask if there was any utility for those of middle-class and lower that has come out of the space station.

11 hours ago, tater said:

Is there a source for the claim that LASIK has anything at all to do with ISS? It was done before any additional components might have been added as a result of anything on ISS, and as a cash procedure, there's a powerful business case to improve it, anyway (the lasik guys I know drive pretty fancy cars).

Yes, it is the second link in the second post on this thread, repeated here for convenience:

https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/news/15_ways_iss_benefits_earth

 

[tater]

33 minutes ago, Terwin said:

Yes, it is the second link in the second post on this thread, repeated here for convenience:

https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/news/15_ways_iss_benefits_earth

I read that, it's a stretch. Lasik existed as a technology before that. An incremental improvement by a company that also works with ISS is a pretty roundabout connection.

I'm a big fan of human spaceflight, and I think that there's no counterfactual history with ISS not happening, so what the heck, it's cool, but ISS has contributed almost nothing meaningful to any science outside of human factors in space, and certainly nothing that could not have been done cheaper as a free-floating experiment.

[DerekL1963]

10 hours ago, tater said:

I read that, it's a stretch. Lasik existed as a technology before that. An incremental improvement by a company that also works with ISS is a pretty roundabout connection.

That's not atypical of NASA's PAO though...  They're past masters at spinning even the tiniest connection into a breathless "this would never have happened without NASA megabucks!" narrative.

[tater]

1 minute ago, DerekL1963 said:

That's not atypical of NASA's PAO though...  They're past masters at spinning even the tiniest connection into a breathless "this would never have happened without NASA megabucks!" narrative.

Very true. I'm a NASA fanboy, too, but they needn't go so far, the "cool" factor of what they do, or the legitimate planetary science is more than enough.

[YNM]

22 hours ago, Kerbal7 said:

 I have no problem with having a space station. I have a problem with having a 150 Billion dollar space station when resources are limited. If I'd have had $150,000,000,000 to invest in the space program, it certainly wouldn't have gone into that space station. 

Alright, give me one example.

 

Unmanned ? They require waay less and still is limited (you are still subject to light speed delays), and still have nothing on human research (remember we need long-term, and no we wouldn't accept sacrifical endeavors - not even the polynesians were as stupid as that, they know well what they were doing in their seafaring, they won't just kill off their most valuable human resources like their very well versed navigators and their best ship crew).

Manned exploration beyond LEO ? They require waay more than 150 billion.

 

And boy oh boy I'm not talking the politics of spending money. Some of it is bloody obvious (if you spend more you get more back) but the way they're spent, I believe they're off limits on this forum.

[tater]

Counterfactuals involving tax dollars are pretty pointless. The domestic politics, back scratching, etc are far too complex. We get what we get. I think it's legitimate to wonder what might have been with money spent towards a particular goal, or set of goals in a political vacuum, but when you do that you have to be aware of the fact that such an environment might as well be Middle Earth, or Oz. So yeah, in such a perfect world we set some plausible goals, then spend our ~20 B$/year (constant dollars) moving forcefully towards that goal, and imagine what might have been... but that's not an alternate future that was ever actually possible for a host of reasons.

[Bill Phil]

I don't see why having cool is bad. Nor do I see why we can't have both, as that is what we are doing even now. The manned program is pretty much just cool, and the unmanned program is science. Seeing as how NASA's manned program budget is less than half their total, they're doing more science than stunts. At least if we measure it based on monetary input...

[tater]

They also Have to do the first letter A stuff. The crew program is certainly over 1/3 (6+ B$/yr), and I don't know what science is. They have all the aircraft related stuff as well, which is probably a couple billion, anyway.

[kerbiloid]

Just took a look in wiki, Canadarm's origin is a 1969 manipulator for a nuke reactor, so it anyway would be created.

Edited December 8, 2018 by kerbiloid

[tater]

2 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Just took a look in wiki, Canadarm's origin is a 1969 manipulator for a nuke reactor, so it anyway would be created.

I'm out of likes, lol.

Ask a Canadian, and the entire Shuttle program existed to lift that arm into space.

[NSEP]

One important thing to note is that something doesn't have to be an amazing technological feat in order to be cool to the mainstream public.

Remember, not everyone is as excited about the unmanned exploration of space as we do, and instead only focus on the crazy headlines.

We can easily see this with the launch of the Tesla Roadster, everyone was going crazy about that cheap publicity stunt*, while the recent launch of China's lander which will be the first to land on the far side of the Moon, gets little media attention, even though its a bazillion times more difficult than launching a car in space.

*Not saying Falcon Heavy, the rocket itself isn't a big feat, but rather launching the Tesla Roadster. We could have launched a car into space before we even got into orbit.

With this, im not saying that we should launch or old junk into space rather than actual science mission, if i had to choose between an unmanned lander mission to Jupiters Moons and a non-functioning piece of junk in space, i'd choose for a Jupiter mission.

[YNM]

5 hours ago, NSEP said:

while the recent launch of China's lander which will be the first to land on the far side of the Moon, gets little media attention

To be honest it might have more to do with the differing 'fanbases'(*) & the general air of secrecy that they have.

Compare and contrast with Hayabusa2.

(*) : China has their own social media & internal sites.

Edited December 8, 2018 by YNM

[tater]

6 hours ago, NSEP said:

gets little media attention, even though its a bazillion times more difficult than launching a car in space.

It gets no media attention because they don't give any media access. The only "coverage" was random people really far away with cell phones. The same was true of the Soviets, when you are not willing to show your program LIVE, warts and all, you don't really deserve much public support.

 

58 minutes ago, YNM said:

To be honest it might have more to do with the differing 'fanbases'(*) & the general air of secrecy that they have.

Compare and contrast with Hayabusa2.

(*) : China has their own social media & internal sites.

The bolded bit. If they cannot be bothered in 2018 to have HD live streams, I cannot really be bothered to care much.