It should be easy enough to calculate. The kinetic energy of a micrometeroid is half the mass times the velocity squared, isn’t it? It seems to me that saying we’ll develop self-sealing materials is at least slightly dismissive, especially given that repeated stresses are bound to weaken any material over time. The problem with high velocity space dust isn’t so much the immediate damage to the shielding, but the fact that any damage, no matter how slight, can compromise the entire life support of a remote vessel. A drop of water won’t hurt a leaf, but erosion can carve out a canyon.
Momentum (m*v) is probably a better measurement of the potential for structural damage than kinetic energy (this is a debate that has deep roots among forensic ballisticans), but regardless, it isn’t an issue to be lightly dismissed; a large impact could potentially destroy a habitat, and yes, smaller continuous impacts will do continuous degredation. So will radiation exposure; neutron embrittlement is a problem in nuclear reactor hardware and processing equipment. But the probability of catastrophic failure has to be taken into account; if the likelyhood of being impacted by a basketball-size meteor is 1:200 years, then it’s not as critical of a problem as being hit one every 1:10 years by a large measure, espeically when you look at the normal (statistical) distribution. Tens of thousands of people die on the Earth’s surface every year due to natural disasters; a comperable rate from space-borne hazards (assuming that the extraterrestrial population is distributed among various habitats) isn’t a major negative.
This assumes, again, a ground-to-orbit and orbital propulsion cost that makes large scale colonization, exploitation, and habitat construction an economically viable proposition. This is obviously not the case today, nor with a reasonable extrapolation of current technology; we have to find something with a higher specific impulse and lower mass fraction than chemical propulsion, notwithstanding all the required advancements in life support technology and so forth. The thrust, with regard to a manned space presence, shouldn’t be pure science but putting space habitation on a sound economic footing. To this end, missions to Mars, or even the Moon, are diversions from the necessary goal. But the cost and long-term planning of such a program are beyond the perview of nations, and most likely business for the foreseeable future.
Stranger
What a bunch of yawnorama science projects scotandrsn.
Crew Earth Observations – we do the same thing with weather satellites.
Materials on the International Space Station Experiment 5 is basically putting stuff outside.
Space Acceleration Measurement System II is a space-seismometer.
Investigating the Structure of Paramagnetic Aggregates from Colloidal Emulsions
(InSPACE) does nothing that can’t be done on the ground except have a cool acronym.
And the rest of the list is useless stuff that NASA and the former USSR space program started working on in the sixties – before realizing that the unique microgravity properties of crystalline formation are highly unspectacular.
I’m no Proxmire. I hate that our species looked at a spectacular impact of heavenly bodies in our solar system and collectively yawned. But the NEO shit that NASA concentrates on is puny stuff, and anyone looking at it with an objective eye knows it.
If we want to go to space, let’s pony up the cash and do it. Settle another planet. Spread throughout the solar system. But don’t do the cost-benefit analysis now, because we don’t know what we’ll find to be useful.
Look at the analogous situation with Columbus. He convinced the queen to send him, and he came back with gold. Fat lot of good it did Spain. The real beneficiaries were the English and the French – and everyone who immigrated. That will be a reason to go to space, and might get us up there permanently.
Your assertion was that NO research was being done. Given that expedition 12 was merely a test run for the refurbished shuttle, and only has a two-man skeleton crew, it’s not surprising that most of the stuff is leftover from previous missions and is rather rudimentary. Feel free to look through the science profiles of the previous 11 missions to demonstrate that there is no research done.
The science community has made a lot of noise about how inadequate the ISS is for certain types of research, but plenty of institutions have ponied up the dough to design flyable experiments, nonetheless. To say otherwise is simply misinformation, although you’re certainly welcome to your opinion on the usefulness of the experiments done.
As far as I’m concerned, the ISS provides us with valuable information on the long-term effects of the microgravity environment on the human body, and is the only venue that can do so. A manned trip to Mars, for example, is 2.5 years minimum. How else do we find out what long-term low and micro gravity can do to us, so we know what a permanent settlement needs? The shuttle can only go up two weeks at a time.
If the ISS gives us that data alone, I’m happy. The entire space program gets less than one percent of the federal budget per year. I don’t demand that this tiny amount pay for itself through commercial investment. What other goverment programs receiving that little funding have similar demands placed on them?