The mentioning of most people today not knowing one astronaut’s name on the ISS brings something to mind as well.
How many people know the names of the men that were in the Trieste when it accomplished it’s historic dive to Challenger Deep? How many know the names of those in the deep sea submerisibles that explore the mysteries of the ocean? Who could name those that are at work at the LHC?

The point is, space exploration shouldn’t be about popularity. It’s extra, to be sure, but it shouldn’t be the driving force behind what projects take place. It shouldn’t even be an issue at all. Yet, it seems to me that people do make it to be one.

As for the other stuff, well, it’s the price we pay, isn’t it? Still worth every penny.

On the smaller issue, I believe this mission will double the available power for science experiments, so enable work for the 6 rotation crew members in May?!

@ Robert:

While Agatha is a spunky spark (and has a lovely hair!), she hasn’t lofted anything into orbit. Yet.

[Hmm. I guess "Spunky Spark" isn't as catching as "Girl Genius". And while a spark can twist 5 physical laws and as many arms before breakfast, I assume "genius" is as close as you can get.]

My entire beef with it is that it isn’t driven by science and we get very little from it compared to what we get from robots and space telescopes, etc.

everything we could get by robotic probes only is just an insignificant fraction of what we could get if we became a truly space faring species.
Robots are a blind alley. We should not take that route just because it is the easier one right now.

This link references world wheat, rice and corn production for 2007:

http://nue.okstate.edu/Crop_Information/World_Wheat_Production.htm

Following is my back of the envelope calculation:

A rotating ring, 10 km in diameter by 10 km in length, divided into 500 concentric rings, each 10 meters apart has a surface area of about 19,625 km^2 or 7,850,000 acres(at approx. 400 acres/km^2) which could grow, with only two crops/year and 45 bushels/acre about 706 million bushels of wheat, which is currently 32% of the worlds wheat production, with NO pesticides required. That could increase by 50% if hydroponically forcing to three crops/year.

At least 32 %(of current world production) for a single wheat colony and all that needs to be returned to a starving population is the refined grain.

Granted, we are currently unable to capture asteroids and use them for construction material, we don’t know if wheat CAN be grown under such conditions, we don’t know if production could be increased beyond 45 bushels/acre/crop (here I am referencing a wheat farmer I knew in Montana in the ’70s) but constructing such habitats is possible with current technology.

(We may even be able to gene engineer wheat to spend less of its metabolic energy growing lignin and focus more on seed production. Thus the ring may have only minimal rotational stress)
At $ 4.50/bushel times 706 million bushels that’s about $ 3 billion/year in gross sales and the (filled) delivery system only needs to go downhill.

Anyway, those are minimum numbers. I expect they could only go up,,,but first we need knowledge of biological performance in low G environments and cheaper launch tech.

The ISS may return such bio data. The launch tech is still up for grabs,,,

Gary 7

But using space smartly can tell extraordinary things about the universe. Dark energy, dark matter, The Big Bang – space-based telescopes contribute immensely to these studies (and obviously way more) I think we would all agree. So let’s build more of them! Let’s have another Hubble, another gamma scope, another…..whatever – to launch right after Webb goes up. I think that 95% of people that read this blog would like the idea of more money going to astronomy and more telescopes in space.

So how do we fund that? Realistically, cut the manned program as much as possible to re-direct money and time to much more worthwhile projects. It’s all about finding the most kick out of a dollar. And a dollar going to the ISS is a just a sad waste compared to what it could be doing.

I’m sorry but I don’t think that NASA has justified the ISS, has managed it well, or has a good idea of what to do with it in the future (for Pete’s sake, we aren’t even going to have our own access to it soon but will have to rely on the Ruskies. Who I am quite certain are going to try to renegotiate launch fees once the shuttle is gone and they hold all the cards. NASA management gets a truckload of The Stupid delivered to their doors for that fact alone).

And I can’t even imagine where we will be if the Russians lose a Soyuz or the station gets hit by orbital debris one of these years. Unlikely (thank goodness) but we have a lot of eggs in one basket up there. It’s not smart. Unmanned missions have proven track record of doing amazing work. They should be the focus. Judging by NASA’s budget they clearly are of secondary importance.

My entire beef with it is that it isn’t driven by science and we get very little from it compared to what we get from robots and space telescopes, etc.

NASA isn’t going to find the answer to anything truly fundamental by launching people up into an orbiting outpost in LEO. If we re-directed that money and time of the engineers we could have three or four times as many probes going out into the solar system and telescopes looking out to the universe. We could speed up the schedule of sample return missions and do some really kick butt science.

Goodness let’s at least fund another OCO. That’s really important science as one example.

We need to know how humans and other critters react to micro gravity environments and the ONLY way to learn that is in a micro-G environment. Someday we will be growing food in space(because viable land is no longer available on earth). How will that environment affect such production?
Can we sustain mono-cultured, hydroponically grown plants in orbit? Will it be cost effective to return food to earth?
What resources can we acquire and return in a cost effective manner? Can humans and other critters even reproduce in a micro-G environment?
Are we stuck on this old ball of mud,,,forever(or until we eat every other life form to extinction)?

Investment in space colonization is driven by available resources. Too few and the cost becomes prohibitive. Too many and people loose any incentive to acquire more.

The oceans are rising. Billions will be adversely affected. Resources are declining. Hunger will be a specter on the land. MAke the highway to the high frontier cost effective and many will rise to the challenge. Those who do will become filthy rich. So rich that saving earths myriad species will be child’s play.

Do it now, before it becomes impossible to do,,,(see Macro Scope by Piers Anthony)

GAry 7

Nope. People wanted it spent on solving problems here on Earth. They got bored of space because NASA made it look simple. It didn’t help that Apollo 11′s TV was ghosty, Apollo 12′s TV was ruined a couple of minutes into the first moonwalk and Apollo 13 didn’t even land on the Moon. By the time Apollo was providing good TV coverage, the public had already lost interest.

“I am more inclined to think that no one really wanted the nasa to give up moon besides republican politicians with their deeply anti-science agenda.”

You can think what you like, but if you read the newspapers of the day, it’s clear that ordinary people were happy to see government money diverted from NASA to social welfare and similar programs. Nixon himself seems to have wanted to cut spending as much as possible to help cover the cost of the Vietnam War.

As for Republicans being the only anti-science people, remember that NASA’s most vocal critic in Congress was Democrat Walter Mondale.

“No money and no directive. Public support for manned missions to the Moon evaporated after Apollo 11. With little public support, it was easy for President Nixon and Congress to cut NASA’s budget. Without the money and the directive, NASA could do nothing.”

The real reason is that NASA was too honest in 1969. All they had to do was fudge things a little and tell people that the Moon had cold beer on tap and naked moon chicks serving it. Guaranteed they would have stopped the Vietnam War and funded NASA for the next 40 years. But nooooooooooo, NASA has to be all honest and stuff. Thanks for nothing NASA!

ordinary people began to ask why NASA kept going back to the Moon – after all, NASA had met Kennedy’s challenge, so why not put the money to some other use?

I would bet that the other use they meant was something like permanent colony/ mars mission, not the thing nixon used it at.
I am more inclined to think that no one really wanted the nasa to give up moon besides republican politicians with their deeply anti-science agenda.

(Speaking of death rays, isn’t [Girl Genius] – Agatha Heterodyne – getting interesting?)

I came in late, is Miles O’Brien the character from Star Trek? So how does that work?

A bit of both, probably. Yes, I probably over-simplified things in my previous post.

NASA apparently got a lot of its Apollo funding in the 1960s thanks to the fact that NASA Administrator Jim Webb knew the details of a lot of Congressmen’s skeletons in closets. This lobbying technique presumably only had a limited lifespan. So there were plenty of people in Congress who were happy to cut NASA’s funding.

But on top of that, after Apollo 11, ordinary people began to ask why NASA kept going back to the Moon – after all, NASA had met Kennedy’s challenge, so why not put the money to some other use? When Congressmen heard talk like that, they could see there wouldn’t be much of a backlash against their own plans.

On top of that, Nixon was happy to gut a program which was the brainchild of his Democrat opponents.

ISS = Just lots of practice.

I hope Obama has the stones to appoint somebody in charge of NASA that has the guts and the vision to change the direction of the agency. Somebody who can stop this insipidly stupid circular logic they are locked into right now with the ISS and putting people up there in it. Let’s let real science and exploration guide us moving forward.

Indeed. There is much to be learned and to be gained for the good of humanity in exploring the solar system… and beyond. And it would probably surprise many in here to know that I genuinely wish the ISS and the Shuttle and various other forms of manned space flight were doing more. Were capable of doing more. But it just isn’t happening. And it’s not simple, straight-up cost that is the problem. Some things cost a lot of freakin’ money… no problem. Really. But what are we getting in return? With the ISS and the Shuttle, not a great deal.

To senethior 459…

Yes, the Shuttle and ISS have great entertainment value. But compared to most all other space endeavors that’s about it.

And @ all the others who keep referencing the link provided earlier and think they’ve found some grand argument stopping information… please. I have looked at all that before. Many times. Big deal.

How many of those “experiments” could not have been done here on earth? How many were for anything other than perpetuating an already outdated manned program? What did we learn beyond the obvious or beyond what could have been learned without wasting roughly 400 million dollars per launch? In my view, it’s all pretty ridiculous.

The ISS isn’t about science. Even the National Academy of Science says that the ISS “is no better than Skylab”. Phil Plait said “NASA has a space station which is doing precious little if no science at all.”.

Popular Mechanics made the quip that in terms of scientific discovery we could have chosen to create one million new PhD’s working on science on Earth instead of building the ISS (this was back when the ISS “only” wasted $100 frakkin’ billion). Of their list of the 10 most important missions undergone by NASA all of them were robotic except for Apollo.

Everybody knows the Hubble and Mars rovers. Virtually nobody knows the name of a single astronaut because they aren’t doing anything in low earth orbit except waste money that could have been invested in much more brilliant missions that could actually discover new wonders of this extraordinary universe.

Let’s give Steve Squyres and Carolyn Porco “genius” grants to come up with the next round of amazing missions (their track records are amazing). Let’s get the money from culling back on the floating turkey in the sky.

No money and no directive. Public support for manned missions to the Moon evaporated after Apollo 11. With little public support, it was easy for President Nixon and Congress to cut NASA’s budget. Without the money and the directive, NASA could do nothing.

Carl Sagan in the 1990′s expressed his boredom with the shuttle .

mk asked: “And precisely what good comes from this mission?”

Installation of a final set of solar panels for generating electricity, and the installation of a device to convert urine into drinking water. So, by the sounds of it, nothing directly. Instead it’s a mission which improves the endurance of the ISS.

“As I read it this only highlights the things they plan to do to keep astronauts alive and well and keep the ISS aloft so that it can receive more astronauts so that they too can add nifty new stuff so they can keep the ISS aloft to receive more astronauts so that they too can add more stuff so that… etc.”

That’s it at the moment, but not so on ad infinitum. The ISS is close to completion, and soon to be in a position to really ramp up the science. Having said that, it’ll be interesting to see whether the value of the science performed is considered to have repaid the cost of the ISS.

“From the Apollo program to today, manned space fight has fallen remarkably short of anything resembling what we’ve learned from robots and probes.”

I’ll disagree with you here. I think the Apollo missions answered the question of the Moon’s origin far more efficiently than unmanned spacecraft could have – particularly that astronauts could be trained to look for particular rocks which helped resolve aspects of the Moon’s geology. Likewise the Mercury and Gemini projects added considerably to our knowledge of space.

Having said that, there’s no doubt that unmanned spacecraft are much cheaper than manned spacecraft, and the repercussions of something going wrong are somewhat less. There are good reasons why many planetary scientists bemoan the idea of sending humans off the planet.

Senethior459 said: “How is the ISS a waste? It’s the ISS! Many people have heard of it…far more than have heard of Cassini/Huygens. It inspires lots of people to get into scientific professions, or to just take an interest in the sky, astronomy, and space! Even if no major scientific accomplishments are made, it’s still a huge inspiration to people all over…Also, every second that humans are living in the ISS, research is being conducted. We’re seeing the physiological effects of living in free-fall, and the psychological effects of living in effectively a small metal box surrounded by an extremely hostile environment, with no practical way of being rescued quickly if something goes wrong.”

With respect, these are fairly trifling returns on the cost of the ISS. With regards to inspiration, is there any clear evidence to back this claim? And with regards to the physiological effects of living long-term in free-fall, what will the ISS teach us that hasn’t already been learned from the various Salyut, Skylab and Mir space stations?

From NASA:

Expedition 20 Dock Date: Undock Date:

3D-Space (Mental Representation of Spatial Cues During Space Flight)
AgCam (Agricultural Camera)
ANDE-2 (Atmospheric Neutral Density Experiment – 2)
BCAT-3-4-CP (Binary Colloidal Alloy Test – 3 and 4: Critical Point)
BCAT-4-Poly (Binodal Colloidal Aggregation Test – 4: Polydispersion)
BCAT-5-3D-Melt (Binary Colloidal Alloy Test – 5: Three-Dimensional Melt)
BCAT-5-Compete (Binary Colloidal Alloy Test – 5: Compete)
BCAT-5-PhaseSep (Binary Colloidal Alloy Test-5: Phase Separation)
BCAT-5-SeededGrowth (Binary Colloidal Alloy Test – 5: Seeded Growth )
Bisphosphonates (Bisphosphonates as a Countermeasure to Space Flight Induced Bone Loss)
Cambium (Cambium)
CCISS (Cardiovascular and Cerebrovascular Control on Return from ISS)
CEO (Crew Earth Observations)
CSI-03 (Commercial Generic Bioprocessing Apparatus Science Insert – 03)
DEBIE-2 (DEBris In Orbit Evaluator – 2)
DOSTEL (DOSimetry TELescopes)
DRAGONSat (Dual RF Astrodynamic GPS Orbital Navigator Satellite)
EarthKAM (Earth Knowledge Acquired by Middle School Students)
Energy (Astronaut’s Energy Requirements for Long-Term Space Flight)
ENose (JPL Electronic Nose)
Environmental_Monitoring (Environmental Monitoring of the International Space Station)
EPO-Demos (Education Payload Operation – Demonstrations)
EPO-Kit_D (Education Payload Operation – Kit D)
EuTemp (EuTEF Thermometer)
Expose (Exposure Experiment)
FASES (Fundamental and Applied Studies of Emulsion Stability)
FIPEX (Flux (Phi) Probe EXperiment – Time resolved Measurement of Atomic Oxygen)
Genara (Gravity Related Genes in Arabidopsis)
Gravi (Threshold Acceleration for Gravisensing)
HQPC (High Quality Protein Crystallization Experiment Onboard JEM)
HREP-HICO (HICO and RAIDS Experiment Payload – Hyperspectral Imager for the Coastal Ocean)
HREP-RAIDS (HICO and RAIDS Experiment Payload – Remote Atmospheric and Ionospheric Detection System (RAIDS))
Immuno (Neuroendocrine and Immune Responses in Humans During and After Long Term Stay at ISS)
Inflight_Education_Downlinks (International Space Station Inflight Education Downlinks)
InSPACE-2 (Investigating the Structure of Paramagnetic Aggregates from Colloidal Emulsions – 2)
Integrated_Cardiovascular (Cardiac Atrophy and Diastolic Dysfunction During and After Long Duration Spaceflight: Functional Consequences for Orthostatic Intolerance, Exercise Capability and Risk for Cardiac Arrhythmias)
Integrated_Immune (Validation of Procedures for Monitoring Crewmember Immune Function )
Integrated_Immune-SDBI (Validation of Procedures for Monitoring Crewmember Immune Function – Short Duration Biological Investigation)
ISS_Acoustics (International Space Station Acoustic Measurement Program)
JAXA-EPO (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency – Education Payload Observation)
JAXA-HDTV (Activation and Test Downlink of HDTV System)
Lada-VPU-P3R (Validating Vegetable Production Unit (VPU) Plants, Protocols, Procedures and Requirements (P3R) Using Currently Existing Flight Resources)
MAMS (Microgravity Acceleration Measurement System)
Marangoni (Chaos, Turbulence and its Transition Process in Marangoni Convection)
MAUI (Maui Analysis of Upper Atmospheric Injections)
MDCA-FLEX (Multi-User Droplet Combustion Apparatus – Flame Extinguishment Experiment)
MISSE-6A_and_6B (Materials International Space Station Experiment – 6A and 6B)
MOP (Motion Perception: Vestibular Adaptation to G-Transitions)
MSL-CETSOL_and_MICAST (Materials Science Laboratory – Columnar-to-Equiaxed Transition in Solidification Processing and Microstructure Formation in Casting of Technical Alloys under Diffusive and Magnetically Controlled Convective Conditions)
Mus (Study of Low Back Pain in Crewmembers During Space Flight)
Nutrition (Nutritional Status Assessment)
Otolith (Otolith Assessment During Postflight Re-adaptation)
PADIAC (PAthway DIfferent ACtivators)
Repository (National Aeronautics and Space Administration Biological Specimen Repository)
SAMS-II (Space Acceleration Measurement System-II)
SEITE (Shuttle Exhaust Ion Turbulence Experiments)
SIMPLEX (Shuttle Ionospheric Modification with Pulsed Localized Exhaust Experiments)
Sleep-Long (Sleep-Wake Actigraphy and Light Exposure During Spaceflight-Long)
Sleep-Short (Sleep-Wake Actigraphy and Light Exposure During Spaceflight-Short)
SNFM (Serial Network Flow Monitor)
SOLACES (SOLar Auto-Calibrating EUV/UV Spectrophotometers)
SOLO (SOdium LOading in Microgravity)
SOLSPEC (SOLar SPECtral Irradiance Measurements )
SOVIM (SOlar Variable and Irradiance Monitor)
SpaceDRUMS (Space-Dynamically Responding Ultrasonic Matrix System)
SPHERES (Synchronized Position Hold, Engage, Reorient, Experimental Satellites)
SPICE (Smoke Point In Co-flow Experiment)
Spin (Validation of Centrifugation as a Countermeasure for Otolith Deconditioning During Spaceflight)
Spinal_Elongation (Spinal Elongation and its Effects on Seated Height in a Microgravity Environment)
SWAB (Surface, Water and Air Biocharacterization – A Comprehensive Characterization of Microorganisms and Allergens in Spacecraft Environment)
TAGES (Transgenic Arabidopsis Gene Expression System)
TriboLab (Tribology Laboratory)
VCAM (Vehicle Cabin Atmosphere Monitor)
Visual_Performance (Human Factors Assessment of Vibration Effects on Visual Performance During Launch)
VO2max (Evaluation of Maximal Oxygen Uptake and Submaximal Estimates of VO2max Before, During, and After Long Duration International Space Station Missions)
Zag (Ambiguous Tilt and Translation Motion Cues After Space Flight)

GAry 7