
Findings from 15 years of the International Space Station - evo_9
https://theconversation.com/five-key-findings-from-15-years-of-the-international-space-station-51540
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peter303
The AMS is interesting. It is CERN-like detector in space. Its the most
expensive experiment on the ISS. It required a special act of Congress to
extend the shuttle program one extra mission past its termination.

Early results show more anti-matter positrons in space than predicted. One
interpretation attributes this to dark matter. AMS continues to collect data
to refine results.

~~~
jessriedel
Worth point out that (apparently) the only reason that the AMS was attached to
the ISS rather than launched as an independent satellite is that it would have
been hard to power it. So it leaches off the ISS solar panels.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_Magnetic_Spectrometer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_Magnetic_Spectrometer)

Obviously, this can't be counted as more than a tiny fringe benefit of the
ISS, since one could always have built a bigger, independent version of AMS
with more solar panels (for a lot less than $150B).

~~~
azernik
Not sure that's a fair cost comparison - the ISS is reusable infrastructure
whose power, propulsion (station-keeping), and structural investments are
reused for multiple payloads. We just happen to be using the vast majority of
it for life-support...

~~~
jessriedel
I just mean that if AMS is near the top of the list of reasons to have built
the ISS, then either you have a bad list or the ISS probably didn't justify
its enormous expense. Sure, it's possible that true value of the ISS was the
in providing power and station-keeping for thousands of little experiments,
but that seems highly unlikely. Better to just launch an unmanned station
every couple years with a hundred experiments on board than to pay the
fantastical expense of live astronauts.

~~~
AYBABTME
Learning how to keep humans in space is a quite worth the expense in my
opinion. One day or another, we'll have to figure it out.

~~~
brownbat
This is an interesting point that has worried me in the past. The clock is
ticking on this planet, and this solar system. But the more I've thought about
it, the less convinced I am that this really justifies manned exploration at
its current costs.

It will take some big changes to make space more habitable than Earth. If we
can make a survivable enclosure in space, odds are that we can make a
survivable enclosure on Earth and save the fuel costs, keeping us closer to
some nifty raw materials. Massive impacts might make that unsafe,[0] but
mostly we're looking at being engulfed by the sun in 5 billion years as a hard
stop.

It's hard to really comprehend how much time that is. It's ten times longer
than primates have been around. It's almost 1.5 times as long as all life has
been around. Humanity as we know it will no longer exist at that point. If we
have living descendents, they could be as unrecognizable to us as apes are to
amoebas.

At that point we're just planning for "life in general" to survive, which we
could accomplish by just sending probes with some spores or dormant bacteria
on long voyages to distant habitable planets.

I wouldn't generally recommend procrastination, but this is probably a problem
we can kick down the road a few generations. If we hit snooze for just
1/5000th of the remaining time we have, that'd give us a solid million years
to up our technological game before tackling interstellar travel. At that
point, the problem will probably have become either trivial or hopeless.

So ultimately, I'm not yet convinced that human survivability experiments are
1000 times as urgent as telescopes, probes, and rovers. That's what I'd be
looking for to justify manned's absurd cost premium.

I was actually hoping this article would convince me otherwise, but if put up
next to the top things we've learned from unmanned space experiments, I don't
think it would compare very favorably. Definitely not 1000 times favorably.

I think we all yearn for the stars, and know this is the sort of thing we want
to conquer, we want it to be among the great triumphs of humanity. But if we
really want it, we should be smart about it. There's so much low hanging fruit
we can get from unmanned. It could aid technological progress and deep
understanding of the universe, leading to breakthroughs that ultimately
leapfrog us past some challenges we'd meet if we just tried to bang our head
against colonization today.

[0] Note that mammals have survived some crazy impacts before, probably by
living underground. If we can make a survivable enclosure underground or under
the ocean, that will be easier than making one and then launching it into
space. Also, near earth object detection and mitigation programs are probably
the best way to improve humanity's survivability given current technological
capacities (ie, we can't build megastructures in space yet), and those
programs compete for NASA money against humans in space too! Gradual climate
change is unlikely to make Earth less habitable than Venus or Mars or space.
Even if we lost most of our atmosphere and temperatures began to fluctuate by
+/\- 50 degrees, there'd still be advantages to building controlled structures
on Earth rather than building such structures and launching them into
inhospitable space. There are degrees of inhospitably, and Earth would have to
become nightmarish (eg, probably engulfed by the sun) before we left.

~~~
chrisatumd
Great comment which really made me think. You are right that unmanned projects
are a no brainer. I would argue that both are important, and even with the
budgets we have, we have been able to do both.

You made two assumptions that I would not, which make me believe we should
continue to pursue manned exploration.

1) We have 5 billion years to figure this out.

There are many ways in which humanity could be wiped out on Earth, not just
the death of the sun. Also I remember Elon Musk had a counterpoint to this as
well that it's not a given that technology will always move forward. We need
to exploit this chance while we have the capability.

2) The cost difference between a manned and unmanned mission are 1000 to 1.

That may be true for some missions, but I can't imagine that is anywhere near
true for something like science missions for a station in low Earth orbit like
the ISS. I would be interested in knowing what the actual cost differences
are.

~~~
brownbat
Good eye for assumptions, those are them. I'll defend one and weaken the
other.

I. 5BY

I had a somehow longer version where I explained why I chose the 5 billion
year figure. There are a lot of factors that could make life on Earth harder
than it currently is, but really only a few that could make Earth less
hospitable than Mars. Mars is basically just a gravity well. Maybe with usable
water. An Earth worse than that is a long way off.

On the other hand, if Mars isn't enough, and we need interstellar travel, then
we need either near instant travel or generational ships.

Generational ships mean we've mastered living in space without a planet. If
we're sustainable in space without a planet, then orbiting destroyed Earth
(for minerals) is as good as leaving it, unless the sun is expanding.

Near instant travel obviates the need for learning lessons about survival in
space.

(I suppose we could get a tech that could take us to any planet in the galaxy
in a FTL but five year long trip similar to sublight trips. That seems
unlikely though.)

Impacts could destroy Earth. So sure, we should spend good money to look for
asteroids (telescopes in space!) and learning how to divert them (with
robots!). Note though, mammals somehow survived a mass extinction event from a
massive asteroid before. So it'd have to be pretty big to prevent us from just
making (maybe underground) shelters.

If the atmosphere or magnetic field weakened, there'd be a huge radiation
hazard. Underground or undersea habitats would be more technologically
feasible for us than space, though, and would provide better radiation
shielding than anything we could build.

II. 1000:1 was silly.

Tech costs though, yeah. Good call. Maybe more like a factor of 10. Possibly
as high as 50: [http://www.tellmehowmuch.net/how-much-did-the-hubble-
space-t...](http://www.tellmehowmuch.net/how-much-did-the-hubble-space-
telescope-cost.html)

[http://www.businessinsider.com/mars-rover-curiosity-cost-
eac...](http://www.businessinsider.com/mars-rover-curiosity-cost-each-
american-8-2012-9?op=1)

[http://www.nbcnews.com/id/14505278/ns/technology_and_science...](http://www.nbcnews.com/id/14505278/ns/technology_and_science-
space/t/whats-cost-space-station/)

[http://www.space.com/12166-space-shuttle-program-cost-
promis...](http://www.space.com/12166-space-shuttle-program-cost-
promises-209-billion.html)

None of these are easy to compare though. Is the Hubble platform equal to the
ISS? How many shuttle launches equal one rover? I don't know. Maybe that
brings them even further in line.

But if you ask me, at what exchange rate would I change unmanned tech points
for manned tech points, based on the relative contributions to science from
each, I think it'd be like 5:4 in favor of unmanned. Even if unmanned was more
expensive, I think it's tackling some pretty interesting problems right now.
I'm weird though, I know.

N.B. - Musk's point was really interesting too, thanks, kind of like
"Foundation." I'm not sure where it takes me. It's like, "If humanity could
develop only one more technology, what would it be?" Interstellar travel would
be pretty compelling. I can think of interesting alternatives, but sure,
interstellar seems like it might win.

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sharp11
I never knew that the chemistry of flames and burning was so complex and
poorly understood. Beautiful that flames are spherical in microgravity!

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sparrish
Not much to show for $19.6 million per day for 15 years.

~~~
api
The highest value of the ISS is not as a scientific experiment but an
engineering undertaking. It's given us a lot of operational experience on long
duration space habitats and space flight, as well as constructing and
operating large structures in space that are launched via many payloads and
assembled in orbit. From the ISS we have learned how one might actually build
and operate the life support and habitat systems of a sci-fi scale spaceship
like Discovery 1 (2001). Now that we have reusable rockets, it will soon be
possible to actually launch and assemble such things in orbit somewhat
economically.

IMHO the money could have been better spent but also might have been much
worse spent. I'll take it.

~~~
LoSboccacc
It's not even that much money compared to, say, F-35 research.

~~~
claystu
It's telling that the only way to make the ISS look good is by comparing it to
one of the biggest boondoggles in US funding history.

~~~
LoSboccacc
Nah that's just interesting because it's a 1000x expenditure with yet
uncertain returns

Otoh, I've seen NASA ROI calculated anywhere from 5$ to 20$ per dollar spent.
Hubbard places it at 8$. This article gives a good entry point to the topic
[http://www.21stcentech.com/money-spent-nasa-
waste/](http://www.21stcentech.com/money-spent-nasa-waste/)

~~~
claystu
Oh I'm a big fan of NASA and think we ought to spend a lot on space since it's
the future, but that doesn't change the fact that the Shuttle and the ISS were
terrible investments. For one thing, the shuttle could lift only a fraction of
what the Saturn V (used for Apollo and Skylab) lifted. In fact, Skylab
actually had more space than even the largest module on the ISS (almost 2x)
and was launched all in one go with a Saturn V.

Think about that: Skylab was bigger and was launched in a single day by a
Saturn V. It also only cost $2.2 billion vs $150 billion for the ISS. If we
had stuck with Saturn V's and the Skylab solution, we could have around 50
space stations right now--as opposed to just one. Or better yet, we could have
colonies on Mars, and deep space manned missions (remember...the ship in 2001
A Space Odyssey wasn't supposed to be science fiction), and many more super-
sized space telescopes, and who knows what else.

Anyway, I look at what we've done with NASA for the past 40 years compared to
what we could have done and I can't help but feel like we squandered an
incredible opportunity.

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jackfoxy
I've often wondered why NASA never considers artificial gravity through a
rotating structure to dispense with the problem of long-term zero-G on the
human body. At least I have never seen a media report of NASA taking this
seriously, and I have followed media reports of space topics since I was a
child. There must be a reason for this. Numerous science fiction writers
treated this concept as a given decades ago.

If these are the 5 key findings of the lengthy construction and 15 years of
operation of the ISS, this is a pretty lame return (in terms of science) for a
huge investment. I suspect the only other thing we can say is we have a lot
more experience of human operations (activity) in space. Something to be said
for that.

~~~
maxerickson
I expect it largely comes down to cost.

~~~
goodcanadian
That and the fact that we have plenty of gravity on Earth. We go to space to
study things that we can't study on Earth.

~~~
glass_of_water
The force of gravity in low earth orbit is about 91.7% of the force at sea
level.

~~~
thaumasiotes
The apparent force, which is what we experiment with, is much less.

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pavel_lishin
Looks like the site is being hugged too hard; I'm getting 503s.

