Forgetting What Russia Did In Space Decades Ago
@ShuttleCDRKelly 4 cosmonauts have already done what @StationCDRKelly is going to do. Not exactly "unknown territory" #YearInSpace
— NASA Watch (@NASAWatch) September 20, 2015
Keith’s note: Russia (USSR) did this 4 times decades ago. Its all listed here on Wikipedia.
Quoted from the referenced article :
“As Scott reaches the six-month mark of his mission, we are headed into unknown but exciting territory — because we have never had an American in space for such a long period of time. Sure, in the late 1980s and early 1990s the Soviets had cosmonauts at the Mir Space Station for more than a year, but the technology available then couldn’t provide nearly the amount of data that today’s can. We simply don’t know a lot about what happens to astronauts in space after six months. Scott’s mission is effectively doubling the amount of data we have.”
1. the soviet research was published and is very easy to find 2. US technology was more primitive too 3. USSR and US cooperated a lot more than people know (I was there).
NASA is hoping to realize double the amount of PR return from the previous year-long stays in space.
Combined with the data from the record-setting John Glenn shuttle flight, the total PR results are hoped to create a wealth of new funding opportunities.
Somehow I don’t think NASA is stupid enough to expect they can defeat the certain exponential decay in it’s budget (relative to other agencies) . . . the data speaks for itself.
Whoever made that graph needs to learn what exponential decay is.
Nope that’s an exponential. % funding is on a log scale (it isn’t obvious because they didn’t use standard log tics, but you can see if you look at the values)
It fits with NASA’s all hype, no substance MO of late. How many times are we going to hear “journey to Mars” when it looks doubtful that we can even get Orion to recreate Apollo 8 by the 2021 date that was the best case scenario before news of more delays recently broke?
We may get data but the statistical sample size is far too small – the data applies to the subject only and cannot be applied to a larger population.
Agreed, but the spin from NASA PAO is sometimes sickening. NASA spent a couple of decades focusing on shuttle development and then shuttle operations and was limited to short duration missions. During this time, Russia was focused on space stations, so they still have a lot of experience that the US is catching up on.