Is there actually cutting edge science taking place on the ISS? Sure, the reports from unmanned spacecraft tend to get published in high profile journals, but the ISS stuff?
Look through the list of experiments run on Shuttle-Mir or on the ISS and you’ll see that most of them are published in third- or fourth-tier journals, if they’re published at all. Compare that to the mountains of seminal publications (not to mention a Nobel Prize or two) coming from unmanned spacecraft, and the difference is stark. If you factor in cost, the comparison becomes outrageous.
Isn’t it great how people like you know what I personally am and am not against?
I’m so glad you’re here to inform me that I’m “not against the US going for a stroll to Iraq or Afghanistan”. Your staggeringly blind, entirely ignorant, and (as it happens) completely inaccurate assumption is so very helpful here - it shows you have no interest in an actual discussion, and I can safely ignore anything further you say.
Yes, because they really need a full space program to launch weather satellites, and because this most recent mission (the topic of the news post and the origin of this entire discussion) has anything at all to do with weather satelittes.
Your comments answer themselves, from the right angle. First off, forget interstellar travel, probably for the next few thousand years. Stick to the solar system.
We have one planet we can live on, and in many ways we’re screwing it up through mismanagement, and space has the potential to address some of that.
Consider NASA’s nascent work on zero-g metallurgy and low- or zero-g manufacturing technology. In 20 years an initially small device on the moon or Mars or an asteroid could be slowly cranking out infrastructure using local materials, bypassing the $10k/lb price tag. That makes things a lot more attractive. And since once you get going at a steady pace no one cares too much about the transit time of rocks, you can send it back to Earth for very little fuel.
Also, right now we have our eggs all in one basket. We screw up this world by climate change, nuclear war, massive pandemics, and so one, we’re extinct (or at least so few survive we can’t sustain or rebuild a technological civilization). We don’t notice a large incoming asteroid or pending supervolcano eruption, same thing. We manage even a small self-sustaining colony anywhere else in the solar system, our odds of long-term survival (recolonizing Earth etc.) shoot up tremendously.
Economically, many of the elements that are scarce here are abundant elsewhere. The reason the main industrial uses for precious metals are in catalysis does not support the claim that there isn’t additional demand - today huge sums are spent reducing how much is needed and recycling as much as possible, money that could be spent elsewhere if the metals were cheaper. Also, catalysis is enormously important for everything from petrochemical production to drug manufacturing. Toss in helium-3 (yes, controlled fusion is plausible on the same several-decades-to-a-century timeframe as lunar or asteroidal mining) as well.
No, businesses don’t operate on the timeframe. That’s why they’re not developing these capabilities. But governments and research institutes can and should. And once they’re done, we can let businesses scale it up and make a killing to our mutual benefit.
My day was much better without reading your nonsense, but thanks for your concern.
No I do not know what you are for or against in general (and have much better things to do), but you made a few clear points here so yea I can assume whatever I like, and you can prove me wrong or say as much nonsense as you please.
So let me recap how your space program argument went: Space is useless, poor people need that money.
Space might be usless indeed, but WAY MORE money are wasted on wars. So your awesome argument could be “Money are wasted on wars, and poor people need that money more”.
To put things into perspective with a quick search, NASA has spend 1.358 trillion $ since 1958. A lot of money? Yes. Wasted money? No.
Iraq and Afghanistan wars costed between 4 and 6 trillion $ since 2000.
You could add the cost of Vietnam war, and god knows what else.
Then again, you can call me names and “progress” the discussion.
edit: at a sidenote, facebook paid 19 billion $ to buy Whatsapp. The poor ex-yahoo engineers stoped being poor. YAHOOOOOOO
