
Let’s Bring the Astronauts Home - chrismealy
http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2011/sep/07/lets-bring-astronauts-home/
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demallien
This article strikes me as being incredibly reductionist as to what the ISS
has to teach us. Sure, pure science is not being greatly advanced by the ISS -
as noted in the article, robotic satellites have proven to be a better
solution for that. But we have learned massive amounts about the engineering
needed for:

a) in orbit construction of large structures.

b) What things don't scale when building on a larger scale? What sort of
joints work when large structures can generate large moments of torque due to
rotation. How do we deal with leaks etc, which become more likely the bigger
the structure. What are

c) keeping humans alive in space for months at a time (necessary if we are
ever to visit other planets)

d) building high-capacity equipment for space - how do you deal with solar
heating on something as large as the ISS? What's the effect of all of that
moving charge generated by those massive solar panels, when there is
absolutely no way to ground the system?

These are the sorts of things that can only be figured out by doing - as most
of us on HN know, engineering is not a hard science - we don't necessarily
know in advance which things are important and which things can be neglected -
who would have thought that low temperatures could cause a shuttle to explode,
or that falling insulation foam could cause one to disintegrate on re-entry?
We learn these things by doing and discovering what works and what doesn't.
The ISS is by far the biggest piece of hardware we have ever assembled in
space, and the lessons we have learnt in building it are well-worth the
dollars spent.

Of course, we musn't forget that the damned thing would have cost an awful lot
less if the launch prices that we have available today, thanks to SpaceX and
friends, had existed 20 years ago. If we must criticize the ISS, the thing to
criticize is the fact that we used the Shuttle to build it, and the Shuttle
was a really bad solution to the problem of launching things into space. But
then, we didn't _know_ the Shuttle was a bad idea until we tried it - prior to
trying it looked really good on paper!

