International Space Station Could be De-Crewed by November

[pokerfan]

For personal reasons I had to miss the NASA press conference this morning which gave an update on International Space Station operations following the failure and crash of a Progress resupply vehicle last week. When I returned home and saw the headlines about the briefing from other news sites, I thought, “Wow, everyone is really overreacting about how this might affect the space station.” But then I watched a replay of the briefing and realized no news site was being overly melodramatic. NASA’s Space Station Manager Mike Suffredini laid out a fairly bleak picture of how quickly the ISS will have to be de-manned if the anomaly with the Soyuz-family of rockets isn’t figured out soon. The problem is not logistics or supplies; it all hinges on the Soyuz capsules themselves and their limited lifespan. If the anomaly is not figured out soon and the Soyuz rockets aren’t flying by mid-November, the space station will have to be de-crewed and be operated unmanned, remotely from the ground.

http://www.universetoday.com/88502/international-space-station-could-be-de-crewed-by-november

[laconicsax]

1. $100 billion boondoggle. n/t

[pokerfan]

2. I agree

That money could have ran the Department of Defense for six weeks.

[laconicsax]

3. Or put probes around every planet in the solar system.

And added some robotic landers on various moons.

On edit: Oh, and replaced Hubble with several JWST-sized observatories

[pokerfan]

4. or all of the above

1 year of DoD spending = 45 years of NASA funding

[laconicsax]

5. Why spend any of it on the DoD at all?

[pokerfan]

6. I wouldn't suggest that we don't need a DoD

but...



I'd start by cutting it in half.

[laconicsax]

7. Redirect that money to arts and sciences and I'll jump on board.

[pnorman]

10. Thanks for that image!

[Johonny]

8. part of DoD spending is on launch vehicles and unmanned satellites.

They could cut money from the DoD to help Americas' NASA space programs, but you might cut it in a way where you rob part of Americas space program like GPS. DoD has a huge footprint in Americas space program. I guess it all depends on how much you trust the people redirecting the money if space programs wouldn't overall lose on the deal :)

[laconicsax]

9. Ending the wars is a good start. n/t

[Orsino]

12. You win the Internet. n/t

[Orsino]

11. I disagree.

I think the ISS is a beginning; I'm just not sure of what. A couple of decades of semi-permanent LEO presence isn't enough, IMO, to conclude that the ISS or some other habitat is useless (or just uneconomical).

If there's any use in our learning to live in space (and I'm not quite ready to claim that, either), I think it may only be revealed in the long term.

[laconicsax]

13. "A couple of decades of semi-permanent LEO presence isn't enough,"

We have great data on the effects of long term weightlessness. Like I said upthread, we could have done so much more science and exploration with the ISS money.

[Orsino]

14. I don't think that's enough info to conclude "boondoggle," either.

Sure, we could have done may other things with all that money and effort...but there's no guarantee that those projects would have netted greater returns.

Hell, we can't even know what those returns would have been. Science is like that; you don't get to know what you don't research.

[laconicsax]

15. But you can look at all the research that could have been done.

Like I already suggested, we could have sent long-term probes to every planet in the Solar System landed some robots on them or their moons, and put up multiple JWST-size observatories with that money.

While we've gotten a good amount of science out of the ISS, hindsight says other projects would have been more useful.

[Orsino]

16. It doesn't even take hindsight...

...to guess that we might have learned more science from unmanned exploration that could focus less on life support systems. Certainly we could have learned more about planetary science, if less about the effects of space travel on people.