Question Usefulness of the ISS (and other space stations) for humanity

[Star Voyager]

No we don't !

 

[T.Neo]

Everyone forgets Canada.

I was going by the people who have spacecraft that fly to the ISS, but at least the Canadians have a nifty robot arm. :lol:

 

[Aaron Boyer]

the ISS IS a reduced size. This is one of the potential designs back from the early 80's:

The power tower was my personal favorite.

I still don't understand the complaints behind the module configurations...

IMC Station-1984
This McDonnell-Douglas illustration shows a "Power Tower" Space Station crew module. The original modules were 10.7 meters long with docking ports in both ends. They would have been assembled end-to-end in a racetrack-like configuration. Some engineers felt this could have created dangerous dead-ends inside the Station if a module had to be depressurised.
Credit: NASA via Marcus Lindroos

Logically, I would assume the opposite to be true of a space station in a "racetrack-like" configuration. If a module were to be depressurized on the power tower, true it would create a dead end that would demand one to have to traverse the entire complex to reach the other side, but the crew would still have access to their spacecraft from any point in the complex due to the redundant design. Not only that, but let's say a module on the ISS such as Destiny were to become depressurized and sealed off--it would essentially divide the station in half, whereas any one module in the power tower station would only limit accessibility to that particular module.

http://www.astronautix.com/craft/pown1984.htm



Concerning the topic, the ISS is still a beautiful station despite its reduction in size and seemingly-impractical configuration. I see it more as a testimony to what we're capable of doing, with the construction itself and international cooperation model as the main "experiment" while the ability to conduct research on board is a spillover benefit, regardless of its significance. Even the engineering that was involved in something that appears to be as simple such as connecting and wiring Unity to Zarya is insane. The station is a wonderful testbed for life support, docking, and power operations, and a vast improvement over Mir. The knowledge gained by constructing and maintaining such a station is invaluable to future operations beyond LEO.

Faulty systems are acknowledged and corrected upon, and technology improves from station to station. For example, compare the airlocks of Mir and the ISS. The airlock on Mir's Kvant-2 module had a hatch that resulted in many problems when they would re-pressurize the airlock after spacewalks because internal pressure put strain on the hatch, which caused recurring leaks and sealing problems. The Quest, Pirs, and Poisk airlocks on the ISS are vast improvements over Kvant-2's airlock, due in part to the knowledge gained from past engineering flaws. The hatches were designed in ways that seal and maintain pressure better than previous airlocks--though I'm sure whatever comes next will be an improvement over those. One good, but unexpected benefit that came out of the ISS was the transhab concept, which was developed as a replacement for the habitation module, then later scrapped to be utilized by Bigelow Aerospace to evolve into the next generation of manned space station modules. I could list countless other improvements and innovations that resulted from or will result from the ISS to enhance manned spaceflight. We'll most likely be seeing these improvements in future space stations, due in part to faulty and impractical technology that may be acknowledged in the 22+ years of operating the ISS. To me, the ISS is 100 billion dollars well spent.

 

[T.Neo]

Ok, improvements in EVA airlock hatches. That's a good development. Never met someone who has ever used an EVA hatch though... :shifty:


I don't know why "taking a circuitous route in the event of a failure" would be the reason to deselect the 'racetrack' configuration- especially since if you have a 4-module racetrack, the 'circuitous route' is not much longer than that you would need to take through some ISS modules today. Certainly preferable to losing entire modules of the station that are undamaged.

Obviously the risk of module depressurisation was not deemed to be that much of a problem, and other issues (mass, berthing, etc) made the 'racetrack' unattractive.

 

[Orbinaut Pete]

Ok, improvements in EVA airlock hatches. That's a good development. Never met someone who has ever used an EVA hatch though... :shifty:

Which must mean that such people obviously don't exist?

 

[T.Neo]

No, it means they're an elite group who make up a very small fraction of the population.

 

[RisingFury]

It looks even more expensive than the current ISS today..

You must have a Nobel prize in economy if you can tell the price of a space station by looking at an artist's conception.

:facepalm:

 

[fireballs619]

I will knock research without any applications whatsoever.

Sorry to bring the conversation back to this but...

Isn't that basically ALL of pure science?

 

[T.Neo]

Not really. You get things that are immediately useful, things that are on the fringes of being heavily useful or could have future applications, and then more-or-less pure trivia.

 

[Artlav]

Not really. You get things that are immediately useful, things that are on the fringes of being heavily useful or could have future applications, and then more-or-less pure trivia.

And when is it ever obvious what research would be useful?
In the disease-ridden first part of 19th century people would have been outraged to find out that instead of being spent on feeding the poor lots of money are spent on looking at tiny things through a set of lenses. Totally useless research... Except that it suddenly discovered germs, and medical death rates dropped dramatically because everyone realized they need to wash their hands between going to a toilet and taking births.

You never know what you'll find - some tiny trivia found by growing chickens in microgravity may suddenly explain how to stop cancer cells from growing, or something quite as good.

 

[Keatah]

The short version: NASA(and its funding govt) is apathy laden, has no direction, and too many PowerPoint spacecraft.

The long version:
I seem to recall back in the 70's that the idea of a space station was to encompass some sort of manufacturing on a regular basis. This was in the pre-Alpha and pre-Freedom days.

There was a lot of talk about growing exotic crystals and mixing alloys that would be impossible to fabricate on Earth. It was manufacturing and research. Manufacturing on a commercial scale and research that was directly applicable to real-life problems. Medicine and metal alloys were always bandied about. Lesser known proposed uses would be for reconnaissance & space-based laser defense. And even lesser was space tourism. The whole space tourism thing had its own movement and was centered around L5 colonies and O'Neil Cylinders and that Stanford Torus contraption. That's a topic for a whole'nuther thread.

That didn't work for two main reasons.
1-The cost per pound of getting materials to and from the station. Not to mention the small quantities that could be bought back compared to modern industrial volume requirements. Totally uneconomical!
2-The unforeseen explosion in computing power. This allows scientists to model material and element behavior with unprecedented accuracy. Eliminating, for the most part, the need for astronauts to do that kind of science in zero-G.

But anyways, it would seem there isn't a need for a space station today. As much as I like science and everything that tags along: If I was doing the budget I'd have axed the station years ago. I'd have put that money into genuine research right here on the ground. And massively increased the un-manned program funding. Having 4 Mars rovers going, for example. And having some Jovian satellite landers going. Not to mention a Titan floater(a boat) and a Neptune orbiter. With money set aside for follow-up missions. And even more money for education fixing America's public schools - damn that system is totally shattered and broken - a shame. The topic of broken schools is for another thread.

I do like the current idea of asteroid exploration, orbiters and surface probes and stuff like that. And it's easy to visit multiple asteroids with one craft as evidenced by Dawn, and the up and coming Rosetta(cruise phase now). New Horizons looks good too, hopefully they can swing it past some Oort Cloud debris.

But, again, under *MY* space program, each of the nine planets(don't argue with me on this one either), NINE PLANETS, nine planets and their major moons, would have had 2 orbiters and at least one lander, floater, or flyer; for each body.

Meanwhile, we could stay safely on Earth, accumulating this technology, building a comprehensive knowledge base - advanced energy sources, better management software, better materials, new methods and practices of putting it all together, reliably and repetitively.

All the information we collected would be collectively pooled and even more research done. I figured this would take 30-60 billion dollars.

Meantime while all this is going on we could be designing several manned spacecraft, have them versatile and mission adaptable to either inner or outer planets, asteroids, moons, etc.. There would be a nice big timeframe to test everything, and re-hash a design over and over till it worked. We could spend 20 billion on that, and have things ready to go once all the data from the unmanned probes came in as was digested.

Go?? ?? Go where? That's my point. I believe that with all information we have, it would turn out that the asteroids are the best spot for manned exploration. Especially considering the limited capability of our craft.

And you know what? It is still less costly than having spent +100 billion on taking pictures of bugs and growing plants. Because that's what's effectively happening on the ISS. They aren't doing anything that's exciting or worthwhile except to maybe a few principal investigators.

We could have, should have, still can, positively focus efforts the right way. And the first thing is to critically examine these budget-busting & time wasting PowerPoint spacecraft. It's excellent to submit proposals, and even more important to submit a lot of them. How else are we going to get ideas on the table? But the problem comes when we dedicate physical resources and thousands upon thousands of man hours to a project, get it half-way complete. Then just cancel it at political whim or some idiot desk jockey saying it won't work. I don't believe we really need to go that far, 5 or 10 years into a program for basic feasibility studies? Ha!! That can be done in a year's time - especially with today's computer modeling capability and worldwide teleconferencing(to use an old term). These PowerPoint spacecraft need more critical analysis right off the bat at their introduction.

But let us not forget that the whole of the "space program", as we know it, started hundreds of years ago. Perhaps thousands - depending how you want to view it. The desire to explore and learn and go there is as old as man & woman. However, it was WWII and Clarke's idea of a satellite in conjunction with the Soviet Sputnik event that lead to the space race of the 60's. Not to mention space-based weaponry and ICBM's stemming from concepts explored within the V-2 program. We only went to the moon because of competition and POLITICAL FEAR, little else. Actions driven by fear are often short lived and rarely self-sustaining; till the motivating fear returns. The space program(especially the manned portion) of the 80's and all thereafter is a result of mis-placed motivations and apathetic half-assed attempts hidden behind inflated promises of profit and good-will. Not forgetting the often downplayed one-upmanship institution; however even this is fading too. Currently the "space program" is - Directionless! Un-energetic! Bogged-down! And literally going in circles 200 clicks up. Folks, the space program has been coasting on waning motivation since the Apollo 11 landing and subsequent splashdown.

The case for a manned Mars mission? Or going to the moon again? Would you prefer a one shot mission in 5 years, at great expenditure? Or would you prefer to colonize the place in 75 years? Think about that! Let us build the technologies and techniques as well as finding the reason for going there. THEN, we do it! Because without those key items in place, well, we'd have another Apollo 11 on our hands. And that isn't good enough.

Folks often talk about Lunar Colonies, Mars missions, battles in space like Star Wars, journeying to other star systems, missions to comets and asteroids, etc.. FIRST, absolutely FIRST, let us get the basics down. Keep that gained knowledge and be ready to apply it. This can go as far back and deep as correct parenting at home and good schooling. This has to happen for the majority, not just a select few. Lest those "select few" be constantly held back unwittingly by their fellow peers. The world, in my humble opinion, is too distracted by social media, Hollywood television stars, the latest celebrity gossip, petty bickering, and so on and so forth. If *you*, specifically *you*, say it is in our nature - then so be it. I won't argue with you on that. But those distractions are too prevalent throughout society in general and totally non-conducive to an advanced spacefaring civilization. Our society needs a black hole for a landfill, what with all its political and religious and undisciplined "thought garbage" and everything. Humanity is pretty pathetic when you look at it that way.

And let us observe the firing of thousands of shuttle workers and contractors. These are the folks that were the backbone of the space program for the last 30 years. And we just threw all that collective knowledge away, gone, done and done with! The people we will hire (if ever) will need to go through the entire process of relearning everything from the beginning! They'll make many of the same mistakes that were made in the shuttle program and prior programs. These mistakes will snowball; taking a $100,000 PowerPoint spacecraft through some mockups and test flights; ballooning along the way to an Americanized fat-ass 20 billion-dollar "program" that gets canceled after the second prototype is constructed. Ha! The people we hire, well, we'll be lucky, damned lucky, if they are able to comprehend anything technical! ..Let alone the previous documentation of how the shuttle actually worked. There is little provision for knowledge retention and continuity. Good GOD!!!

So, put me in charge of NASA and funding and I'll show you how things should be done. If I can't do it then let me assure you that no one else can either. Not even the most ardent commercial startup stands a chance until the basics are in place. You might not like it much at first, but the result would be, in young-person-vernacular " KICK ASS!" You'll never know what would happen next, but it will happen, It might sound boring with the initial focus on science and unmanned stuff. But that's the basics buddy. You better get me in office soon..

..Because right now, the US govt. and NASA managers are pretty short on critical thinking. They are oversexed with hormone imbalances, Over-aged and stodgy in their clarity of thought. kitty-whipped apathetic profit mongers, unable to make manly decisions. Stuck in a rut. And they call themselves visionary?? Ha! Go smoke another one for me willya?!

 

[Pyromaniac605]

The short version: NASA(and its funding govt) is apathy laden, has no direction, and too many PowerPoint spacecraft.

What exactly do you mean by that?

1-The cost per pound of getting materials to and from the station. Not to mention the small quantities that could be bought back compared to modern industrial volume requirements. Totally uneconomical!

Which is precisely why we need to continue with the ISS, to try and figure out a way to do things cheaper.

But, again, under *MY* space program, each of the nine planets(don't argue with me on this one either), NINE PLANETS, nine planets and their major moons, would have had 2 orbiters and at least one lander, floater, or flyer; for each body.

If the ISS has no purpose and doesn't improve our lives, praytell how this is any different.

Meanwhile, we could stay safely on Earth, accumulating this technology, building a comprehensive knowledge base - advanced energy sources, better management software, better materials, new methods and practices of putting it all together, reliably and repetitively.

And if new technologies that could improve research are invented? Are you not going to want to send new probes and orbiters with these improved research tools? Good luck try to find the funds.

Go?? ?? Go where? That's my point. I believe that with all information we have, it would turn out that the asteroids are the best spot for manned exploration.

And your reasons for this? What's so important about an asteroid that makes it more important than landing on the Moon or Mars?

The case for a manned Mars mission? Or going to the moon again? Would you prefer a one shot mission in 5 years, at great expenditure? Or would you prefer to colonize the place in 75 years? Think about that!

Do you honestly think it will take 75 years to have colonies on the Moon or Mars? Please. I'd say within 5 to 10 years we could easily have colonies on the Moon, and colonies on Mars within 20-30 years, but 75 years? That seems a bit long.

PS: Why don't you use bold to express your words rather than ALL CAPITALS or *asterisks*? it's rather distracting.

 

[RichWall]

I like Terra Firma, don't you? Otherwise, How could Columbus acclaim anything to plant a flag on?

 

[Keatah]

I mean that the US populace and govt. has no real desire and direction when it comes to space exploration, especially manned exploration. The time commitment is too long, and our attention spans too short. A PowerPoint spacecraft is a proposed design that sucks up funding, and sometimes makes it to testing. After a long gestation period it seemingly gets canceled for no reason. Or an idiotic reason like a cost overrun that should not have happened in the first place. But the cancellation is the defining part of a PowerPoint craft. They all get axed after sucking billions having been spent on meetings and presentations.

With computer modeling and great laboratory equipment (the best we've had in years thanks to cost-cutting and design efficiencies explored by the commercial sector), there is little need to actually do this stuff over and over again. The ISS in its current role is little more than an overweight saddlebag. A size 46D bra on an otherwise anorexic skeleton of a national plan. We don't need a space station yet. We have no use for one. No amount of experimenting with launch configurations will significantly lower the cost-to-orbit. Lower costs will come with better materials and energy sources. Those goals are best achieved with ground research. We can send a satellite or probe up there to test the design results. But using an orbital station like the ISS to do that. That is not cost effective.

Developing better unmanned missions to planets and asteroids will allow us to explore space unencumbered by dragging "ugly-bags-of-water" and thousands of pounds of plumbing around. The technologies developed there, when advanced enough, will transfer over to a new-beginnings manned program. A sophisticated unmanned program will allow technologies to be developed mush faster and safer than ever before. The benefits to the layperson on the street worrying about the latest Hollywood celebrity or 'sports hero' would be little more than some pretty pictures of planets being sent back. About what the ISS is doing right now anyway. The benefits to the space program would be immeasurable! Many things can be tested and tried with great speed and efficiency. We already know what it takes to keep a man alive in space. Let us now fabricate new materials and methods of using them to build a better manned craft. Don't waste time and resources building a sub-standard manned craft now.

If we are not sandbagged with the ISS there would be so much money JPL wouldn't know what to do with it! And go figure, the current space budget of the US is a tiny few percent in the overall scheme of things. Funding is no problem, provided a politician says so. See?

Landing on the Moon or Mars is more of a psychological state, a dream, a "because-it-sounds-cool" type of thing. Again, and AGAIN, a Moon and Mars mission is something to be undertaken later, when we can build the correct type of spacecraft. Today, the knowledge does not exist. A lot, A REAL LOT, has been been lost since the Apollo landings.

Back to the asteroid thing. The thing with asteroids is they have materials, perhaps materials, ALLOYS, as of now unknown to us, perhaps. The thing is the low delta-V required to land on and take off from an asteroid. Insanely low! We have to do that because we can't get enough for the Moon or Mars. Not cheaply anyways. If we want to explore things, to satiate the desire to see something new, or waste time going someplace, then the asteroids can placate the compulsion to explore 'something'.. But I digress.. Look at the MER rovers. They have discovered so much science for so little cost. A manned mission would look like stream of piss compared to the firehose of knowledge we get from automation. New knowledge is worth a lot. And unmanned craft provide it in spades & droves. And in today's "information age", everybody can partake in the discovery. Having a great instrument package that is functioning well is always better than a man in a suit stumbling around like an idiot. If the instruments break, well we can send another one, and another one, or if they are close by, we can go fix it ourselves. Sorry pal. The idea of a manned Mars mission is a romance, a fugue, a fit of the human psyche. Once we have everything characterized and a good solid reason to go, then we build a capable craft and have a party there! Invite the women and jam on!

People can only see so much with their eyes, hear so much with their ears. And in space, there is no sound. So we are really limited to seeing things, in a narrow selection of wavelengths. An unmanned craft can study so much more! Magnetic fields, radiation way outside organic bandwidths, light so faint it takes days to accumulate enough to trip a CCD element. Humans are useless in that type of environment. But the single one advantage is performing maintenance or fixing those sensors that may have broken down. Like the HST servicing missions. That was a great thing! Though the general populace could care less about a space telescope. And aren't these new ground based installations superseding HST anyways?

And finally answering your last question. Do I honestly think it will take 75 years to have colonies on the Moon or Mars? At the rate we are progressing and will continue to progress, 75 years is very VERY optimistic! Maybe a moonbase, in 30 years, maybe, but then it will need a purpose to justify its existence. The only reason I see for a moonbase is to maintain a huge telescope on the farside. 2000 miles of regolith is great shielding for radio astronomy! And then, that could be accomplished with a lander mission. Hell, we're gonna trash the ISS before 2022. Is there a replacement on the drawing board? I didn't think so.

Colonies??? Bwaahahahaaaa!! What's the definition of a colony anyway? Mom and dad flying around in their space cars, junior building sandcastles out of lunar mud? Yah right. Or perhaps the more sterile and regulated establishment is to your liking..With controlled sex and every day of a newborn kid's day planned out like in those "Sci-Fi oppression movies" of the 80's. THX-1138 and 1984 come to mind. Something more recent, perhaps ALIENS (the 2nd movie), or maybe MOON from a few years ago.

Why do I do CAPS and *'s you ask? *I* come from a time when a tele-type terminal with monochrome text and a daisy-wheel printer was an expensive luxury. Punch cards had just been phased out and 5.25" disk drives were still something of a novelty. I don't do txtspk or internet l337spk too much. It is imprecise and improper and simply plain rude.. When we had a word processor machine it was often a $3000 set-up and it could not do bold text without typing extra control <ctrl> characters. And that's if we were lucky to have a display that could do text at varying intensities and that sort of thing. It was easier to use directly type-able ASCII characters to define an acronym or ADD EMPHASIS to text. Subscripting and superscripting was also something that only high-end stuff supported too!

Our word processor of the day looked like this - Note the low-cost of $3500! And a dot matrix printer that sounded like a buzzsaw going.


And the screen resembled this to a "T"! - Monochrome amber, annoying scanlines, flickery and curved images. A display that shot radiation into your head at point blank range. We had it all babycakes!


There was no such thing as Orbiter back then. Our games were like this - Single colors. Damned lucky if you even had graphics. Oftentimes we'd play Lunar Lander on a slide-rule or programmable calculator. VV = -1.45Ms, HV = +0.2Ms, ALT = 14M, Burn time remaining 74s.


And computer art was like this - It was total fun to calculate Bessel in various ways. Different heights and ripple lengths. Absolutely thrilling! Those were the days!


The dream of a space colony (Stanford Torus style) looked like this - wasn't this cool or what? On stormy nights we'd hang out in the plush attic drawing Orion spaceplanes and laying out floor plans for our bunks in the Torus.


If we hem'N'haw over saving 1 kilo on a space probe today, YOU just explain to me how the hell we'd build a megastructure colony like the ST in "free-floating" space. FOR CHRISSAKES!!! A satellite gets a major design review every time the smallest change is made, like an extra louver or a change in the type of screw holding an antenna. This sort of (now necessary) micro management would make a colony or base administratively impossible. Again, better materials and energy sources will relieve the necessity to have to account for every gram of material. AND now consider scaling up the whole shebang and doing it all deep inside a gravity well! ..Where the costs involving transportation of materials to the construction site are probably more than doubled compared to getting them from the asteroids and working in free-space! Good God!! A moonbase in 10 years?? I don't think so.

Just imagine the logistical nightmare of even doing a Stanford Torus in every detail on paper! It hasn't even been done, it can't be done, NASA and some universities deemed it too complex and pointless. And the reasons cited were materials and energy!

This is all very ridiculous.. Space colonies on the moon my BUTT!! Grumman couldn't even build the lunar module without putting it on a shake table and rotating it through X,Y,Z! Why'd they do that? To shake out the construction debris! Pens, papers, chits, wire strippings, shavings of metal, people hair. Each module regurgitated between 2 and 7 pounds of foreign material. Then the whole craft was sterilized again and again.

And don't forget the Planetary Protection Program. The EPA of space. What a frakking joke! Basically it says we can't contaminate anything with biological matter, or Microbes! Can you imagine the fit they'd have if a colony dome got a microscopic puncture and all the microbes floating in your fart-gas escaped! HEAVEN FORBID we contaminate Mars with human gut flora! Ohh my! RED ALERT!

Did you know they're gonna make Juno burn up in the atmosphere of Jupiter so that it doesn't contaminate Europa. If they think life is there, then just send a frakking probe to check it out! The PPP made a big stink about it despite Juno having been thoroughly sterilized prior to launch. Panspermia? I don't think so, not after cruising through the vacuum of space and darting in and out of Jupiter's radiation.

Folks, the politicians have failed you, your only hope is private industry. 'nuff said!

 

[Wishbone]

Forward contamination is a threat not only to science but to future manned exploration. While the chances for a large ALIEN evolving from terrestrial microflora are nil, chances of an unwelcome mutation are not nil. You don't want your crew to fall ill with a deadly cold which no antibiotic would cure.

Don't sneeze at the threat, and the threat won't sneeze at you.

 

[Capt_hensley]

Infants must learn to crawl before they may walk. ISS, and other space stations make that process possible for humans.

Evolution will take place! it's unavoidable.

 

[T.Neo]

In the disease-ridden first part of 19th century people would have been outraged to find out that instead of being spent on feeding the poor lots of money are spent on looking at tiny things through a set of lenses. Totally useless research... Except that it suddenly discovered germs, and medical death rates dropped dramatically because everyone realized they need to wash their hands between going to a toilet and taking births.

Except we're not talking about constructing lenses or anything of the sort, the whole point is quantifying usefulness where we can.

So far this usefulness has been pretty small, especially compared to the total cost.

You never know what you'll find - some tiny trivia found by growing chickens in microgravity may suddenly explain how to stop cancer cells from growing, or something quite as good.

And there is also quite a large chance that this trivia will stay trivia. And we're supposed to spend $100 billion on the off-chance that this becomes useful?

each of the nine planets(don't argue with me on this one either), NINE PLANETS, nine planets and their major moons

What is your justification for this one?

In my book, there are either 8 planets (as per the IAU) or over 20 planets (as per a scenario where teaching anyone about the solar system would be time consuming and tedious).

Which is precisely why we need to continue with the ISS, to try and figure out a way to do things cheaper.

Uh, no. The ISS isn't some visionary platform that drastically reduces costs. In fact, it has got a lot of aspects about it that make it a very costly operation. Being constructed by STS was one of them.

The whole reason the ISS exists is because the whole idea was to have a space station serviced by a space shuttle. Even though the shuttle was a total flop, the station idea was still present.

Granted, with stuff like COTS we have new ways of getting to the station... but this doesn't make the ISS that special, it is just a destination that can create a small market.

If the ISS has no purpose and doesn't improve our lives, praytell how this is any different.

Indeed. Of course, such missions will be cheaper overall, which might matter a bit to people who come up with budgets, but they still don't do several other things.

And your reasons for this? What's so important about an asteroid that makes it more important than landing on the Moon or Mars?

They're not more important. They're easier. You don't need a dedicated Moon or Mars lander to visit an asteroid. It's almost like a docking, not a landing.

Do you honestly think it will take 75 years to have colonies on the Moon or Mars? Please. I'd say within 5 to 10 years we could easily have colonies on the Moon, and colonies on Mars within 20-30 years, but 75 years? That seems a bit long.

I think Keatah is pretty accurate here. You are not going to have colonies on the Moon or Mars in 5-30 years, even if you tried.

Of course, a Moon colony would be absolutely pointless.

And don't believe the people who tell you that lunar derived propellant is the holy grail of spaceflight. It may be easier in physics terms to launch from the Moon, but there is almost no infrastructure there and an in-situ propellant plant and all of its associated infrastructure would be massively expensive to construct and maintain.

allow us to explore space unencumbered by dragging "ugly-bags-of-water"

I'm human and I take offence to that, you know.

Humans are not a bad thing for planetary surface exploration. They are very capable. Problem is, that capability comes with a huge price.

Landing on the Moon or Mars is more of a psychological state, a dream, a "because-it-sounds-cool" type of thing. Again, and AGAIN, a Moon and Mars mission is something to be undertaken later, when we can build the correct type of spacecraft. Today, the knowledge does not exist. A lot, A REAL LOT, has been been lost since the Apollo landings.

Er, no. We have more knowledge today than we did in the Apollo era. We could easily undertake a Mars mission in 5-10 years, but it would be exceedingly costly.

We don't need Battlestar Galactica to fly through space. Of course, developing an Orient Express would be nice, but it isn't needed.

People can only see so much with their eyes, hear so much with their ears. And in space, there is no sound. So we are really limited to seeing things, in a narrow selection of wavelengths. An unmanned craft can study so much more! Magnetic fields, radiation way outside organic bandwidths, light so faint it takes days to accumulate enough to trip a CCD element. Humans are useless in that type of environment. But the single one advantage is performing maintenance or fixing those sensors that may have broken down. Like the HST servicing missions.

That's why you carry instruments with you, just like scientists do on Earth. Since the whole mission is a whole lot larger, it means you can piggyback more equipment onboard.

Of course, for an orbiting spacecraft, humans make very little sense. All of our Earth observation satellites are unmanned- except for the ISS. But the ISS is not essential in this role.

And don't forget the Planetary Protection Program. The EPA of space. What a frakking joke! Basically it says we can't contaminate anything with biological matter, or Microbes! Can you imagine the fit they'd have if a colony dome got a microscopic puncture and all the microbes floating in your fart-gas escaped! HEAVEN FORBID we contaminate Mars with human gut flora! Ohh my!

It is not a joke- in certain environments. It is in others, such as the Moon.

We don't know what if any biological environments on Mars are like. If would be a huge pity to inadvertantly contaminate them with foreign organisms.

Which is also not an unknown, it has been done for thousands of years by humans, bringing our diseases and crops and pets and pests into new places not able to withstand them.

Forward contamination is a threat not only to science but to future manned exploration. While the chances for a large ALIEN evolving from terrestrial microflora are nil, chances of an unwelcome mutation are not nil. You don't want your crew to fall ill with a deadly cold which no antibiotic would cure.

Colds are caused by viruses, are they not?

I think the risk of super-colds evolving from earthly bacteria on Mars is very, very low...

Infants must learn to crawl before they may walk. ISS, and other space stations make that process possible for humans.

Walk? Walk to where?

There are a whole lot of ways you can learn to 'crawl', that are not like the ISS at all. That doesn't exclude space stations, but there are a lot of things about the ISS that could be regarded as either not innovative, or not directly applicable to further exploration.

 

[garyw]

Uh, no. The ISS isn't some visionary platform that drastically reduces costs. In fact, it has got a lot of aspects about it that make it a very costly operation. Being constructed by STS was one of them.

Actually it was visionary. Clinton had a vision of America and Russia working together. That idea evolved into the ISS which has many additional partners. Isn't the idea of multiple nations working together for a common good visionary?

 

[T.Neo]

Ideologically it is very visionary, but that does not necessarily mean that it is technologically visionary or the direct seed for BEO exploration technology.

 

[garyw]

What sort of visionary technology do you want? In many ways the LAST thing you want on your space station is vionary tech. This is one reason that sounding rockets and zero-g flights are still popular - you test out the visionary aspects before the massive multi-million dollar spaceflight puts your experiment on the ISS.

Besides, isn't this visionary enough?