The International space station in my words is just a big 100 billion dollar hunk a junk thats sucking up money from more interesting things like the exploration of mars and the rest of the solar system.

The young ones are calling our proud International Space Station 'junk' it must be school holidays or something...?


anyway Shuttle is an even more expensive LEO venture ( only USA pays for Shuttle while the costs of ISS is spread out between nations ), the Shuttle cost $1.2 billion per launch and perhaps Shuttle is a lot more dangerous than the ISS.

What do u mean r u happy we are calling it junk or what

There are a lot of people here who think that it has consumed a lot more money than it was worth. Did you think this was a revelation?

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No i just think it was a piece of junk taking money from cooler missions like take JIMO for example. That would have been an awsome mission.

I agree that JIMO would have been great. It would be fantastic for us to build the Prometheus core for future missions, and to have a big high powered mission to explore the Jovian system. Other lost missions come to mind too. At this point, we're reassessing the value of the ISS, and looking to the future.

Personally, I favor unmanned probes. Some people are looking at the manned missions to the moon and Mars as valuable (as I imagine you do). We will work it out, but not nearly fast enough for any space-enthusiast's taste.

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Forming opinions as we speak

I would not call ISS "a piece of junk". I would call it "a Rolls Royce sitting on blocks" -- without a prayer of ever going anywhere.

Certainly agree with VenusROVER's sentiment, though.

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Fiction has to be plausible. Reality is under no such constraint.

ISS has been the host to many many expirements, it isn't junk.

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-The Wolf
http://www.ryanmercer.com
http://www.youtube.com/user/ryanmercer317
http://www.pleasegodhelpme.org

The ISS is very useful, but to expensive.

If at first they had sunk some of those funds in developing a reliable,
cost-effective, and powerful space transportation system, which
the Shuttle was supposed to have been, and then had spend the
rest on building the space station, we'd had gotten a lot more
station for our bucks.

Hindsight is always 20/20.

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Join the Illuminati

[rant]
We have these marvelous things in English... they are called WORDS. Generally speaking, only "I" and "a" are single letter words in common usage. There are no bloody words "u" or "r". We ALSO have wonderful marks called PUNCTUATION...
[/rant]

Seriously, using proper words and some semblence of punctuation will help you to more clearly communicate. I've noticed in some of your other posts that what you are saying or asking aren't always clear.

As to the ISS... We can look back all we want and say we should have done "this or that", but besides the Russians, whose station was built with a similar "stack modules together" paradigm, NO ONE ELSE (i.e,. private industry) stepped up to try and build such a thing. In the end, things didn't work so well, but at the time, it was an attempt to get an international project done with existing infrastructure. It's helped us learn all sorts of things relating to space-based construction, transportation and materials science. Hardly a waste, in my opinion.

CJSF

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Two years ago moved from my town
I was looking up past the city lights
But the city lights got in my way

See the constellation ride across the sky
No cigar, no lady on his arm
Just a guy made of dots and lines

-from "See The Constellation"
by They Might Be Giants

None of which even remotely justify its expense. In fact, the science return of entire manned space program, from 1961 (I am counting USSR) on, is very modest, and for its cost downright embarassing. No Nobel prize ever came out of manned spaceflight; several came out of unmanned.

That's why I call ISS a "Rolls-Royce on blocks" rather than "junk". It is beautiful, gleaming, high-tech... and it just sits there. Occasionally it gets taken off the blocks and is used to get milk from the store.

That's about the cost-benefit analysis of ISS -- cost benefit analysis being a completely foreign concept to government agencies in general, and especially to NASA.

IMO, the single biggest benefit of ISS is to provide a tourist destination, which in turn provides an incentive for cheaper, more reliable access to orbit.

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Fiction has to be plausible. Reality is under no such constraint.

Right now, crippled as it is, the ISS is just a showcase and lab to try a few things when the onboard crew has time. Had it ever reached it's 7-8 occupants capacity it would have been a completely different story.

The ISS is only a failure in it's crippled state, not from a technological standpoint. And yes, it was very costly for what it's doing today.

I guess the will is just not there anymore.

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The impossible often has a kind of integrity which the merely improbable lacks.

nor is the shuttle, on which ISS heavily relied...

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To the regular visitor of internet bulletin boards it is clear that it's an excellent idea your parents get to choose your real name.

Ya'll always discount the main reason for the ISS and that is to find out what it takes to live in space for extended periods of time.
That experience in nessessary for any long mission into space and to gain that experience you need some kind of platform. That is the ISS.
http://www.arrl.org/arrlletter/06/0310/

Of course if you're a bot lover, none of that matters.

My favorite though is...
http://www.arrl.org/arrlletter/06/0317/

You don't get that kind of insight from a spacebot.

IMO the only reason there is a push to get the shuttle flying is to support the ISS and without the shuttle, or something to take it's place, there would be no manned space flight and no astronauts. Without astronauts, NASA would become just another goverment think tank who's money could be used as a slush fund to be dipped into whenever they wanted. What I think would happen is funding would be cut and cut until nothing is left and NASA would get closed down and no more bots either. No we need to keep people involved in space flight, one way or another.

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You're a coward and a liar and a thOOF - Bart Sibrel

That means quite some dead mosquitos (from the payload bay) must float/have floated freely in LEO

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To the regular visitor of internet bulletin boards it is clear that it's an excellent idea your parents get to choose your real name.

What impresses many young people is not so much "You have made a machine that has gone to space?" as "You have been to space?". Astronauts make the space industry more human, more appealing, to a lot of people. That alone makes it worthwhile. Furthermore, a lot of experiments are done by these people. It would be harder to make robots that are versatile enough to do all those in such a short time (although they can work 24/7 of course).
Other good things are the international collaboration, and the tests for what long periods of weightlessness do to the human body, and long periods in space do to the human mind.

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Knowledge is a curse, but ignorance is worse

you may call it junk

but at least they got to take this cool photo
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11763975/
eclipse snapped

A lot of the problems with ISS start with the political decisions. Several very expensive years of designs and re-designs essentially to fit a capped budget. Bringing the Russians in to build hardware, then refusing to bail them out when they had money problems - result two years' delay, two years' US costs instead of a relatively small one-off payment. Over reliance on the Shuttle, cancellation of the US crew transport system and again refusal to pay the Russians to develop their alternative. Results - ESA and the Japanese have had their labs completed and sitting in storage for several years; an ISS limited to a small crew that spend nearly all their time maintaining it and very little on research.

Rolls-Royce on blocks is pretty apt.

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"The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head" Terry Pratchett

It's definitely not been a good return on the money invested - imagine how much space science could have been done for a hundred billion!

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

I second that.

Except ISS does not do well even that. Granted, it is because of very bad political decisions, but is that a valid excuse? I don't think so.

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Fiction has to be plausible. Reality is under no such constraint.

Ok, let me say this :

The design for the ISS is not junk, in fact it could have become one of the greatest scientific creations and the most wonderful space construction projects of all time, it could have produced even better results than MIR or Skylab. The whole international thing was badly managed and now we don't even have a half-finished station, it could be becoming a junk project fast but since the loss of Shuttle Columbia over Texas the whole thing has got even more complicated. The Russians with their Soyuz and Progress is what is keeping the United States in space right now. The Shuttle ( STS which may cost double the price of the ISS before it retires ) should return to flight soon but it has too much work lost, so I doubt it will ever be able to finish-off the station.

Welcome to the future, where people learn to type on cell phones...

As for the ISS, its typical of any project where the words "promise" and "potential" are bandied about with too much abandon. Too many compromising conditions had to be covered to make it anything other than a destination unto itself because of the plurality of its sponsorship. And too many things critical to the station's success are dangerously unreliable. e.g. The Russian economy and the American space shuttle.

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The last time I felt a warm fuzzy feeling, I was informed by my doctor that it was just gas.

Better yet if we simply fund a whole lot more. I hate to intrude with political realities here, but the people apparently prefer huge tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy and futile, pointless crusades in the middle east.

Antiscience leaders and legislators will "Proxmire" projects that are not political pork for the folks back home. This is why we have ballooning deficits and bridges to nowhere, while conducting our science on a shoestring budget.

Regarding the NASA budget, you're not going to get your pet project funded by attacking someone else's. Suppose we gut the shuttle. Business will simply contract with the Chinese for launch facilities, and the shuttle funding won't be diverted to some other project, it will simply dry up. Kiss it all goodbye, and look for work in the private service sector. We'll have good "manufacturing" jobs building hamburgers for all those engineers.

And add in what the people are doing themselves.

Considering (at the time) nearly $1000 per dependent: This situation could have completely funded NASA.

In fact this is the only type of political discussion you can have here, but even then, you must be careful where you tread. At the moment, NASA has a budget, and a tradition for what size slice of the pie it gets. There are many states that benefit from NASA contracts, and Senators and Congressmen representing those states are ill-advised to seriously reduce funding, but cannot easily raise funding without some compelling reason (the war on space?). We have what we have, and making rapid shifts just isn't in the cards.

The ESA has the same sort of difficulty. I'm sure Japan and India as well. I have no idea how China budgets their space program.

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Forming opinions as we speak

I consider, that the true value of the ISS lays in its function as a test bed for international cooperation in space. This project represents a valuable learning exercise in the coordination of complex projects between nations. Looking at the history of space exploration in the past half century, my feeling is, that the future of manned space exploration lays in international endeavours.

It certainly proved we should stay away from "international cooperation" in the future.
That it has been. We learned that such coordination is basically impossible, and leads to stagnation among conflicting priorities and unreliable partners. An expensive lesson, but worth it if NASA takes it to heart.
You Have Got To Be Joking. Do you want ALL future of manned space exploration turned into politicized white elephants!?

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Fiction has to be plausible. Reality is under no such constraint.

It certainly proved we should stay away from "international cooperation" in the future.

Like Huygens/Cassini, Soyuz launching for everybody and from the European spaceport, international cooperation on Clipper?

That it has been. We learned that such coordination is basically impossible, and leads to stagnation among conflicting priorities and unreliable partners. An expensive lesson, but worth it if NASA takes it to heart.

So it should never have done Huygens/Cassini and should not fly on Soyuz? I think that from your reasoning not only NASA should learn from it, but all agencies. They certainly should learn from ISS, but I don't think the lesson here is that international cooperation doesn't work in space.

You Have Got To Be Joking. Do you want ALL future of manned space exploration turned into politicized white elephants!?

If politics are left out of international cooperation (as much as possible), I think it certainly has value. I think the problem with ISS is not so much politics (maybe to stop it, but not what caused it to be not such a huge success), but the fact that it relied heavily on 2 unreliable, non-redundant elements (Shuttle and Russian money).

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To the regular visitor of internet bulletin boards it is clear that it's an excellent idea your parents get to choose your real name.