5 ms·

Largely because it's a fantastically expensive undertaking, and hasn't quite borne out the fruits that were speculated about over the years. USA provides a hug

by snoshy 6y ago

Largely because it's a fantastically expensive undertaking, and hasn't quite borne out the fruits that were speculated about over the years. USA provides a huge bulk of the funding, expertise, and personnel required to keep the program running. That's not to say that Russia, Canada, Japan, etc. don't do their part, but it's really not as much of a truly global joint effort as you might be led to believe. Then there's a genuine question of what this enormous expenditure truly buys us. NASA's budget has been strangled for decades now, and robotic probes and missions to other planets have been perennially delayed due to cost, while their scientific ROI would truly be much greater than for ISS experiments in many cases. Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge fan of the ISS and manned spaceflight in general, but this kind of money does require serious explanation to Congress to justify the costs. Oh, and there's the entire money pit that is Artemis/SLS that stays on NASA books. Also, why now? The private space industry is at what seems to be the beginning of an inflection point with heavy launch capabilities (SpaceX Starship) looking likely to drive down costs by over an order of magnitude. A single Starship might provide 800 cubic meters of volume, and the whole ISS is 1,000 cubic meters. Why not wait for that to come online and then launch many many ISS' worth of volume to several labs? Lastly, the privatization of launch vehicles in particular has a lot of people questioning if private industry might be better able to step up to this challenge of manned orbiting labs. It has a potential to expand the range of solutions, massively decrease costs, and provide efficiencies that NASA might not be able to provide. When you don't have to manufacture space parts scattered all across the globe, it's easy to see why this could be cheaper and more efficient.

calibas 6y ago
>Then there's a genuine question of what this enormous expenditure truly buys us. It helps to answer the question of whether or not humans can even survive long term away from Earth. Sure, if you judge it purely by the price tag, it's not doing very well. If you judge it by the scientific, societal and philosophical implications, we're not spending nearly enough.
- YetAnotherNick 6y ago
  > It helps to answer the question of whether or not humans can even survive long term away from Earth How will it answer that question that we already don't know of? I don't think that was the aim of ISS anyways and will definitely won't be the aim of second ISS. Humans can survive in space for year without significant physical damage but with lot of training.
  - calibas 6y ago
    To me, it's just so odd that people don't seem to understand why we have an ISS. Is the main argument "We've already learned what's needed about life in space, and now we don't need a space station anymore"? That seems absurd.
    - bluGill 6y ago
      The ISS exists to give Russia cover to keep the ex Soviet rocket scientists employed and thus not tempted to work for some evil dictatorship.
    - lordlic 6y ago
      No, the argument is that there's plenty to learn, and it's all very interesting, but it doesn't stand up against people's very real needs here on Earth. I'm about the biggest fan of space you'll find, but even I, sadly, find the ethical calculus unassailable. Manned spaceflight won't accrue material benefits for ten generations or much more, and meanwhile human beings are dying of treatable or curable diseases, suffering under poverty, and living without access to clean water. This spoken-word work from 1970 conveys the sentiment well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goh2x_G0ct4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goh2x_G0ct4
      - perl4ever 6y ago
        >I'm about the biggest fan of space you'll find, but even I, sadly, find the ethical calculus unassailable. I'm not the biggest fan of manned spaceflight, and I couldn't care less about the ISS in particular. But how does "ethical calculus" tell you to care about killing the ISS, vs. say LIGO, or wasteful military spending, or the video game industry, or foie gras, or goldschlager, or TikTok or astronomy in general or the Xbox or selfie sticks or... If I was dictator, I'd prefer missions like New Horizons, but I can't see what ethical calculation is involved, I'd just rather see pictures of far away stuff than pay taxes for a space station to go around in circles.
onethought 6y ago
The problem with Privatised space industry is your country doesn't control the agenda. SpaceX is a pretty rare thing, the rest of the private space industry (Blue Origin, Virgin, Boeing) is as much of a money pit as NASA was. Then you have rapidly progressing government run space programs like China and India. The fact that the US banned China from the ISS and banned Non-Americans from participating in what it deems as weapon systems has only driven more resolve for home grown/soveraign alternatives.
- curiousllama 6y ago
  > you don’t control the agenda True, but not really in the way you describe. The US is the main (often, the only) customer of US space companies. If you control the money, you control the operational agenda. If you want a a new ISS? Just write up the contract. The way in which you don’t control the agenda is only inasmuch as the strategic interests of the space company diverges from those of the US govt. But typically, with outsourced high-value work, vendors will evolve to MORE closely align to their big customers. (It screws the small customers often, but hey, the govt isn’t small). The issue in my mind is much more value extraction & leverage, but as long as there’s multiple players (including an in-sourced option), I don’t see how it’s a problem.
  - lordlic 6y ago
    Gigadollar-scale space projects seem like a particularly poor fit for the private industry model, though. Conventionally the idea of free-market competition is that companies stand to gain if they succeed but have to eat the losses if they fail, and so competition eventually selects the best. But we're not talking about making widgets or sandwiches or launch vehicles. Things like the ISS, JWST, etc are all one-off projects, and they cannot be allowed to fail, so competition doesn't really help and the public is left holding the bag, just like we see in the endless cost overruns of politically unkillable DoD contracts. "Public bad private good" isn't a coherent strategy. If NASA isn't good enough then the preference should be to improve NASA rather than to insert an unnecessary layer of profit-taking for SpaceX or Boeing to do the same thing anyway.
jjcon 6y ago
> NASA's budget has been strangled for decades now It’s higher than it was in the 70s and has remained pretty constant since then trending upward (when adjusting for inflation) http://static1.squarespace.com/static/500caca8e4b0e4a25027aa89/t/55fb0596e4b08bcd43b186a3/1442514329598/ http://static1.squarespace.com/static/500caca8e4b0e4a25027aa...
- mkl 6y ago
  Yes. But in another way to look at it, as a percentage of the US federal budget, in 2017 and 2019 it was the lowest it's been since 1959. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA
  - jjcon 6y ago
    As there continue to be more and more federal programs that will pretty much be the case for any individual portion of the federal budget - smaller proportionally but larger over all - so that really doesn’t say anything
mikro2nd 6y ago
The program might not have borne all the speculative fruits, but the one very major thing that has come out of it is the learning about the effects of living in micro-gravity on the human body. If ever we want to get humans out into the rest of the solar system, this knowledge is priceless. Oh, I know that NASA has this constant pressure to justify that learning in terms of stuff like "medical benefits" (and there surely are a bunch of those!) but really it's the foundational pure science that's critical here. I don't think there's any monetary value can be put on that.

by snoshy 6y ago

calibas 6y ago

>Then there's a genuine question of what this enormous expenditure truly buys us. It helps to answer the question of whether or not humans can even survive long term away from Earth. Sure, if you judge it purely by the price tag, it's not doing very well. If you judge it by the scientific, societal and philosophical implications, we're not spending nearly enough.

YetAnotherNick 6y ago
> It helps to answer the question of whether or not humans can even survive long term away from Earth How will it answer that question that we already don't know of? I don't think that was the aim of ISS anyways and will definitely won't be the aim of second ISS. Humans can survive in space for year without significant physical damage but with lot of training.
- calibas 6y ago
  To me, it's just so odd that people don't seem to understand why we have an ISS. Is the main argument "We've already learned what's needed about life in space, and now we don't need a space station anymore"? That seems absurd.
  - bluGill 6y ago
    The ISS exists to give Russia cover to keep the ex Soviet rocket scientists employed and thus not tempted to work for some evil dictatorship.
  - lordlic 6y ago
    No, the argument is that there's plenty to learn, and it's all very interesting, but it doesn't stand up against people's very real needs here on Earth. I'm about the biggest fan of space you'll find, but even I, sadly, find the ethical calculus unassailable. Manned spaceflight won't accrue material benefits for ten generations or much more, and meanwhile human beings are dying of treatable or curable diseases, suffering under poverty, and living without access to clean water. This spoken-word work from 1970 conveys the sentiment well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goh2x_G0ct4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goh2x_G0ct4
    - perl4ever 6y ago
      >I'm about the biggest fan of space you'll find, but even I, sadly, find the ethical calculus unassailable. I'm not the biggest fan of manned spaceflight, and I couldn't care less about the ISS in particular. But how does "ethical calculus" tell you to care about killing the ISS, vs. say LIGO, or wasteful military spending, or the video game industry, or foie gras, or goldschlager, or TikTok or astronomy in general or the Xbox or selfie sticks or... If I was dictator, I'd prefer missions like New Horizons, but I can't see what ethical calculation is involved, I'd just rather see pictures of far away stuff than pay taxes for a space station to go around in circles.

onethought 6y ago

The problem with Privatised space industry is your country doesn't control the agenda. SpaceX is a pretty rare thing, the rest of the private space industry (Blue Origin, Virgin, Boeing) is as much of a money pit as NASA was. Then you have rapidly progressing government run space programs like China and India. The fact that the US banned China from the ISS and banned Non-Americans from participating in what it deems as weapon systems has only driven more resolve for home grown/soveraign alternatives.

curiousllama 6y ago
> you don’t control the agenda True, but not really in the way you describe. The US is the main (often, the only) customer of US space companies. If you control the money, you control the operational agenda. If you want a a new ISS? Just write up the contract. The way in which you don’t control the agenda is only inasmuch as the strategic interests of the space company diverges from those of the US govt. But typically, with outsourced high-value work, vendors will evolve to MORE closely align to their big customers. (It screws the small customers often, but hey, the govt isn’t small). The issue in my mind is much more value extraction & leverage, but as long as there’s multiple players (including an in-sourced option), I don’t see how it’s a problem.
- lordlic 6y ago
  Gigadollar-scale space projects seem like a particularly poor fit for the private industry model, though. Conventionally the idea of free-market competition is that companies stand to gain if they succeed but have to eat the losses if they fail, and so competition eventually selects the best. But we're not talking about making widgets or sandwiches or launch vehicles. Things like the ISS, JWST, etc are all one-off projects, and they cannot be allowed to fail, so competition doesn't really help and the public is left holding the bag, just like we see in the endless cost overruns of politically unkillable DoD contracts. "Public bad private good" isn't a coherent strategy. If NASA isn't good enough then the preference should be to improve NASA rather than to insert an unnecessary layer of profit-taking for SpaceX or Boeing to do the same thing anyway.

jjcon 6y ago

> NASA's budget has been strangled for decades now It’s higher than it was in the 70s and has remained pretty constant since then trending upward (when adjusting for inflation) http://static1.squarespace.com/static/500caca8e4b0e4a25027aa89/t/55fb0596e4b08bcd43b186a3/1442514329598/ http://static1.squarespace.com/static/500caca8e4b0e4a25027aa...

mkl 6y ago
Yes. But in another way to look at it, as a percentage of the US federal budget, in 2017 and 2019 it was the lowest it's been since 1959. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA
- jjcon 6y ago
  As there continue to be more and more federal programs that will pretty much be the case for any individual portion of the federal budget - smaller proportionally but larger over all - so that really doesn’t say anything

mikro2nd 6y ago

The program might not have borne all the speculative fruits, but the one very major thing that has come out of it is the learning about the effects of living in micro-gravity on the human body. If ever we want to get humans out into the rest of the solar system, this knowledge is priceless. Oh, I know that NASA has this constant pressure to justify that learning in terms of stuff like "medical benefits" (and there surely are a bunch of those!) but really it's the foundational pure science that's critical here. I don't think there's any monetary value can be put on that.