NASA plans to deorbit ISS in 2016

[JKing106]

We've spent $880 billion on a war to kill brown people who had the nerve to try to keep their oil to themselves. Why would this surprise you? Bring it down. It's a waste of money, along with the yearly space shuttle missions that do jack shit.

 

[dmcowen674]

Originally posted by: sao123

we spent over $100billion to build an put this research station into orbit, it wont be completed until late next year, and then 6 years later, were going to just drop it into the pacific?

We should be leasing it out to private companies for research and collecting royalties to pay for our next generation space station.

No, please give it to Iran or Iraq.

That's where we have blown the most money they might as well get the rest.

 

[Dr. Zaus]

Originally posted by: Moonbeam
We killed the planet and now humanity's dying. We have to retract as we die.

That makes a lot of sense!

Originally posted by: DrPizza
Push it into the Pacific now, before it wastes any more money. That's about all it does, with the exception of providing middle schoolers with opportunities for video-conferencing with astronauts.

Originally posted by: Patranus

Originally posted by: yllus
Well, with a permanent moon base in the works I suppose the ISS is old hat.

And where exactly are we going to get the money for a permanent moon base when we are running multi trillion dollar deficits?

I would gladly click a box on my income tax that says "here is an extra 1%, 100% of which goes to NASA".
The benefits of zero-G science are unknown and we should not give up on the project until we do know them.

There was a time when electricity was only good for doing a light-show.

 

[Siddhartha]

I have read Sci Fi since I was a kid. My dad worked on the Apollo missions. But is manned space exploration the best use of our resources?

 

[geno]

Originally posted by: Moonbeam
We killed the planet and now humanity's dying. We have to retract as we die.

We will never kill the planet, only harm our own living conditions until we can no longer survive. The planet will always be just fine.

 

[Possessed Freak]

Originally posted by: Siddhartha
I have read Sci Fi since I was a kid. My dad worked on the Apollo missions. But is manned space exploration the best use of our resources?

Multi-tasking. Wave of the future.

 

[sao123]

Originally posted by: Siddhartha
I have read Sci Fi since I was a kid. My dad worked on the Apollo missions. But is manned space exploration the best use of our resources?

I believe it is.

 

[DisgruntledVirus]

Originally posted by: DixyCrat

Originally posted by: Moonbeam
We killed the planet and now humanity's dying. We have to retract as we die.

That makes a lot of sense!

Originally posted by: DrPizza
Push it into the Pacific now, before it wastes any more money. That's about all it does, with the exception of providing middle schoolers with opportunities for video-conferencing with astronauts.

Originally posted by: Patranus

Originally posted by: yllus
Well, with a permanent moon base in the works I suppose the ISS is old hat.

And where exactly are we going to get the money for a permanent moon base when we are running multi trillion dollar deficits?

I would gladly click a box on my income tax that says "here is an extra 1%, 100% of which goes to NASA".
The benefits of zero-G science are unknown and we should not give up on the project until we do know them.

There was a time when electricity was only good for doing a light-show.

x2

While the whole "traveling through the stars" stuff isn't going to happen anytime soon, there are a TON of things that have come from zero g/manned space missions. They push the technological envelope, and push humanity (or at least the nation doing the missions) to find solutions for problems.

Here are 50 things we got from NASA and space flight.

Some others (top 50)

 

[DrPizza]

Originally posted by: Paratus
Only if you assume the ONLY goal is science.

As I'm sure you've noticed the primary goal of the manned space program is definitely not science. Science a secondary objective which is why there are plenty of folks in academia moaning about every dollar spent on manned spaceflight

Interestingly I had the opportunity to hear some of the original Apollo folks for the 40th anniversary of Apollo (Chris Kraft, Glynn Lunney and others) discussing what the purpose of manned spaceflight was. Kraft had the interesting answer of Return on Investment. He pointed out at the beginning of Mercury he could receive 22 words of teletype from Africa. At the end of Apollo they had full global communications. NASA didn't invent that infrastructure, it demanded it of industry and they responded. He also pointed out that any space exploration is at heart a political game and ROI is the best stick to use to sell it to the government.

What also shouldn't be overlooked is the number of engineers and scientists that became engineers and scientists because of the manned space program, even if they never worked for NASA. I don't know when you went to school or what your degree is in, but half the engineers I knew in college were in engineering because they wanted to be astronauts as kids.

Besides if you really want a more robust robotic exploration just think of the vehicles that could be launched by an ARES V with over 400,000lbs to LEO and 150,000lbs to the moon. Can you say big honking space telescopes or direct high speed trajectories to the outer planets?

If you kill ISS now then US manned spaceflight is dead and I'll guarantee you that extra 5 billion won't be going to any other NASA project.

IMHO of course

To an extent, I agree with this position. You can even check through old posts of mine and see where I've said nearly the exact same thing. However, dollar for dollar, I'm sure there are ways that have a better return for getting kids to enter into math, science, engineering, and other technology fields.

Look at all the positive press for the Mars rovers. A wildly successful unmanned mission. To the general public, many of them can tell you something about the Mars rovers, if even only that they have video images from Mars & have been operating a lot longer than expected. Ask them something about the ISS and about the limit of what they can tell you is that astronauts live inside it and it goes around and around the Earth. Hell, one of the greatest achievements of the ISS was supposed to be international cooperation. They're fighting over the use of toilets up there, and fighting over who is charging how much to transport our astronauts up and down. Meanwhile, the Russians are treating it as a tourist location for the uber-rich who have nothing better to blow their money on.

How about the Hubble Space Telescope? We've gained vast amounts of new knowledge, and the public is absolutely fascinated by the images it has returned. And, it receives a ton of public support from people who don't want NASA to can the program.

But the International Space Station? All it does is transports astronauts around in circles in a low Earth orbit. For 40 years, we've been able to do this. The only thing that's changed is that it's bigger and more comfortable (plus has room for the occasional daring multi-millionaire/billionaire.)

What will a moon base accomplish? "Oh look, more fucking moon rocks."
Again, I'll grant that it might inspire a bunch of people with "science is cool! We just repeated what they did in the 1960's, except this time, they built a really expensive house."

"But, the next step after the moon is... MARS!"
"Big fucking deal. Oh look! Mars rocks!"
"Yeah, but the next step after Mars is..."
"What? Going from the Earth to the Moon to Mars is like walking across stepping stones in a stream. Ahead of the stream is a vast ocean. People don't realize this. They can't comprehend that our current method for transportation between the Earth and Moon/ or between the Earth and the other planets is absolutely inadequate for transportation beyond our Solar System. There is no place else hospitable to humans in the Solar System. And, the stream/ocean analogy works: tip toeing across rocks in a stream is NOT an immediate precursor to traveling across the ocean. Our current technology is woefully inadequate for exploration beyond the solar system. And, manned space flight will NOT facilitate a more rapid development of such technologies any more than robotic space flight would. In the mean time, if we put the money that we dumped into the ISS into other incredibly promising missions - studying Earth's climate, probing the frozen over oceans of the moons of the gas giants for life. Finding life on Europa (if it's there) would be one of the greatest discoveries of the millenium. Our human species is curious; one of our biggest questions has been 'are we alone in the universe? Is this rock the only place in the universe where there is life?' Finding life elsewhere would have profound implications.

"The funny thing is though, the more we contemplate manned missions to Mars, etc., the more likely we are to find life there... It's a hell of a lot easier to sterilize a robot than it is to sterilize a human."


edit: And I, too, would check a little box on my income taxes to give more money to NASA.