ISS - Waste of money?

lockon...

The ISS has cost over $150billion so far, but has it really been of any value? The list of experiments they have performed seem really weak.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/experiments/List.htm

ZeRoY

your link is wrong to start with

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/experiments_category.html

I dont think it is a waste of money at all. It is the future, aside from the rather important experiments carried out in the station there are tons of equipment attached on the ISS, for biology, research into dark matter, all sorts.

Rhys Essien

Aah OP,where to start.

How many tens of billions has little ol Ireland/Developers pi$$ed down the drain on the property bubble.
Roman Abramovich has spent a billion quid alone,on soccer players for Chelsea.

IMO,There should never be an issue on money when it comes to science and research in Space.
We have to look outwards and try and spread humanity in the Universe.You saw from the other day how easily we could become extinct/wiped out.

Chuck Stone

Rhys Essien wrote: »

Roman Abramovich has spent a billion quid alone,on soccer players for Chelsea.

If Abramovich put his fortune on a bonfire and burned it the question in the OP still remains.

IMO,There should never be an issue on money when it comes to science and research in Space.

Money is an issue and will be for the foreseeable future until someone comes up with some other way of putting a price on scarce resources.

I think we could get a lot greater value for money from robotic space exploration. Robotic equipment and electronic hardware is getting less expensive and more advanced. Just think how many probes could be sent out into the Solar System for the price of a manned mission to Mars.

Myrddin

Compared to whats spent on building weapons, & whats spent on causing death, destruction & suffering in the name of 'peace' every day...no, not at all. The ISS is a drop in the water in comparison. For one year alone, in the US...you could have built four ISS stations.

For the 2011 fiscal year, the president's base budget of the Department of spending on "overseas contingency operations" brings the sum to $664.84 billion

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_States#Budget_for_2011

Thats just one year. How anyone can call into question the worth of something like the ISS is mind boggling. What has that half a trillion spent in 2011 gotten America? Exactly.

Slightly off topic, but what are the long term plans for the ISS...wasn't there talk a few years ago that it would eventually be allowed to burn up in the atmosphere as it was costing too much to have in operation? I think it got an extension of a few years or something...

2 stroke

That $150 billion (if your figures are correct) is still on this planet, being passed from person to person, being handed back to governments in taxes, and being handed back out again.

Just Like Heaven

2 stroke wrote: »

That $150 billion (if your figures are correct) is still on this planet, being passed from person to person, being handed back to governments in taxes, and being handed back out again.

This exactly, there seems to be an idea that billions of dollars are just launched up inside every rocket fired up and wasted. The ISS was a first for so many technologies, especially stuff like habitable satelites that can all be used in the future. NASA have patented 6,000+ inventions and spinoff technology is used daily around the world.

The $150 billion dollars is correct when you factor in the shuttle flights. The actual ISS itself cost 45%-50% of that $150 billion.

silverharp

2 stroke wrote: »

That $150 billion (if your figures are correct) is still on this planet, being passed from person to person, being handed back to governments in taxes, and being handed back out again.

in economic terms that a nonsense. Are you suggesting the Easter Islanders could have stayed rich by building more monuments and passing their "money" around?

Just Like Heaven

silverharp wrote: »

in economic terms that a nonsense. Are you suggesting the Easter Islanders could have stayed rich by building more monuments and passing their "money" around?

Well lots of people would have jobs building monuments. The point they were trying to make is that it isn't $150 billion fired up into space.

2 stroke

I guess the true cost is the fuel, and the waste ejected to burn up in our atmosphere. Without the ISS, there'd be a lot of unemployed rocket scientists. The advances in solar technology, driven by the space industry, will pay long term dividends on the ground.

Captain Chaos

Sure they are even testing a new ion engine on the ISS intended to power future craft to go to Mars and beyond. Without the ISS there would be no space based platform to test these systems on. The ISS is invaluable for these kinds of tests.

nokia69

Captain Chaos wrote: »

Sure they are even testing a new ion engine on the ISS intended to power future craft to go to Mars and beyond. Without the ISS there would be no space based platform to test these systems on. The ISS is invaluable for these kinds of tests.

na, not really

ion engines work and we know they do, plenty of satellites use them

but the ISS still has its uses but I think it will be allowed to fall in to the sea in the long term, it will be gone by 2020 IMO

but not to worry it will be replaced by something better

Capt'n Midnight

ZeRoY wrote: »

I dont think it is a waste of money at all. It is the future, aside from the rather important experiments carried out in the station there are tons of equipment attached on the ISS, for biology, research into dark matter, all sorts.

It's a waste of money in the sense that it could have been done for a fraction of the cost.

The weight in orbit is less than 4 Saturn V / 5 Energia launches.

and maybe even less if they had used a wet lab. - A shuttle external tank would make a huge habitable volume, with insulation and able to take pressure.


77 human flights to the ISS and 62 supply missions Each shuttle mission is estimated to have cost 20 times what a Soyuz mission cost http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/now-begins-the-era-of-the-soyuz/article2306053.ece
(yes I know that the shuttle could carry more but it was an obscene waste of resources and killed off so many other projects)



Yes the ISS is necessary but it's main function is to subsidise the aero-space industry


Mir was nearly 1/3rd the mass of the ISS but cost far far less.

http://www.astronautix.com/craft/mir.htm

Mir lasted 15 years, the complex in the end consisting of 7 modules with 11.5 metric tons of scientific equipment. It cost $220 to $240 million per year to keep in operation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mir

The cost of the Mir programme was estimated by former RKA General Director Yuri Koptev in 2001 as $4.2 billion over its lifetime (including development, assembly and orbital operation)

It would be interesting to work out what the ISS would have cost if all launches and structures were done by the Russians with Westerners providing stuff to stick in racks.

Stuxnet

alot cheaper then building the Death Star :pac:

maninasia

fewtinsoffroth wrote: »

This exactly, there seems to be an idea that billions of dollars are just launched up inside every rocket fired up and wasted. The ISS was a first for so many technologies, especially stuff like habitable satelites that can all be used in the future. NASA have patented 6,000+ inventions and spinoff technology is used daily around the world.

The $150 billion dollars is correct when you factor in the shuttle flights. The actual ISS itself cost 45%-50% of that $150 billion.

Like the space shuttles itself it didn't really accomplish many breakthroughs and costs far too much. In the end it sucks money from other more worthwhile goals such as whether there is life in the rest of the solar system or building giant telescopes that could image planets in other solar systems. In fact it's a fair bet we could have discovered life on Mars or on some of the moons that kind of money already and that my friends would be a game changing discovery.

Capt'n Midnight

fewtinsoffroth wrote: »

This exactly, there seems to be an idea that billions of dollars are just launched up inside every rocket fired up and wasted. The ISS was a first for so many technologies, especially stuff like habitable satelites that can all be used in the future. NASA have patented 6,000+ inventions and spinoff technology is used daily around the world.

Which stuff that wasn't used on Mir / Skylab ?

If it wasn't for the Shuttle Skylab might still be up there as the US had no way to re-visit it having scrapped all their launchers.

Skylab had an internal volume of 319.8 m3 which was 38% of the ISS (837 m3) - It was based on the third stage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylab

The spent 49-ton Saturn V S-II stage which had launched Skylab in 1973 remained in orbit for almost two years,

If you were to use a 'wet workshop' based on Saturn V second stage instead ( Hydrogen tank had a volume of at least 984m3 + expansion room)

It would be like this but ~4 times the internal volume


So one launch could have provided a large chunk of the ISS infrastructure, all the crew habitation, room for zero g experiments , a gym / running track. Yes you would have to launch stuff with windows later on.


BTW
Here is a classic example of how to misuse statistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylab#Program_cost

The Skylab program cost $2.2 billion from 1966 to 1974, or $10 billion in 2010 inflation-adjusted dollars. As its three three-man crews spent 510 total man-days in space, each man-day cost $19.6 million in 2010 dollars, compared to $7.5 million for the International Space Station

or you could use 2,249 Days in orbit instead of 171 Days occupied. And then the cost drops to $1.48 per man day. Less if there were more than 3 occupants , less again when the stays are longer than 57 day average.


Yes the resupply would have to be factored in but...

It still had 180 man-days of water and 420 man-days of oxygen, and astronauts could refill both;

shedweller

I'd say hardly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvAnfi8WpVE

Victor

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

And then the cost drops to $1.48 per man day.

Capt'n Midnight

Victor wrote: »

And that's how we sold it to congress

Capt'n Midnight

maninasia wrote: »

Like the space shuttles itself it didn't really accomplish many breakthroughs and costs far too much. In the end it sucks money from other more worthwhile goals

Don't get me started on the shuttle.

Back in the day the SSME's were advertised like they were the pinacle of rocket technology. The Russians had earlier engines which re-used the turbopump exhausts (the US are using them today)

The SSRB's were reusable, some segments were reused seven times.
But the first stage of a rocket doesn't have to be that efficient, it's not like the other stages where each Kg saved will result in cumulative just savings. The cost and weight penalties of making stage one reusable don't justify themselves beyond maybe giving the rocket motors parachutes.


You have to remember that we live in an age where Google cars are licensed to drive on public roads in parts of the USA. Where UAV's can take off , fly missions and land themselves when flown by army privates. (airforce pilots have crashed them on landing)

Does the ISS have a 3D printer ?

We have automated supply vessels

Sample return is easy enough - the 1950's technology corona spy satellites film was recovered by aircraft.

Humans require a lot of life support and safe systems.

An ISS built for robots / using remote control wouldn't have to be built to the same standards and could be a lot cheaper.



A big question is - for the same money could we have found / made tunnels on the moon for a base ?
Oxygen can be liberated on the moon with a temperature of 2500c - so possibility of a large component of rocket fuel there

How much would a one way trip to Mars cost ?

Victor

I wonder how practical it would be to reuse fuel tanks for space stations - they don't lend themselves to easy subdivision, welding and riveting while in space.

I'm also wondering why old space stations need to be disposed of 'willy-nilly'. While, yes, the grow old, parts wear old and the hull suffers thermal, radiation and impact damage, potentially that hull can be used as an outer shield for a new inner hull.

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

How much would a one way trip to Mars cost ?

Hundreds of billions.

There are distinct logistical problems, aside from the distance and travel time.

As you may be on the far side of the sun from Earth, you will need a doctor. However, that doctor may fall ill, so you will need a second doctor. While the doctors will be able to do other things, you are still looking at a crew of 4-6. If you have an orbiter-lander split, the crew might be as much as 8.

Now if you are going to travel for a year there and travel for a year coming back, you might as well spend at least several months there. That is a lot of food, water and other supplies. They would really need to finesse the fuel-water-air system to allow a lot of it to be reused.

All that means using a space station to assemble the supplies.

maninasia

Why would you need a doctor(s)? You can diagnose most of the problems from Earth and limit issues by prior screening and strict living habits.

The easiest way to save money for a human mission is one way, you go and you don't come back. Plenty would be willing to do it. Maybe the Chinese will do it in future.

Manned missions don't make a lot of sense though due to cost comparison with rapidly advancing robotic and drone technology.

Rhys Essien

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

Don't get me started on the shuttle.

Back in the day the SSME's were advertised like they were the pinacle of rocket technology. The Russians had earlier engines which re-used the turbopump exhausts (the US are using them today)

The SSRB's were reusable, some segments were reused seven times.
But the first stage of a rocket doesn't have to be that efficient, it's not like the other stages where each Kg saved will result in cumulative just savings. The cost and weight penalties of making stage one reusable don't justify themselves beyond maybe giving the rocket motors parachutes.


You have to remember that we live in an age where Google cars are licensed to drive on public roads in parts of the USA. Where UAV's can take off , fly missions and land themselves when flown by army privates. (airforce pilots have crashed them on landing)

Does the ISS have a 3D printer ?

We have automated supply vessels

Sample return is easy enough - the 1950's technology corona spy satellites film was recovered by aircraft.

Humans require a lot of life support and safe systems.

An ISS built for robots / using remote control wouldn't have to be built to the same standards and could be a lot cheaper.



A big question is - for the same money could we have found / made tunnels on the moon for a base ?
Oxygen can be liberated on the moon with a temperature of 2500c - so possibility of a large component of rocket fuel there

How much would a one way trip to Mars cost ?

Dennis Tito is hoping to do the 2018 flyby mission for only 1 billion.

nokia69

Victor wrote: »

Hundreds of billions.

There are distinct logistical problems, aside from the distance and travel time.

As you may be on the far side of the sun from Earth, you will need a doctor. However, that doctor may fall ill, so you will need a second doctor. While the doctors will be able to do other things, you are still looking at a crew of 4-6. If you have an orbiter-lander split, the crew might be as much as 8.

Now if you are going to travel for a year there and travel for a year coming back, you might as well spend at least several months there. That is a lot of food, water and other supplies. They would really need to finesse the fuel-water-air system to allow a lot of it to be reused.

All that means using a space station to assemble the supplies.

Hundreds of billions, total madness, maybe if NASA are behind the plan, but they won't be the ones to do it

a simple mission to mars could be done for less than 10 billion, easy

and BTW with solar electric propulsion the trip to Mars and back can be made in months not years

there is no new technology needed it has all been developed and is ready to go

http://www.gizmag.com/improved-ion-engines-jet-propulsion-laboratory-erosion-lifetime/26323/

Capt'n Midnight

nokia69 wrote: »

and BTW with solar electric propulsion the trip to Mars and back can be made in months not years

there is no new technology needed it has all been developed and is ready to go

Forget VASMIR it's another timesink
http://www.marssociety.org/home/press/tms-in-the-news/thevasimrhoax

No electric propulsion system — neither the inferior VASIMR nor its superior ion-drive competitors — can achieve a quick transit to Mars, because the thrust-to-weight ratio of any realistic power system (even without a payload) is much too low. If generous but potentially realistic numbers are assumed (50 watts per kilogram), Chang Diaz’s hypothetical 200,000-kilowatt nuclear electric spaceship would have a launch mass of 7,700 metric tons, including 4,000 tons of very expensive and very radioactive high-technology reactor system hardware requiring maintenance support from a virtual parallel universe of futuristic orbital infrastructure. Yet it would still get to Mars no quicker than the 6-month transit executed by the Mars Odyssey spacecraft using chemical propulsion in 2001, and which could be readily accomplished by a human crew launched directly to Mars by a heavy-lift booster no more advanced than the (140-ton-to-orbit) Saturn 5 employed to send astronauts to the Moon in the 1960s.

Hall Effect Thrusters work but it suffers from "not invented here"

Over 200 Hall thrusters have been flown on Soviet/Russian satellites in the past thirty years. No failures have ever occurred on orbit

nokia69

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

Forget VASMIR it's another timesink
http://www.marssociety.org/home/press/tms-in-the-news/thevasimrhoax

Hall Effect Thrusters work but it suffers from "not invented here"

VASMIR is still being worked on, I was thinking of solar powered ion drives

Capt'n Midnight

nokia69 wrote: »

VASMIR is still being worked on

If I have a choice of two technologies one of which has been flight proven over 200 times during the 30 years the other has been in development there are no prizes for guessing which one I'd pick. Especially since the first crowd have a long history of making more robust kit at a tenth of the price.

I was thinking of solar powered ion drives

solar panels are just getting better all the time , all you need are some mylar mirrors to get an even better power to weight ratio

SMART-1 spiraled to the moon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMART-1

Its launch mass was 367 kg or 809 pounds, of which 287 kg (633 lb) was non-propellant.
...
The electric propulsion subsystem had a weight of 29 kg with a peak power consumption of 1,200 watts.
...
The solar arrays made 1,190 W available for powering the thruster, giving a nominal thrust of 68 mN, hence an acceleration of 0.2 mm/s² or 0.7 m/s per hour (i.e., just under 0.00002 g of acceleration).
...
Xenon throughput: 82 kg
Total Impulse: 1.1 MN-s
Total ΔV: 3.9 km/s

Yes impulse up to 8000 have been obtained
Yes you could use more fuel
Yes on a one way trip you could use aerobraking

But in this case 10% of the mass was motor and fuel was nearly 30% of the payload mass.

and it took 13 months to get to the moon :pac:

But you are going to need shielding anyway so food isn't really dead weight.

Squeaky the Squirrel

501 Day round trip, short due to planet allignments, 2 crew, married man and woman, multiple ship options, not locked down yet, waterwalls as in they're full of water at launch and are slowly filled with dried poo which will act to block radiation. Gonna grow edible algae to deal with carbon dioxide.

Has launch date booked jan 5 2018 or they'll have to wait til 2031 (i think) for reallignment.

On phone. No linking. Boo.

Capt'n Midnight

Squeaky the Squirrel wrote: »

501 Day round trip, short due to planet allignments, 2 crew

Skylab was occupied for 510 man days and had a lot of resources left over, it was also in orbit quite a while. It could have done this or the Venus flyby mission with a bit more thrust.

http://www.astronautix.com/articles/skyyfate.htm

The enthusiasts were those who had worked on Skylab and were quite proud of it, but it interfered with the more global vision of glory shared by the later generation at NASA." Given a risky cheap way and an expensive fancy way, NASA (not for the first or last time) opted for spending a lot of money in the future rather than a little money immediately

The main difference between manned launches now and the 1950's is that the Chinese now have a manned launcher.

The EU has access to the Russian launchers and the USA will have to wait a while before any of their competing systems is reliable enough to fly humans.

AFAIK the Chinese are working on/have managed the Russian trick of reusing the turbopump exhaust.


And another indication of the waste of money

Perhaps the most damning argument against Skylab was something any real estate agent can appreciate: location. The high-inclination orbit (tilted 50 degrees from the plane of the equator) was not convenient for shuttle missions. To reach Skylab, a shuttle would have to be launched more to the north than usual, sacrificing some of the boost offered by Earth's eastward spin. That wasn't a major penalty for expendable spacecraft and boosters (about 10 percent of maximum payload weight), but because the shuttle carries its heavy wings and engines back to Earth, the weight sacrifices would have to come from the payload. (To avoid this unacceptable loss, Freedom is to be built in an easterly orbit from Florida, with an inclination of 28 degrees.) (NOTE ADDED IN 1999: Now isn't this ironic, that in the end we chose to build the International Space Station at an even higher inclination, 52 degrees, in order to make it accessible to the Russians, and we wound up paying the performance penalty anyway).

MMAGirl

Its a waste of money in the same way the wright bros wasted money.

Capt'n Midnight

MMAGirl wrote: »

Its a waste of money in the same way the wright bros wasted money.

a better comparison would be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Pierpont_Langley#Aviation_work
You can see lots of parallels, big wads of money even though the Wrights were getting their gliders working for a fraction of the cost , reliance on subcontractors getting stuff right, throwaway craft (cf. the recent hypersonic waveriders), lots of extra gear needed for launching - compare the saturn crawler and dedicated barges for SRB recovery with Soyuz on a train and it's supporting arms held by the weight of the space craft itself (on liftoff the arms pivot away)

In 1898, based on the success of his models, Langley received a War Department grant of $50,000 and $20,000 from the Smithsonian to develop a piloted airplane, which he called an "Aerodrome" (coined from Greek words roughly translated as "air runner"). Langley hired Charles M. Manly (1876–1927) as engineer and test pilot. When Langley received word from his friend Octave Chanute of the Wright brothers' success with their 1902 glider, he attempted to meet the Wrights, but they politely evaded his request.

While the full-scale Aerodrome was being designed and built, the internal combustion engine was contracted out to manufacturer Stephen Balzer (1864–1940). When he failed to produce an engine to the power and weight specifications, Manly finished the design. This engine had far more power than did the engine for the Wright brothers' first airplane—50 hp compared to 12 hp. The engine, mostly the technical work of men other than Langley, was probably the project's main contribution to aviation.[6] The piloted machine had wire-braced tandem wings (one behind the other). It had a Pénaud tail for pitch and yaw control but no roll control, depending instead on the dihedral angle of the wings, as did the models, for maintaining roughly level flight.
Langley, right, with protegé Charles Manly.

In contrast to the Wright brothers' design of a controllable airplane that could fly against a strong wind and land on solid ground, Langley sought safety by practicing in calm air over the Potomac River. This required a catapult for launching. The craft had no landing gear, the plan being to descend into the water after demonstrating flight which if successful would entail a partial, if not total, rebuilding of the machine. Langley gave up the project after two crashes on take-off on October 7 and December 8, 1903.