Now things might change again, two Senators appear to want to extend the orbiter program as long as possible. They say a shuttle type design is the only correct vehicle for finishing the space station and pursuing President Bush's man on Mars objective.
Hadn't GWB vowed to retire the orbiter by 2010 come hell or high water ?
The Senators Mr Bill Nelson and KAy Bailey Hutchinson have said first step of this new journey to explore with this new mission is to finish the work on the International Space Station and fulfill the commitment to the US partners and allied nations. They go on to describe safety, the costs in finance, complete the work on the ISS and do the shuttle and the goal to Mars they made a special to florida today. Here's a quote


it goes on , the rest can be read here

http://www.flatoday.com/news/space/s...718WNELSON.htm



Did anyone hear anymore on this idea ?

Sounds Typical for Bush:

The Centrist Coalition, Strikes again.

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If you Ignore YOUR Rights, they Will go away.

we don't know what way things are turning, some think there are flaws in the Bush plan yet now it looks like other projects will get axed, yet senators think we shoudl continue with the ISS but now there are more spending cuts again, who knows what will happen

I'm strongly in support of this new program. My feeling is this: you may not like the president (even though I do, but that's irrelevant), but anything that gets us out of LEO is worth it.

Plus, the White House said today that it would veto a spending bill that didn't include NASA's budget increase for FY 2005. They're really behind it, unlike the first Bush on SEI.

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"Too low they build, who build beneath the stars". - Edward Young, 1745

I would tread very carefully in this thread and not start posting partisan politics. Padawan, this means you specifically; watch your language as well.

Indeed it is quiet odd how some threads go off so suddenly at times, maybe putting the word 'Bush' in the title was a bad idea. It seems that sometimes whenever the word Bush pops up some people go off on these type of talk and all of a sudden you have liberals and conservative and republicans and democrats at each others necks and suddenly everyone is talking bad politics instead of bad-astronomy ops: .

So from now on this thread will be about the ISS and a discussion of the George-plan The discussion of the George vision will focus on the issue of space and if it is possible and issues of safety and cut backs on other projects like the ISS, will this be the way to go to have people on the Martian planet. We will try and discuss if you think the George vision is do-able and possible..that's unless you think it was all an 'election stunt' but then suddenly we are back to bad politics

However if you think George was serious about the vision and was keen on space then we can discuss if this is the correct path, what about finance, are the the right goals, what about the removal of other projects and pulling away from the ISS? :-? Is this vision the right, how about is it going to be safe ? Is this the way to put people on Mars and what about other plans like the ISS getting cut.

Here's how such talk might go

So please let's try to keep the politics out of this one let's talk about the george vision and the ISS ..and Please don't get my thread locked

Just my 22.5 cents worth (2 cents adusted for inflation): The ISS is a wonderful program, no doubt. But as long as priorities are centered on ISS support, it'll be another 10 to 15 years before we'll be anywhere near leaving LEO again, and in fact this is roughly the timeframe of Dubya's proposal to return to the moon. (notice I didn't use the "B" word)

I'm reminded of an anecdote I read once regarding Charles Lindbergh and the backers of his transatlantic flight. After several attempts by others to cross the Atlantic had failed, the backers were getting cold feet. They told Lindbergh in words to the effect that "maybe we just can't do it now". Lindy shot back that it needed to be tried...now. Again and again if needed until the task is completed.

Nothing dulls the mind like routine. We've been doing LEO stuff since Reagan's first term and it seems to me anyway that that's as far as NASA is used to thinking when it comes to manned missions. At the very least we need to start planning now for lunar missions starting in the middle of the next decade. What kind and level of technology will be involved? What type of launch vehicles will be needed? (Saturn V revisited? :wink: ) Can we go it alone or will international partnerships be required? And a big one in my estimation: How can the public interest and political will be stimulated for such a project the way that Mercury/Gemini/Apollo inspired the nation in the 60's? There are other issues to be resolved I'm sure but if we're gonna do this we need to start doing something about it...and soon.

What does the ISS do (apart from suck lots of money into low orbit)? Can you name any science achieved in the ISS that cannot be done as well and cheaper here on Earth?

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"If lightspeed has something to do with speed.
how come things can move fast in the dark?"
-James Driscoll (Spaceman), kook, imbecile, idiot.

The ISS is a test bed for orbital facilities that a number of civilian outfits are going to be lofting in the REAL near future. When civvie stations start going up, they will be doing so with the knowledged gained by having the ISS up there making the first steps, the first mistakes, and the first successes.

SS1 kicked open a door to getting civilians into space, and there will be others to follow. At some point, NASA will more on to other things, but the ISS right now represents the foothold that civilians will be stepping on when the first commercial/private space stations go up. If the rest of us are going to do it right in LEO, someone has to do it first. We won't have the ability to properly regulate the standards for civilian stations unless someone in an official capacity (read: NASA) sets those standards by knowing what can go right and go wrong.

Commercial space stations may sound like a pipe dream and it may be another 10 years before we see them, but they are coming. The momentum has gathered and its not slowing down.

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I'm not completely heartless, the doctor who removed it told me he'd never be able to get it all.

The ISS has only been operating for about a third the time that Mir did, and counting Salyut, the Russians have had men in orbit on stations for about 30 years. We know an awful lot about space stations and how to run them already, what with Skylab, Salyuts 1-7 (especially 4 and after), and Mir. The ISS is by no means making the first mistakes or successes. We're not learning anything tremendously important on the ISS in terms of engineering, except perhaps the mating of equipment from different countries - but we did that in 1975 with Apollo-Soyuz. And science on the ISS? Have you heard of even one scientific discovery that's been made there to date? New drugs, new computer chips, etc. will never be developed on the ISS, regardless of the "research agenda", because research is not really done there. The most important thing we've learned on the ISS is that this piecemeal construction business does not work; it's at least 8 years behind the original schedule once this configuration was finalized.

We'll always here that "now is not the time". Congress and other policymakers want to push spaceflight back into some time when everything is perfect, when no more problems are present. Isn't a little suspicious that these "problems" preventing us from launching space initatives "now", never seem to go away? They're just replaced by other ones. Think Confucius and the single step.

How about "the President's vision"? He is President, after all. We should accord him the fitting respect.

The funding's not ridculously high. The shifting of funds from the notoriously overpriced Shuttle is the right way to get the money.

Comparing the amount science done, say, on Apollo 15, and over the entire lifetime of the ISS is not even an issue. Lunar and Mars flights are definitely better for science.

This is a question that's always going to be asked about any space mission. It's not a problem specific to the President's plan.

There hasn't actually been a specific strategy for how the flights will be accomplished, so I would contend that the first part of the question is attacking an aspect of the plan that hasn't been fleshed out yet. As for ISS cuts, I think it's been given enough money as it is. Consider, as I quote another post I made:

Most estimates place the cost of the ISS at around $100 billion. If Skylab cost $7 billion in 1994 dollars , then:

Space inside Skylab = approx. 10,000 cubic feet
Cost of Skylab = $7 billion
Cost per cubic foot on Skylab: $700,000

Space inside ISS = 43,000 cubic feet
Cost of ISS = $100 billion
Cost per cubic foot on ISS = $2,325,581

That's over 3 times the relative cost of Skylab. www.spaceref.com/news/viewnews.html?id=315 describes a budget overrun in the ISS of $4 billion, over half the cost of the entire Skylab, which was launched in one day by one rocket. If you're going for science, consider the number of Skylab-equivalent "supermodules" you could launch for the price of the ISS. Say you inflate the $7 billion to $15 billion in today's money, and launch three Skylabs and dock them. There, even without any substantial modification to the original Skylab design, you have created a station that houses 9 astronauts and does some real science (assuming these modules work as well as the original Skylab did), for less than half the cost of the ISS. And all that in only three launches, too. Assuming you built them all at the same time, maybe a year to launch the whole thing, maximum.

I think that whoever wrote this had misunderstood what the senators were saying. The first part of the new directive explicitly states that NASA will finish the station and fulfill its commitment before the Shuttle is retired. How a winged vehicle will help in a significant way for lunar or Mars landings, I'm not quite sure.

Valery Polyakov spent 678 days in space (that's 22 months) in 1994-1995 and experienced no significant medical problems. That was all in zero-g. A Mars crew would spend a significant amount of their time in .38g, which is presumably less damaging to human health. Artifical gravity could also be employed. I'm not sure what the specific nature of these "serious" problems were, but I don't imagine that they were anything beyond normal bone and muscle loss in prolonged zero-g.

The rest of what you've quoted seems to be the same rehashed arguments against spaceflight seen again and again, the radiation hazard, the risk of crewmembers getting ill, etc. This writer seems to have a distinctly liberal slant, also. One thing that's confused me when people say this is a "stunt": public support for this is not overwhelming, as if 80% of the country likes the plan. It's more like 50%, like every other issue. Regardless of the political motivations that may or may not have been behind the plan, this is more or less the way to get to the Moon and Mars; this is something manned spaceflight needs to do (get out of LEO). If you have lingering doubts, read the Aldridge commission report to see why this has nonpartisan benefits aside from science.

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"Too low they build, who build beneath the stars". - Edward Young, 1745

Agreed, but this is being done with newer technologies, international cooperation and on a much larger scale lead by a government that does not have the level of enforced focus that the Soviets had in launching and building Mir. Mir didn't have gyro stabilization, Mir didn't have a robot arm with the independence of the ISS's, Mir didn't have the extensive truss structures, Mir didn't have to service multiple spacesuit configurations and multiple docking ports.

As much as we need to learn what to do up there, we're also learning how NOT to do things up there. (Staged construction, etc.)

Contrary to public opinion and belief, there does come a time when the only way a lesson can sink in is by doing something and screwing up royally.[/i]

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I'm not completely heartless, the doctor who removed it told me he'd never be able to get it all.