White House commits to ISS extension
The Biden administration formally supports extending operations of the International Space Station through the end of the decade, an announcement that is neither surprising nor addresses how to get all the station's partners, notably Russia, to agree on the station's future.
In a statement published on NASA's ISS blog Dec. 31, NASA said the White House agreed to extend operations of the ISS through 2030. Federal law, last revised in 2015 with the enactment of the Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act, made it U.S. policy to operate the station through at least 2024.
[...] The White House's decision is alone not sufficient to continue ISS operations through the end of the decade. NASA said it would work with the station's partners — Canada, Europe, Japan and Russia — "to enable continuation of the groundbreaking research being conducted in this unique orbiting laboratory through the rest of this decade."
One partner has already signaled its willingness to continue the ISS. "I welcome this announcement & will submit a proposal to Member States for @esa to continue until 2030, as well," tweeted Josef Aschbacher, director general of the European Space Agency, shortly after NASA published its statement.
A bigger challenge, though, will be keeping Russia in the ISS partnership. Russian officials have expressed doubts about both the technical ability of the ISS to operate through the end of the decade given problems with the Russian segment of the station as well as a desire to develop a Russian national space station.
Also at The Verge.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by fustakrakich on Sunday January 02 2022, @07:49PM (9 children)
This one is getting pretty creaky
Need more than one anyway
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Sunday January 02 2022, @08:16PM (6 children)
What with? The US doesn't even have rockets other than private billionnaire joyrides to haul anything in space anymore. They're committed to the space station until 2030 IF the Russian are kind enough to sell them rides up there.
Kind of like the US Space Corp really: it's all pretend manned space exploration nowadays...
(Score: 5, Informative) by khallow on Sunday January 02 2022, @08:35PM (3 children)
Those "private billionaire joyrides" are more than capable of putting the original ISS in space. The Falcon Heavy in particular is superior to the original Space Shuttle both in payload mass and fairing size. With a modest compromise in component diameter, all of the ISS pieces could have been launched with many different platforms (Delta IV Heavy, Atlas 5, Falcon 9, Proton, Soyuz, Ariane 5/6, and the Long March 5) for a fraction of the cost of the ISS.
It's worth remember that there are things in space far more frivolous than billionaire joyrides. The decision to use the Space Shuttle and ISS as codependent projects was one of those things.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 02 2022, @11:24PM (2 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 02 2022, @11:29PM
That is a nitpick. GGP is the real idiot.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday January 03 2022, @04:42PM
Exactly, the billionaire joyride I was talking about. I even mentioned it by name.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Sunday January 02 2022, @08:45PM
With a bucket, dear Henry...
What, are we gonna pretend we can't do it? Well that would be only for lack of desire...
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 02 2022, @10:54PM
Please try to keep up. SpaceX has launched several manned missions to the ISS (as well as at least one mission that did not involve the ISS).
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Sunday January 02 2022, @09:00PM (1 child)
There's one in the planning stages that will orbit the moon.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 04 2022, @09:35AM
https://www.nasa.gov/gateway/overview [nasa.gov]
Here's a link to it.
(Score: 4, Touché) by Thexalon on Sunday January 02 2022, @08:12PM
The whole country is being committed? I understand why that might be an attractive idea - it would save the rest of the world an awful lot of trouble - but I'd think the ISS is definitely too small to fit everybody.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 02 2022, @10:21PM (9 children)
Hoo boy, I love it when I can start the New Year off with a good belly laugh.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 03 2022, @10:34AM (8 children)
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/news/iss-20-years-20-breakthroughs [nasa.gov]
Maybe I'll leave this here so you can "belly laugh" longer.
For your belly laugh, SpaceX would be long in history books as dead-end without ISS resupply contract, like a dozen other startups. Starlink would be another impossibility. You know, like Apollo was something that started the entire microchip revolution. But you know, the ignorant just laugh and laugh how useless this all is and would instead spend stuff on shit like bigger army which results in almost no spinoffs. Like it or not, SpaceX *is* a spinoff of ISS like Intel is a spinoff Apollo. Without ISS, we would have Bezos joyrides and Virgin rubber rockets as the pinnacle of commercial space.
Funding ISS looks like a cheap way of spinning up huge dividends. NASA has been good at this for a long time. But just because you can't see the benefit today, doesn't mean there are no huge benefits down the road.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 03 2022, @01:54PM (2 children)
And you know what, that is ALL BULLSHIT. There is NO research done on that platform that can't be done on the ground, and it has been that way since before Day 1. Basically every scientific organization was against building the space station on the grounds as a research platform because "there is microinterest in microgravity." NASA has been selling this line of bullshit since the beginning. A decent amount of the "research" done up there now is essentially science fair projects done by high school and college students for STEM outreach and PR. You can argue all the reasons for and against having a station, but don't do it on scientific research grounds.
So yes, I "belly laughed" because it is STILL a ridiculous statement. Why don't you actually inform yourself on topics [spaceref.com] before spouting off with such indignation. And now I laugh at you and your ignorance for buying all of that bullshit hook, line, and sinker.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 04 2022, @09:33AM (1 child)
Not sure dude. Can you do that combustion (fire) research without zero gravity? You definitely cannot do long spaceflight research on human bodies without it.
I know, it's always the shit you don't plan on that produces biggest surprises.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 04 2022, @11:15PM
Sure, for research that requires microgravity, doing it on the ISS is a decent place to do it, especially now that it is built. In fact, that Robert Park testimony to Congress mentions some of the fraudulent science justification claims that were made to that point, but the point of that testimony was "ok, so it is now built, what is the best way we can use it for science?", but that (and many other places) is careful to say "I sure as hell wouldn't build this $100M tin can just so that I can do such-and-such." The number of research topics that requires a massive and super expensive space platform to be done is very small, and it is hard to blow away the stink of 30+ years of what are essentially lies to add justification for its existence. I mean, really, in that NASA piece the AC above provided, one of the "20 greatest" research things claimed is cubesat launching. SpaceX is throwing thousands of them up there all the time, and being a launchpad for cubesats makes NASA's "20 greatest" list for this platform? That should tell you something right there.
Argue all you want about all of the other benefits it serves or can serve, but just don't make "scientific research platform" one of the main pillars holding up those claims. But we all know that its successor, if it comes out of NASA, will beat that dead horse. I'd much rather see a billionaire space tourist hotel with available space on it to try to do interesting science rather than what is supposed to be a world-class research platform hosting billionaire tourists because it can't fill its science slots with interesting experiments. The first way is more honest than the second.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday January 03 2022, @06:27PM (4 children)
Doubtful, they had plenty of other business and their R&D was relatively cheap and easy to cover. They probably wouldn't be as far along, but people still need their satellites launched cheaply.
NASA is an army (counting all official branches and US espionage too) spinoff in the first place. And that army has a better claim to Apollo and the microchip revolution than NASA does (being the first developer of rocket technology and a much heavier consumer of cutting edge microchip and aerospace technologies). Further, a lot of near future NASA projects are going to be SpaceX spinoffs because they wouldn't have the budget for and launch any other way. Play the spinoff game and you will lose it.
The obvious rebuttal is opportunity cost. Those huge dividends would be about an order of magnitude huger, if they had been done on the ground instead. And we'd still have all the stuff, like microchips and SpaceX, even if NASA wasn't doing an ISS.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 04 2022, @09:28AM (3 children)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA [wikipedia.org]
So, since it was never part of any army, it's rather difficult to have it "spun off", but nice try there. NACA was created as an attempt to collaborate private sector with the military during WWI.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday January 04 2022, @10:13AM (2 children)
And if we look at microchips, the military/intelligence was a bigger early adopter, needing them for stuff like aerospace, sigint, early warning systems, encrypted communication, weather forecasting, and global early warning systems.
Similarly, to merely consider SpaceX a spinoff of NASA is to ignore the massive creation of value that SpaceX did. For example, NASA studied SpaceX's development costs, including a deep look at the company's finances, and determined that SpaceX developed the Falcon 9 (which consisted of both the development of the Falcon 1 and 9, as well as the development of three separate rocket engine families) for about a tenth [transterrestrial.com] what NASA would have originally budgeted (so skipping the inevitable cost ballooning of the project) for the equivalent development. While I don't have a similar link for the manufacture of Falcon 9, it's very different from a typical NASA contractor with little to no outside sourcing for rocketry parts.
This is why I think that SpaceX could have survived without NASA as a patron. And the powerful, low-cost R&D and manufacture infrastructure is unheard of in NASA at least since the earliest days. You miss much by framing that merely as a NASA spinoff.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 04 2022, @11:00PM (1 child)
Of course NASA is a "military spinoff," it was that way from the start. [eisenhowerlibrary.gov] The importance of a space program was evident from the start and the Eisenhower administration didn't want it under the auspices of the military. For instance: [eisenhowerlibrary.gov]
They basically took the expertise and experts from the Navy (Vanguard) and Army (Jupiter-C) and made NASA, with its own mandate and requirements. And of course NASA and the DoD collaborate where feasible. It would be massively stupid and inefficient if they didn't for major efforts such as these. And we should all be happy that they do. Remember when, to justify the program and its costs, the Nixon Administration mandated that all launches must be done from the Shuttle? [planetary.org]
I really don't get the pearl clutching by some people about this.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday January 05 2022, @12:30AM
This also applies to SpaceX which is doing things that we don't want under the auspices of NASA.
For me, there's two huge flaws with the spinoff argument. First, it ignores that most spinoffs would happen anyway. And second, it disregards the cost of the alleged spinoff. Spending a lot of money just to boast about a negligible improvement in the US's microchip industry is a huge waste of money, even if the boast is correct.