Extending the ISS: Some Think Global, Others Think Local
Remarks for NASA Administrator Bolden at International Space Exploration Forum
“Although we understand that our ISS Partners’ governments may not yet be ready to make a decision with respect to ISS extension to at least 2024, we hope that each of the ISS Partners will come to a similar decision through its own government process.”
NASA, Obama Administration Highlight International Space Station Extension at Global Forum
“The ISS is a unique facility that offers enormous scientific and societal benefits,” said Holdren. “The Obama Administration’s decision to extend its life until at least 2024 will allow us to maximize its potential, deliver critical benefits to our Nation and the world, and maintain American leadership in space.”
NASA wants to keep the International Space Station going until 2024. Is that a good idea?
“The space station has plenty of supporters — not least because of the economic angle. In 2011, NASA bought goods and services in 396 of the 435 congressional districts. One example: Florida’s space industry took a big hit after the end of the space shuttle program in 2011. So it’s no surprise that Florida Sen. Bill Nelson is in favor of keeping the space station aloft: “This means more jobs at the Kennedy Space Center as we rebuild our entire space program.” But there are other arguments, too. Rep. John Culberson (R-Tex.), a member of the House appropriations committee in charge of NASA funding, applauded the move on national-interest grounds. “”It’s inevitable and I’m delighted that NASA understands the value of ensuring that America continues to hold the high ground.”
Remarks by OSTP Director John Holdren at the International Space Exploration Forum
“We may have different flags patched to our space suits, and different cultures, traditions, and political systems. But as the success of the ISS has shown, we can transcend these differences in space.”
The extension is covering the bases when SLS gets cancelled and NASA has something to do to justify keeping the agency afloat.
Yes. Absolutely. Why take a risk on something newer and superior that can take us to destinations we’ve never been before and enable new capability, when we can just send a couple astronauts twice a year in the least ambitious space vehicle possible to our orbiting do-nothing laboratory and call this non-ambitious waste of money ‘exploration’. Why’d we even bother retiring the Shuttle under that mindset? We should have flown them into 2020 as was the pre-Columbia plan! Why embrace something new when you can play it safe, limit your ambitions and hold onto what you have for dear life?
The building of the ISS was immensely significant. The perpetuation of it is not. Research being done on it is cited in how many papers exactly? It’s lead to what significant break throughs? AMS-02 better deliver, because there is no other science being done on the ISS worth $3 billion a year. Period.
A space program where the ISS is the long term destination is not a space program worth having.
Anyone wanna take a bet people will push hard to have this thing flying into the 2030s owing to it aging gracefully?
there are 278 NASA-sponsored scientific research programs currently ongoing on the ISS. that doesn’t count the research programs by other entities or nations.
a “do nothing” laboratory? you lie or are ignorant. if it’s the later, peruse these links:
http://www.washingtonpost.c…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wik…
Sure. Let’s look at some of the things on the list:
Human Research Facility Holter Monitor (Holter)
Kennedy Space Center Fixation Tube (KFT)
Portable Clinical Blood Analyzer – i-STAT (PCBA)
Radiation Area Monitor (RAM)
Tissue Equivalent Proportional Counter (TEPC)
Urine Monitoring System (UMS)
Vegetable Production System (Veggie)
European Modular Cultivation System (EMCS)
Fluid Physics Experiment Facility (FPEF)
Flywheel Exercise Device (FWED)
Image Processing Unit (IPU)
Mice Drawer System Facility (MDS_Facility)
Microgravity Vibration Isolation Subsystem (MVIS)
Portable Astroculture Chamber (PASC)
Protein Crystal Growth – Single Locker Thermal Enclosure System (PCG-STES)
Expression of microbial genes in space (GENE)
Fischer Rat Thyroid Low serum 5% (FRTL5)
Microbiological Experiment on Space Station About Gene Expression (MESSAGE)
Natural killer cell activity in microgravity
Effects of the gravity altered environment on Drosophilia motility, behaviour and ageing (AGEING)
Signalling through Rho GTPases in microgravity (RHO SIGNALLING)
Yeast In No Gravity – Part 1 (YING-A)
Yeast In No Gravity – Part 2 (YING-B)
So that’s just a sample, clearly. But what we have is this:
-Assorted science involving Rat, flies and Mouse biology.
-Growing some plants and some yeast and seeing microgravity effects.
-Assorted Science involving cell cultures, proteins and genes.
I ask again… science worth it to the tune of $3 billion a year? No. Not even close. It’s really the same problem with the JWST: the $8.9 billion space telescope that has a five year lifetime and will be used only by a few hundred scientists should not exist as a “thing”.
If you’re going to drop a billion dollars on something it should be (1) lasting and (2) meaningful. Does “Fischer Rat Thyroid Low serum 5% (FRTL5): substantially enhance the human condition? Does it change our understanding of the Thyroid? No. It’s a low cost grant that got thrown up onto the the ISS because it doesn’t need regular monitoring, weighs basically nothing, and has an extremely vague “benefits long term space flight” goal.
Look, it makes sense for things like this experiment to happen while the ISS is in orbit. Clearly, it’s there, use it… why not. I’m sure any ship going to Mars will bring along a similar assortment of low-mass experiments. But there is a wold of difference between an experiment like this benefiting from the ISS’s existence and being a reason for it. Benefiting – sure… it costs basically nothing to have it on a rack or in a refrigerator. Being a reason? The sum of all these experiments is not worth $3 billion a year.
I would sing a different tune of something substantial were going to be done on or with the ISS…. like if that VASIMR module that hopefully launches one day and moves the ISS to Earth-Moon L2 or something (and it becomes that Gateway station Boeing proposed). That would be reason to do it. But as a place to do science with Rats, flies, cell cultures, crystals and Thyroid cells? No amount of science of that kind is worth the $3 billion a year cost. Space is too expensive a destination for such narrow research to be a rationale for continuing investment.
Oh, and one more thing: historically when someone has to write a “in defense of” article (in reference to your The International Space Station’s scientific payoff is real link), chances are, it’s not really going too well.
Did you bother reading the research papers, or would that have possibly conflicted with your bias?
Mr. Squared
I’m not sure of your purpose for calling people here bias. But inspite of our strong views I believe that most the people here expess their views, to put them to the test and read the other peoples responses with an open mind in hopes of learning.
Are not our opinions based on our experience???
Are not we here to share our experience.
Are not most NASA watch readers and posters here to learn?
I don’t see the point of calling people bias???
You’re free to believe what you want, but one thing that is true, no matter your beliefs, is that bias can cloud objectivity, such as when one is rating the merit of research. To comment on the research requires doing a bit more than reading research paper titles. That’s the sort of thing that congresspeople do, and they consistently misunderstand the research that was done.
JonathanN3 demonstrated a clear bias against the research done on the ISS. I won’t apologize for asking him if he read any of the work done. There’s nothing to be learned otherwise.
I know that some are here because they are truly interested in having honest discussions about NASA and related space programs, but others seemingly come only to cheerlead or deride programs, companies, or whatever. Neither is helpful, and neither is instructive. What is helpful is actual discussion based on actual facts or objectivity.
Do you think you learned something from JonathanN3’s list and dumbed down categories and descriptions of the research done on the ISS. If so, what exactly did you learn?
I can just about guarantee one thing: bias makes it pretty hard–sometimes impossible–to critically evaluate different aspects of a problem and its possible solutions. If people aren’t going to critically evaluate problems and possible solutions, what’s the point of even discussing such things?
Bias? No. Experience.
My background is robotics… well let me put it this way. It’s what I used to do. I quit research in that field. When I was in High School, I had a email correspondence with Marvin Minsky who implored me, aspiring computer scientist, to go into A.I. rather than robotics as to paraphrase him “more is done in 1 year in A.I. than 10 years in robotics”. Me being me, I didn’t listen to ultimately extremely sound advice, and instead what I endured after college was the extreme glacial pace of robotics research. Remember Senator Coburn calling out that $500k towel folding robot? He was completely right, about that project and the field. I understand entirely the incremental steps necessary in science, but this goes beyond that. Much of robotics is filled what I like to call “stupid robopet tricks”. One off robots that do nothing but some singular “trick” and put food on the researcher’s table. Harsh? Yes. Because grant money doesn’t go on trees, especially in this age of austerity. Of course Coburn was blasted on this very forum. But he was right.
So when I see an experiment about “Thyroid cells” on the ISS, and read the websites and abstracts to a long list of these very limited in scope research projects, it sounds very professionally familiar to me. It reminds me why I got out. As I said, so long as the ISS is flying, it makes absolute sense to do this research… but that isn’t a reason to keep the ISS. The sum value of this small scale research isn’t $3 billion a year before crew launch costs either. Under the same principle, the $500k robot that folds towels shouldn’t exist, but if you have a $500k robot that can do many, many things and is ambitious in it’s design, then go nuts… make it fold towels too.
I’ll even split the difference. If NASA can offer up hard reasons for keeping the ISS flying beyond merely enabling this “secondary science” to continue, I’d be open to hearing it. But to me that means saying things along the lines of “we’re going to test this radition shielding on a new module, because it’s direct successor will be used on the Mars transit vessel” or “we’re going to test this thrust module because it’s direct successor will be used to send astronauts to Mars” or “we’re going to test this new space suit because it is the one that will go to Mars”… then we can have a conversation.
But NASA has never done that. They invest in technology and research, then forget about it or don’t reuse it. That’s why I see no value in any of the Science on the ISS. How much of it is really going to directly inform NASA’s next step? How many of these research papers are really going to be read by every member involved in the design of a habitation module? My guess is none. It gets posted on the internet, excited a very narrow scientific community for a week, then gets forgotten about.
That’s fine (and normal) for university science on planet Earth. It’s not fine for $3 billion a year science in space. It’s a waste of money and of time.
Ah .. the ISS has been deemed a NATIONAL LAB .. not a NASA LAB. It is not there for just NASA.
We utilized the Nation’s space agency to put up the facility for ALL branches of science and research.
President Bush tried to redirect the ISS into a NASA only research station to be used as a testbed for Mars.
Congress redirected it away from NASA and made it National.
I think the National Lab designation was to generate research funding for ISS from outside the NASA budget, i.e. other agencies like NIH would pay to put experiments on ISS. Not sure how successful it was in doing this.
This is a lot of basic science that will have to be done sooner or later. What is the cost of learning it later?
Science is building blocks, you learn and move forward, ALL these experiments and science are building blocks. This means we are moving forward with each year, earch years new crop of students learn about new cutting edge experiments., with each round of experiments.
For me, 3 billion is chump change if it means just one PHD student reading about a new Space Station experiment and it gives them an EUREKA moment.
The more experiments the more likely we get … EUREKA!
The question is whether it’s cost effective. If the budget is $3b/yr, does ISS maximise the amount of research that NASA can buy?
I support the idea of space stations, and want even more research up there. So how to get more research? By lowing operational costs. Which probably means getting rid of ISS itself. Sadly (and bizarrely), there’s no support for even attempting cheaper (say, commercial) replacements.
[How much more bang-for-buck could you get if you could just hire multiple stations, specialising in different areas. So human micro-g or variable-g centrifuge animal research on separate stations to other research, so vibration doesn’t harm other projects.
How much work has been prevented at ISS because it would interfere with something else? (Or cost too much because of the need to prevent such interference.)]
Paul, keep in mind a few things:
NASA has been a monopoly / monopsony for five decades.
Our Nation’s space transportation is currently in a major transition.
The pork premium is currently slowly getting stripped from a government agency that has enjoyed the pork for 5 decades.
For this particular point in time, America and it’s lessor paying partners currently enjoy the only space station on the planet.
Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water.
We are where we are. They say politics is a lot like making sausage and no one wants to see how the sausage is made.
The great thing to know is that FINALLY we are on the last round of our insane space policies. It the space station a hog? yes, but it is what it is and it is not going to die a quiet death, So just know we are getting science done and we are utilizing what we have and the science is moving forward.
All the pieces will be in place when the ISS is done. Commercial crew, cargo, spacebased commercial space for lease and all out of the hands of the congressional porkonauts.
For the record, I’m not suggesting throwing away ISS before there’s a replacement. It’s just that IMO, every cent of research should currently be spent on the goal of rendering ISS unnecessary. And ISS is the perfect place to do that research.
[There’s a few small signs that someone at NASA is trying to sneak in a little between the cracks. BEAM, non-hydrazine thrusters, etc. But I expect there’s a political push-back whenever it gets noticed, as there is with commercial crew.]
Much of the research wouldn’t even be “anti-ISS”, since the Russians are floating the idea of withdrawing their modules, research towards enabling fast commercial replacements for essential systems seems an obvious priority goal now. As a side-effect, those companies learn how to make core systems for space-stations in general (…and for long-duration exploration ships.)
Thing is, I don’t want to “trick” the ISS guys or go behind their back. “Ha ha, while you weren’t watching I totally betrayed you!” I want to recruit them. I want them to put their all into developing key technologies that can then be passed on to commercial development, and playing anchor-client for commercial services. ISS will end one day, it’s in their own interests to have an open agreed effort to create a successor. And whether the best successor is leasing a bunch of low cost specialised commercial stations, or another singular government station, you still need a crap-load of companies with recent knowledge and experience creating space-station systems.
Waiting until after ISS is dumped in the Pacific is just creating another Constellation/SLS situation.
“science worth it to the tune of $3 billion a year?”
my answer is a resounding YES!! your cherry-picking of boring-sounding stuff is pathetic. there’s a lot of pure research being done that we simply don’t know what the benefits will be. a lot of work on human biology is being done that could prolong our lives and enable us to live in greater health.
JWST is bleeding-edge technology. you can’t say what its benefits will be. the Hubble has been tremendous – the JWST is several orders of magnitude more precise than Hubble – there’s no telling what we will learn from it. is the cost already worth it? YES!! anything that reduces our ignorance of the universe around us is a worthwhile thing. that’s why we spend the money to do it.
the ISS will never be moved from Earth orbit. it’s not designed for operation in L2 – it would overheat. it uses the shade of the Earth to cool itself down during each orbit.
“research on the station has generated about 3,100 papers since 1998”
http://myns.tumblr.com/post…
At a cost of around $50 billion since 1998. Or $15 million for each and every one of those 3100 papers.
The US spends about $300m on Antarctic research. So that should produce about 20 papers a year? From memory it’s closer to 1500/yr. And most are more significant than what is produced on ISS.
Edit: From the article you linked to: “The Hubble Space Telescope, meanwhile, has produced more than 11,300 papers in its 21 years, yet it cost less than one-tenth of the price of the space station. Even the $150 million Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, designed to measure the cosmic microwave background, has generated 5,100 papers in just over a decade.”
quite true. however, much of the research on the ISS is still ongoing, and many more papers are being written or are yet to be written. also, the number of papers generated, while important, isn’t the only measure of the success of the ISS.
For $15M I suspect the NIH would expect a major advance in understanding and preventing a disease affecting millions, accompanied by a few dozen papers.
The station is modular , so if parts of it become out dated replace it , and decommission the old / bad section only .
If part is attached to something from more than one side, you will have BIG problem.
Taking the station apart doesn’t make much sense; new modules can be added and obsolete equipment dumped from the old ones. The station is still smaller than the original growth concepts.
Despite his weaknesses, I remain a supporter of Obama. As for Obama’s ACA, I refer readers to the NY Times article by Michael Moore (http://www.nytimes.com/2014…. It pulls no punches. Furthermore, when I have attended all-hands meetings for a Bolden visit, I recognize a man that dearly loves NASA, its people, history and goals. He cares but we are left wondering what he could do to leave a lasting legacy rather than acting as a caretaker to a perpetually ill patient; most notably, the human spaceflight side of NASA – HEOMD.
What I would volunteer to Bolden and Obama as an idea worthy of a great agency and a great nation is that we begin to forge a long-term future for ISS. One reads the articles referenced by Nasawatch and these touch on the idea, on the question of the longer term future – beyond 2024.
Worthy of a great nation that leads and forges the right path for humanity, ISS can function as a pathfinder, a greater step than the international cooperative it is now – creation of first World corporation for Space Development and Exploration. In my opinion, such an entity will be necessary to ensure that the vast resources of our Solar System are fairly distributed to all humanity. Rather than just imagine that ISS will have a life beyond 2024, Bolden and Obama could conceive a future for ISS as a seed for this World corporation; Perhaps overseen by the UN but likely based on founder member states – the original nations involved in ISS, there would be open membership to every nation on Earth. The European Union has a process for joining its union and likewise a process could be created for joining and investing in this corporation. This is not far from the statements in the speeches and articles referenced but let’s take it further. Science Fiction writers have touched on such a future for Humanity where Space forges a World Union. Now we are on the verge of making this a reality. ISS, as a centerpiece of the World corporation, would be this critical first step.
While NASA and partners will recoup a little of the ISS investment through technology, experience and discovery from the ISS platform, it is this social aspect that far outweighs the technological. I do not think this is an instance of selling the Brooklyn Bridge. ISS is a valuable asset; it just cost too much – $160B, due to mismanagement by NASA and Washington politicians over decades. But its value will be multiplied by transferring its ownership to an international entity – this “World First Corporation” that will spearhead the cooperation needed on even grander scales than we see today. Exploration and capitalization of raw materials from the Moon, near-Earth Asteroids and the first missions to Mars will need such greater participation – for the seed funds, technology and also the fair and just dissemination of knowledge and materials to the Earth’s population.
This is the type of vision and type of actions that NASA needs. In the same breadth, Bolden spoke of the asteroid retrieval mission (ARM) and SLS/Orion but the first needs refinement and international cooperation while the second needs to be terminated. Bolden can continue the role of good soldier, stamping out fires, convalescent worker in this transitional period or he and Obama can call on America to do something great with ISS and do something great for American private space industry – hand over the remaining keys to rocketry to private enterprise and set our sites on truly cutting edge technology and on missions that forge lasting World cooperation.
If the ISS is to represent the world, it must include China. If it is to be of practical value, the science focus must shift from microgravity and life sciences to earth observation.
Certainly, include the Chinese – about 1/4 the World population. Well, Earth observations are being done now but they just cost a lot more if done from the ISS platform. Small Earth observer sats are the way, most the time. So ISS science, on the most part, to be cost-effective, must be things that require human presence to manipulate or as test subjects.
Sensors can be continuously updated with parts carried up on each logistics flight, and data and stabilization can be provided from the truss. This would be more practical than designing and launching a spacecraft for each upgrade, mod or repair.
These type of payloads, upgradeable, fall under “require human presence to manipulate”. I would hope most payloads requiring humans on ISS would be upgradeable. Putting something on the Truss means spacewalks (risk). There are a couple of ports for putting smaller instruments outside. One has to clearly justify the advantage of ISS as a platform (cost/performance) rather than making a payload an orbiting small/micro-Sat.
The big difference is that there are already logistics spacecraft going to ISS every three months or so which could carry sensors and replacement parts at little or no additional cost. Robotic systems for installing sensors on the truss and returning them to the airlock when needed for repairs would be a valuable advance.
Interesting, I do not see anyone discussing two other related issues– the deteriorating relationship between the US and Russia, and that the Russians already have public contingency plans for their part of the station (OPSEC). NASA may talk as if the ISS is gonna stay together ’till the end, while Russia appears to be taking the “pick up our toys and move to another sandbox” stance.
what’s wrong with Russia taking its modules off of the ISS at the end of its lifespan?
Nothing wrong with that; not really the point — NASA is certainly blowing a whole lotta sunshine into a gloomly looking ISS future, while Russia with it’s OPSEC plans are being so… Russian.
BTW… *can* the rest of ISS fly (controllaby) if the Russian section goes bye-bye, or are we going to see an “emergency module request” cry in the future?
I believe the Russians would only remove their modules when the ISS is going to be deorbited.
Not to mention the absurdity of the “International” space station excluding China, the only country with the funds to add anything significant to its capabilities.
I am looking to see how they replace ATV. The last one is this year. It hauls 16,000lbs. Dragon and Cygnus have been hauling around 4000lb each. Next year they increase a flight. That makes 8000lb. Only half of what is needed. SpaceX could increase flights, but it would be hard for Orbital.
Why would it be hard for Orbital? What is your basis and
qualification for making this type of blanket, gratuitous assertion?
Because the Antares launch vehicle uses a modified NK-33 engine, and there is a limited stockpile left of these (enough to service the COTS contract), and the manufacturer no longer exists to make more (Russian by the way).
In order for Cygnus to be of use beyond the contracted number of launches would require a new engine, or a new vehicle altogether to launch Cygnus. In either case this would be a timely and expensive path to take. Eventually I see Orbital going with a new launcher, or altering the current design one way or another. Unless of course after the COTS contract is up they get out of the cargo hauling business (unlikely).
Probably because OSC has what, 3 dozen NK-33’s left with no viable way of importing more? Hard to appreciably increase near-term flight rate without a first stage engine.
Orbital is dependent on a limited supply of Russian engines for the Cygnus and would have to start manufacturing them if traffic really increased. Perhaps that’s why so far Orbital doesn’t seem to be marketing the Cygnus for commercial launch services.
I am sure that NASA has this covered. It will be interesting to see how it turns out. SpaceX does most in house. I thought it might be easier for them. Orbital has foreign sources. Maybe no problem to make more. Soyuz is using a new version of NK33 engine also. That may be stored ones or if new manufactured, then no problem for Orbital.
My concern is that NASA hasn’t got it covered – that the cargo up-mass assumptions and requirements are based on ISS retirement in 2016 and that, due to some bureaucratic gridlock, no-one has realised that they need to (or wanted to take responsibility to) recalculate the requirements.
Hmm.. since ESA is now going to make a ATV-based Service module for Orion, wouldn’t be much of a stretch to use that design to produce more cargo ships.. all tooling and labor in place — win-win for ESA!
“research on the station has generated about 3,100 papers since 1998”
This was not a positive statement.
Cited in the New Scientist article in comparison to the 11000+ papers coming from Hubble over a somewhat longer time frame.
I would like to see an updated article that shows whether PrOrbis was successful in reducing the bureaucratic rigamarole that has been ISS and whether CASIS has been successful in bringing forward any significant new research projects. The article highlighted projects on human research are largely an in-house NASA program.
The shame of ISS, and significant reason for lots of wasted ISS dollars and time is that efficient experiment recruitment and integration processes were developed over the previous quarter century for Shuttle, Spacehab and Mir, and the ISS threw all that away because they felt they would do it better. They didn’t. When CubeSat, composed of some of the Spacehab workers, first approached ISS and told them they wanted to fly within 9 months, which was a typical template for a simple payload on Spacehab, ISS payload integrators told them ‘not so fast’ – we run a 3 to 5 year integration process and we don’t see a way around it.
How has ISS been improving? This should make an interesting story.
As far as the Russians casting off their elements and going their own separate way, technically something they could do right now or at any time, the issue for the US and other partners is that the Russians offer some unique systems such as propulsion. Especially without either Shuttle or additional ESA ATVs, there is essentially no other propulsion capability on ISS.
There is also limited capability to replace big ORUs like that ammonia coolant pump that failed a few weeks ago, and that previously failed 2 years ago. If it fails again then ISS is in serious trouble. That is worthy of an investigation, before it happens. After it happens its too late.