What is the value of the ISS?

On Jul 7, 2008, at 8:16 AM, ANTIcarrot wrote:
> > From: Joe Strout
> > Mir was a great station, no doubt about it. But ISS is already more
> > than twice as big.
>
> A hand built SUV at a cost of $500k is not necesaserily worth more
> (in any
> sense) than a machine built car half as big that costs $20k.
>

Sure. But do we have the equivalent of a $20k machine-built car in
space? No, we don't, so let's not claim that the hand-built SUV is no
better than no vehicle at all. At the very least, we're getting more
experience building vehicles. (And as an engineer, my experience is
that you have to build something by hand a few times before you can do
a decent job of automating the process anyway.)

> > Yes, true, there's a lot of stupidity at the governmental
> > level making ISS far less useful than it could be. But it's still
> much
> > better than nothing.
>
> I disagree. America uses NASA as a tool to manipulate the space
> programmes
> of allied nations. Such 'cooperation' discourages independent
> thinking. The
> huge cost 'proves' that space is too expensive for smaller
> governments to
> dabble with. "But NASA surely ccan't be that stupid!" is an
> arguement that
> is the bane of anyone trying to sugggest an alternative way of doing
> things.
> If the ISS disn't exist there might be a lot more healthy innovation
> and
> international competition in space.
>

It's easy to imagine that, just as it was easy in the 60's to imagine
nuclear rockets tooling around the solar system, departing from giant
rotating space stations (see "2001" for an example of such
imagination). However, imagining something doesn't make it real.
It's just as likely that if ISS didn't exist, the total population in
space for the last decade would have been zero.

If you mean competition between governments, then who exactly? If the
U.S. doesn't have a space station, then the only players left would be
the Russians. China's launching one guy every couple of years, and
nobody else is even close. That's not competition -- that's a Russian
monopoly. (Which may be a little better than an American monopoly,
since they run their program in a more capitalist way, but it's not
MUCH better.)

And if you are imagining commercial services would have stepped up to
fill the gap, I find this highly doubtful. Commercial space transport
is only now struggling to reach the suborbital stage. The only
serious prospect of commercial manned launch to orbit is due to COTS,
which wouldn't exist without the need to reach ISS.

> It's like fusion. Tokamak projects suck up all funding; and rational
> intelligence. Mathemetics, engineering, and even functional prototypes
> become irrelevent. Any alternative idea faces an uphill struggle
> because,
> "If it was such a good idea, everyone would be doing it right now,"
> and
> because questioning The Project is heresy because it undermines
> support for
> The Project.
>

That's a good description of the fusion situation, but I'm not
convinced it applies to space development. We don't necessarily need
innovative new approaches to space launch, as we do with fusion. To
use your car analogy, we just need to start building and operating
rockets like a modern manufacturing process, rather than hand-
assembling (and launching!) every one with an army of expensive
people. But that's easy to say in a hand-wavy, ignoring-the-details
sort of way. To do it real life requires mastery of many thousands of
details, and that mastery comes from experience in actually reaching
and operating in space.

> > Science or exploration, true. But it is clearly NOT a zero when it
> > comes to operational experience.
>
> Remember job hunting. Experience is only useful if it's relevent.
> The ISS is
> made from tissue paper and tin foil. If the low-cost problem is
> solved,
> almost all that experience will be completely redundant. If we start
> using
> inflatomatics, almost all that experience will be completely
> redundant. Any
> time we start using automated docking and robot assembally (beyond
> canadarm)
> almost all that experience will be completely redundant. If we start
> using
> spinning stations, almost all that experience will be completely
> redundant.
>

I have to disagree on pretty much every point. Was experience
building cars one by one irrelevant when Henry Ford sat down to design
the first assembly line? Of course not. You HAVE to build them first
by hand to understand the tasks well enough to break them out into a
line. In the first assembly lines, all those tasks were still done by
hand; was that irrelevant when factory robots came along? Again, of
course not; it was only from the experience of the hand assemblers
that automated ones could be built.

To draw from my own field: were those years of software written in
hand-coded machine language a waste of time once assemblers came
along? What about the years of writing in assembler before the
development of C? Or the years of writing in C before more modern,
object-oriented languages? No, no, and no. They were necessary
operational experience that *enabled* the development of better, more
efficient techniques.

You simply can't jump from not doing something at all, to doing it in
some fancy automated way, without first doing it the simpler, less
efficient, manual way.

Look, I'm not a defender of ISS in general. It's in a lousy orbit,
and has been the victim of many other design (and political)
compromises that make it much less useful than it could, in theory,
be. But you guys are being ridiculous. It has enabled a continuous
human presence in space. Every year of real experience with something
is worth a decade or more of sitting around a table theorizing about
it. You never know exactly what's going to go wrong, and how you're
going to handle it, until it actually happens (like the recent solar
panel repair, which was a marvelous exercise in dealing successfully
with a real, unforeseen problem in the space environment). And for
that, the ISS is valuable.

> > That's like saying: we built a factory in the 1800s, so "we"
>
> > (whoever
> > that is, I can't guess) don't need to build factories anymore -- we
> > already know everything there is to know about building them. It's
> > just silly.
>
> Factories make money. At the very least they make goods. What does
> the ISS
> make? Apart from happy contractors with full pockets?
>

You missed the point of the analogy. Factories are very complex
operational artifacts; so is any space station (or colony). The
analogy was about the experience required to make such a thing. (Cars
are a less apt analogy, because while they are mechanically complex,
they're not operationally complex.)

> > Currently, like it or not, that means ISS; it's all we've got.
>
> And the other space station in orbit. I know you probably think it
> doesn't
> count, since it's only a prototype (and was after all launched by
> non-americans) but it's still there, and it's still the harbinger of
> doom
> for the entire late 70s-era ISS design philosophy.
>

If you're talking about Bigelow's crafts, they don't count because
they do not (and can not) support humans. They're satellites, not
space stations. They are an exciting development, but I'm certain
that the Bigelow engineers have studied (and continue to study) ISS
for lessons that will help make their own space stations, when they
come, more likely to succeed.

Best,
- Joe