NEWS: US Shuttle Woes Worry International Community

GEEK: US Shuttle Woes Worry International Community

NASA's continued inability to launch a cargo shuttle is beginning to concern the international community. Countries like Japan are waiting patiently to send modules and equipment to the International Space Station.

The International Space Station is a joint effort between 16 countries, but the US has the lead role in carrying parts into orbit. Construction of the ISS has all but stopped while NASA's fleet has been grounded, and the US may not be able to complete its promised role in finishing the station.

With countries like China now sending manned flights into orbit and US firms working on private and commercial space travel, how long will it be before NASA becomes obsolete?

I think NASA is just being very cautious because they don't want anymore disasters happening.

Astounding logic.

I think NASA will find themselves obsolete quite quickly because of their unwillingness to take risks.

If NASA were a private company, it would have found itself bought and liquidated long ago, with its best "products" carried over to a new company's line. As it is now, it can't try and do too many new things, because it has to assign much of its budget to supporting old and crufty products.

I'd like to see NASA continue to exist, experimenting with new things, but also letting go of the past and letting private industry take over where it makes sense.

Realize it probably isn't NASA as much as the politicians which fund, or rather tend to fail to fund, NASA which are cutting into their ability to keep doing things as rapidly as in the past. The government is no longer as willing as it once was to put billions of dollars at risk for something they feel gives us no real benefits. Not too surprising considering how we're falling behind in other scientific fields as well because the government utterly fails to recognize the importance of them and their future applications.

while i do see where the international community is coming from; they've invested a lot of money too, nasa has a very fine line to walk. they can't afford too many risks right now because they're already one suttle short. if they lose another shuttle, these small setbacks will seem like nothing.

I think that the problem is the opposite: They are being given too much money.

The willingness of congress to give NASA money encourages it to keep business as usual, instead of realizing ways to do things faster, better, and cheaper.

Look at the Discovery Missions, the missions that were put together for around 150 million a piece. They produced amazing amounts of data for the money. And compare this to the Voyager programs, which cost around 2-3 Billion in today's money.

I think NASA needs to ditch the shuttle ASAP, and figure out a new way to get to space. We have made a lot of tech developments in the past 30 years, and our space technology should reflect that. Instead, we have the shuttle, which is the "safe" way to go about getting into orbit. Tried and proven technology, all the way. This costs us. Do you know how much a single launch costs? 1.3 billion dollars! This is unacceptable for something that was designed to cut lauch expenditures.

We need another space revolution. We need NASA engineers to sit the fuck down and come up with new ideas, because there has to be a better way of doing it. And if they won't, someone else will. The X Prize was an excellent showing of that. China may be another source of innovation. If NASA doesn't act quickly, they will be left behind being the only ones still using 1960's technology

I'm terrified about the idea of flying to Mars by a company owned and operated by John Carmack. Imagine the practical jokes.

I think its also time that everyone realised that the Space Station is a useless piece of space junk, and should be sent down to burn up in the atmosphere as soon as possible.

How much money do we need to spend to find out the effects of zero gravity on small screws?


Its definately time for a space revolution. According to all the old programs we should all be living on the moon in shiny silver space suits.

I want my space suit dammit!

The Shuttles are pretty old. Are any of them still using magnetic core store memory?

The problems with designing and building new craft is the huge cost of development. If a product could be developed and sold to other nations it mightbring the cost down a bit. But once you've built them you have to run them until they're held together with duct-tape, which is tricky if you have living people on them. Especially with the risk-averse nature of US space flight at the moment.

[QUOTE\]
bean said:

Small screws? You have fucking got to be kidding.

http://www.shuttlepresskit.com/ISS_OVR/

Some of those sound a little tenuous...and also perhaps a little unethical.

I'm not sure that anyone can justify the amount of money being spent on the ISS to research those things.

How many billions is the ISS costing now? I've lost count...

[Edited on Jul 18, 2005 by JohnFM1]

Save us, Richard Branson!

Nasa does a lot more than putting heaps of junk build by the lowest bidder into space.
first and foremost nasa is researching the universe, they have far greater scope than any commercial project or any random country wishing to put a man into space.

manned space flights and supply runs to space stations are probably the least significant thing nasa does but those things are the crowdpleasers.
untill someone else starts documenting the birth of stars or the search for new and/or habitable planets and looking at all those other miracles of the galaxy why would nasa be obsolete at all?

most commercial interest into space stops at orbit or perhaps the moon, that's just where nasa's interests begin.

X prize winner says....

Humans have a "moral imperative" to open up space as a "new frontier"

He also believes that within the next decade humans will find ubiquitous life on Mars and, in our lifetime, millions of people will be going into space.

Examples of the types of U.S. research that will be performed aboard the station include:

• Protein crystal studies:
Going to cure cancer? How exactly?

• Tissue culture:
Growing cells in high radiation? Yep, that’ll be useful. And we can grow cells perfectly well here on earth. Growing them in zero gravity is just going to make it harder to apply any finding to ‘natural’ cells.

• Life in low gravity: The effects of long-term exposure to reduced gravity on humans – weakening muscles; changes in how the heart, arteries and veins work; and the loss of bone density, among others – will be studied aboard the station.

A tad unethical don’t you think? Kind of like studying the effects of bullets on people, but slower.

• Flames, fluids and metal in space:
Could be fun.

• The nature of space:
this one might actually be useful…

• Watching the Earth:
Satellites anyone?

• Commercialization
Now we get to the real point eh?

Nor to anyone else it seems.

Yeah, I didn't quite mean that they were actually recieving too much money....more like, they were recieving too much money for what they are putting out....i.e. congress rewards failure, and that hurts NASA.

I think it's just an example of economics.....no one was competing with NASA for a long time, and they had a monopoly (on manned space flight), and it is an inefficient use of resources, as you can see from the results NASA has been putting out.

No one can deny that NASA could be doing a lot more with the money they are getting. They just have no incentive to really invent or innovate right now.

Why is this sort of thing useless? I think it is necessary knowledge for any long term space stay, or long term trip

God yes. I hope and pray that commercialization of space _will_ happen. It's the next logical step.

I want to know if the US has lost the pig semen in space race