The ISS has been up and running for quite a while…and we’ve had “Spacelab” and "MIR"before it. The US (and Russian ) taxpayers have been conned out of 100’s of $billions…so where is the much vaunted payoff?
We were promised:
(1) all kinds of exotic alloys (of metals that would natuarally separate in the earht’s gravity)
(2) new drug compounds
(3) high-performance semiconductors (faster that our earth-grown silicon chips)
Where is the payoff? I haven’t seen ANYTHING come out of this that justifies the enormous expense…have we been lied to?
Who do I talk to at NASA to express my disapproval? 
Space related stuff don’t have a pay-off. For example, what was the pay-off from the moon landings? A bucketfull of rocks maybe?
Well, while I’m generally sceptical about the scientific purpose of the ISS (like much of the space program, it’s an engineering feat, not a scientific advance as such), you should bear in mind that it has been operating in what is essentially maintenance mode since the Columbia crash, a year and a half ago. To allow escape in an emergency, only three astronauts/cosmonauts are up there at any one time; just enough to keep the thing operational. It will continue to exist in suspended animation until shuttle flights resume. There’s not much point holding its present inactivity against it, because there’s an extremely good reason.
For most space projects the payoff is mostly intangible, at least in the near term. Sure, we could stop exploring space (and the oceans, etc.) and save a bunch of money. Then again so could have Ferdinand and Isabella when Christopher Columbus was asking for money to venture into the unknown. NASA’s budget is less than 1% of the federal government’s, I think we should spend way more than that.
Why do we travel in Space? by Cecil Adams
I hate the comparison of space exploration to the Columbus expedition. The cases are ENTIRELY different. Please stop doing it.
While I’m not against exploring space, and I see the long-term benefits of the ISS in exploring the effects of long term low/null-G on the human body, even if we reached Mars in the next 25-50 years, we aren’t looking at COLONIES for a good long time, and then, those colonies would represent our anarctic expeditions much more than they would the early New World settlements, in terms of population growth, economic and social impact, and scientific impact. The discovery of the Americas was a huge landmass amazingly rich in resources and riches. We aren’t going to find anything like that on Luna or Mars.
In short, stop promising El Dorado.
Two, actually. It was three before the Columbia disaster; even that was probably not really adequate to do more keep the place running; you’d really need a larger crew than even the pre-Columbia three-person crews in order to actually unlock the Secrets of the Universe, invent Flubber, etc.
Quite right, I was confused by the spare guy they seem to have sent up last time - I was recalling the funky pictures of the three returnees sitting in deckchairs in the middle of a Kazakh field drinking tea. 
First of all, science is only a small part of the payoff. Another huge payoff is in the form of experience and proven designs retained by NASA and its contractors. Even if the ISS is cancelled today, it has already left behind an enormous amount of design studies, manufacturing infrastructure, test results and experienced personnel that will benefit all future programs.
Second, they haven’t even finished building the station. Not all scientific experiments are operational yet.
Third, the science done on the station is basic science research, not product development. They are not testing and manufacturing product samples on the station. The direct outcome will be papers published in scientific journals, which will be used by other scientists and engineers. Eventually engineers and scientists will learn from those papers and apply them into things that can improve our lives. So don’t expect a news release saying “today, a new AIDS drug was developed on the ISS.”
I work at a NASA center but I don’t have any power, so complaining to me won’t do any good.
But say you had O’Keefe cornered at a cocktail party. What exactly would you tell him? Should we abandon the station just when it’s starting to function as a research station?
Besides, NASA doesn’t control its own funding. The government does.
Nitpick: Only about $32 billion has been spent on the ISS since its design began in 1984.
Blame Congress for spending the money, not NASA. Congress voted to appropriate the money for the program. NASA just carried it out.
Americans spend trillions of dollars on the entertainment industry, specificially in television. This money could easily be spent in other, more usefull things like curing world hunger. I think it is time we ended making new movies and television and spent the money on something with more of a use.
Sometimes things don’t have to have a payoff to be useful, sometimes a lot of money is spent on things for sheer entertainment or curiousity.
I believe one of the reasons ISS cost so much money is because of its nature as a cooperative international project. How many times has the design been changed to accomodate changes in Russia? How much extra money has been spent merging the fundamentally different strategies of different nations?
When the space station was first proposed by President Reagan, it was going to be a purely American affair, called Space Station Freedom. Later, it was decided that it should be turned into a cooperative venture to help relations between the Soviet Union and the U.S. It’s been a political football ever since.
The new NASA plan calls for the U.S. to gradually divest itself of ISS. They’re going to accelerate construction and finish it by 2010, then retire the shuttle. The U.S. will maintain a presence in ISS until 2016 or so.
Dr. Jeffrey F. Bell complains that our entire model of manned space exploration is based on 1950s concepts orginally put forward by Werner Von Braun. He claims that the whole “let’s build a reusable launch vehicle to service a space station to support a moonbase so we can explore Mars” scenerio is logically flawed. Bell is a notorious naysayer and a lot of people disagree with him though.
Also, the ISS has been dumbed down so much and so many times that it’s not expected to do much anymore. Is the ISS going to:
-test rotational artificial gravity? Nope.
-demonstrate even partial recycling of air, water or food? Nope.
-serve as a fuel depot or assembly point for space vehicles? Nope.
But even without the international cooperation, chances are that changes in funding and goals would have necessitated major design changes. Look how many changes the Chandra X-ray Observatory went through before it finally flew - first envisioned as a 6-mirror telescope, then converted into two 4-mirror telescopes, then one of them cancelled and the other modified to do all the science, etc.
And the international cooperation really paid off. The Russians are currently keeping the ISS alive, not just with the manned Soyuz flights but also the unmanned Progress cargo flights which we don’t hear much about on the news. The Shuttle fleet, the only American spacecraft capable of docking with the ISS, remains grounded.
Related issue:Congress considered spending billions on a nuclear research facility–a partical accellerator buried in a tunnel 30 miles long in Texas.
When a scientist was asked by a Senate committee how spending this money would benefit America’s security, he replied:
“Only because it will make America worth defending”
The Space station is similar–it seemed like a good idea in 1980–a chance to make great leaps to the unknown, matching JKF’s reason for going to the moon.
Turns out we were wrong, though.
We should abandon manned expeditions for the next 50 years or so.Everything we need can be done in space by satellites or robots.(and dont remind me how they needed manpower, not robots, to fix the Hubble malfuntion–for the price of 30 years of the manned shuttle program, we could have made a new Hubble)
And lets remember that computers in 1980 couldnt do much–so everybody thought you needed humans to run the little black box experiments.
Where’s the pay off for anything, when you really look at it? The trillions spent on cancer research hasn’t wiped the disease out. Certainly, some forms of it are now curable, and in other cases people’s lives can be extended a little longer, even if their cancer can’t be cured, but it’d be cheaper simply to dope them up with pain meds and let them die that way, than spending all the money to research drugs and treatments, of which 60% or better, will not work at all. HUD’s annual budget is roughly double what NASA’s is, and yet we still have an estimated 3 million homeless people in America. For the life of me, I can’t imagine how you couldn’t find homes for 3 million people with an annual budget of $30 billion, but apparently you can’t.
How many tries did it take Edison to build the lightbulb? IIRC, it was something like 10,000, and the man even used bananas as filaments.
There has been a pay off from the ISS, but you don’t see it because you’re not looking in the right places for it. The R&D which went into designing the enviromental controls for the ISS aids engineers here on Earth who design home and commercial HVAC units. (No, really it does. The ISS has limited power resources and could face a total power loss at any time, which means that the astronauts could be put in a life threatening situation. So the environmental systems on the ISS must be highly reliable and use very little energy, good things to have here on Earth as well.) The ISS is also an incredibly complex piece of machinery, so we’re learning how humans react to such a thing, and future designs of complex things used here on Earth will reflect the lessons learned there.
Oh wait, you say, we could have learned all these things right here on Earth without ever having to go to space, but we didn’t! Look at “Megan’s Law.” Sex offender crimes have been on the books for centuries, but it was only until one child’s kidnapping and murder made the news that “Megan’s Law” was created. Most earthly R&D is simply, “Let’s see if we can get a 10% improvement on this.” There’s some of that in the space program as well, but there’s also a considerable amount of, “If we’re going to do this, we need a 90% improvement in this area.” Pushing the frontier, any frontier, not just space, forces us to think in new directions, and the larger and the more unknown or hostile the frontier is, the greater the knowledge gained from it.
Supposedly, the big push for improvements in fire protection gear came as a result of the Apollo 1 fire. Now, firefighters have been dying because of inadequate gear since time immemorial, but it took the loss of three astronauts to get people to shell out tons of money to develop better gear. Yeah, it could have been done at any point in time, but it took the loss of three high profile individuals to get that to occur.
Even if the ISS is the world’s most expensive Edsel, ever built, there’s plenty of payoff there. We’ll know why it was an Edsel, and that knowledge will help prevent us from building other Edsel’s here on Earth. Additionally, everything that’s gone into designing and maintaining the ISS has payoffs for the folks in the X-Prize competition. That doesn’t seem to be such a big deal at the moment, after all it looks like the biggest group of customers for suborbital flights will be tourists (though I’ll lay real money that Rutan’s got enough cards stashed up his sleeves to change that in a very short period of time), but then again, the world barely noticed when the Wright Brothers first got their plane off the ground.
There is a Moore’s Law theory about transportation, but it doesn’t have a handy shorthand version of “Every 18 months technology doubles because of rapid transportation.” so it’s not very well known. Simply put, the societies which are capable of rapid movement of goods and people advance the fastest. Each technological innovation which accelerates the rate or amount of travel a society can move about, is met with a corresponding increase in innovations in all other areas of society. As we progress in space, we will advance here on Earth, and most of us won’t be able to recognize the connection between the two.
I’m excited now, for all the potential that I can see on the horizon coming from the ISS and the other elements of the space program, most people, however, cannot, and will not see it until the first generation of folks raised in space reaches maturity. When that happens (and it could happen in less than 40 years), there will be an unbelieveable explosion of technology and innovation from space. Not simply because there’s been a natural increase in technology over that period of time, but because those folks will have grown up in a space based environment and they will understand it the same way anyone on Earth understands the world around them. The children of space won’t have to think about how things react in space, they’ll know how they react.
To get giddy and wildly optimistic for a moment, I’d like to point out that there’s already a revolution going on in space science thanks to the folks who’ve grown up with there always having been a space program during their life. Rutan and the others competing for the X-Prize are essentially duplicating the mission of Al Shepard and Yuri Gagarin. They’re doing it for far less money than NASA or the Soviets spent (remember both programs simply strapped a human to an ICBM and shot him into space riding that). It took 40 years for that to happen. Rutan was first pitched the idea of building a spaceship in 1996, less than a decade later, he’s not only poised to be the first civilian to design and build a successful spacecraft, but he’s rumored (and again, I’ll lay real money that this rumor’s accurate) to have designs for a craft which has the same load carrying capacity as the space shuttle, but at a much lower cost to operate and vastly greater reliability. It took NASA over 3 years to design the space shuttle, and another eight years to build and launch one. The Mercury program started in October of 1958, the design work on the space shuttle didn’t get started until 1969, eleven years later. The first manned Mercury flight took place on May 5th, 1961, with the primary piece of hardware (the rocket) being little more than “off the shelf” hardware. Meanwhile, Rutan has designed and built from scratch both the White Knight and SpaceShip One in a slightly longer period of time. Additionally, he’s worked on designing (if not building) the successor to WK/SS1 in less time than NASA spent on designing the space shuttle.
Now, one of the recommendations for NASA by the President’s Commission on Implementation of United States: Space Exploration Policy is that NASA rely on private contractors for access to low Earth orbit (and that’s exactly where the ISS sits), which means that the ISS could be serviced by Rutan’s Tier Two craft. This will drive down the cost of not only maintaining the ISS, but will also open up space to tourism, since Rutan thinks that he can get the cost of a ride on the Tier Two to $40K without the benefits of scale which come from having not only tourist flights, but also NASA purchased flights to the ISS. Big deal, you say, but one of the problems with spaceflight has been it’s expense, and once the expense is dropped, even slightly there will be an increase in flights, this will further help lower the cost of space flight (see here for an example of how this might work), and we’ll see not only a technological benefit from this but even greater efforts at lower cost space flight.
So, we might not see a lot of benefits from the ISS itself, but we will see a gret number of benefits because of it.
chappachula, you’re wrong. Even assuming that Rutan isn’t able to pull of his X-Prize flight, and no one else does either, humans can do things in space that neither robots nor computers can do at present. As proof of this I would like to point out that in the more than 90 days they’ve been on Mars, the two rovers have travelled a combined distance of 2 km as of April 28th.
and
Contrast that with what the Apollo 14 crew did.
and
Mind you, that was on foot.
Let’s look at what Apollo 15 (the first mission to bring a rover to the Moon) did
and
So at least as far as ground covered, humans beat robots (and the humans were operating in a far more inhospitable climate than the Mars rovers are). The Apollo missions also brought back samples of Lunar materials which can be studied here on Earth in better labratories than we could equip a robot with. Humans can also go places and gather things in manners that robots cannot. Even here on Earth, we can’t build a robot which can move and function half as well as a human. Sure robots can weld cars, but they can’t navigate a fully mapped and laid out course on their own, as the folks at the DARPA Grand Challenge found out this past year. Heck, you or I could do better without a map!
Bob Park publishes a weekly newsletter called What’s New. From this week’s:
From October 31st’s issue:
The “obscure physicist” here is Bob himself being modest.
So… anything, no matter how big a failure, is worth any cost, as long as you learn from it?
Parks does a disservice to himself and to all scientists by his anti-human stance. According to Parks, everything can be done better by robots than by humans, and given the venom which he spews out at the merest mention of a manned space program, I’d be willing to bet that he’d be happier if the entire human race was wiped off the face of the Earth and replaced by robots.
Parks happily cherry picks through the scientific literature and finds case where humans have fouled up an experiment, or lied about an experiment and says, “See! A robot would never do that!” Well, yeah, but then again, humans do that here on Earth all the time.
In sending robots into space, we don’t learn about ourselves in the process, we only learn about the things that the robots were programmed to find (and if there’s something really interesting that the robot’s not been programmed to find, we’ll never know about it). A robot isn’t going to look out a window and suddenly feel compelled to recite a passage from Genesis, or comment on how small everything suddenly looks and how much we all are interconnected. A robot can’t tell me that the Moon smells like burnt gunpowder, but an astronaut can. If a robotic program goes awry, we just throw up our hands and start building a replacement. If a manned mission goes awry, we bust ass to figure out what the hell went wrong, and do our damnedest to save the crew. The Apollo 13 mission is a prime example of this. No one at NASA thought that the kind of accident which occured on Apollo 13 was survivable, but they found a way to save the crew, and not only that, but the crew was able to do photographic work (helpful for astronomers, geologists and the like) as they swung around the Moon. A robotic mission would have been written off the moment the O2 tank blew.
Zagadka, the ISS is not what I would have wanted for a space station, but it is what we have, so one has to make the best of a bad situation, until an alternative becomes available. And there are those who’ve paid a higher price who would no doubt feel the same.
Anybody here want to make the claim that money is more valuable than human life?
I don’t think this is a particularly useful measure of suitability for exploration missions. Distance covered doesn’t tell you anything about the scientific data returned; it’s just a distance. Certainly, there are functions that can be performed by humans that can not at present be perfectly replicated by robots, but that’s not the point - the point is that robots can get to places that humans can’t. An equally simplistic comparison would be to point out that no human has ever successfully reached Mars - by this measure, robots are infinitely superior.
It’s a question of pragmatism and cost - the relative cost of a Mars shot with humans would be enormous, but the relative benefits minor; humans are arguably more suited to on the spot adaptation to new information, but the rovers have already demonstrated considerable capabilities in that area for a fraction of the cost. If there’s something of interest that they prove unable to explore, a follow-up mission is a (relatively) minor effort. And again, they look like they’re on to be operational for the best part of a year, something a human crew would be extremely unlikely to achieve.
Your example of the Grand Challenge is also deeply unfair - this was designed from the start to be an extremely difficult task to encourage development of really new technologies; the attitude that it is a failure due to the lack of teams completing the course is precisely the sort of attitude that refuses to accept that space exploration is of benefit because it’s got no direct product. Furthermore, no-one is suggesting full autonomy for robotic space exploration missions; human feedback is extremely useful, and the rover control process (for example) is extremely intensive. In your post I see on preview, you seem to be assuming that we’re designing single-use robots that run through a list of tasks with no scope for deviation. This just isn’t the case at all; to have read anything about the rovers at all is to know that they’re eminently adaptable.
In a more general vein, the complaint that robots cannot fully emulate humans is IMO perhaps onr of the greatest barriers to robotics research. Of course they’re not exactly like humans, nor should they be; they’re something different. They have different strengths, different weaknesses and should be considered on their merits, not on a narrow measure of non-humanness, as you have done. The simple fact is that robotic missions have reached unknown places that humans are simply unable to explore at present, have returned far more interesting data than have the astronauts pootling round the upper atmosphere, and have done so for relatively little cost.
(apologies if this is slightly tetchy - “but they’re not human” is a bit of a pet peeve of mine…)