“You can certainly do a cost assessment for an ISS science topic, and decide whether dollars would be saved by doing with an expendible launcher and robotic systems instead of with ISS.”

IF you’re using proven analogies. Every time we base a new system on new technologies and techniques, NASA at least has a horrible track record of coming close to estimates.

That’s kind of why you brought this up, and it’s a valid concern, but that’s why I think it’s not so easy to come up with comparables to something that is so unique. Sure you can come up with costs for a single experiment, but that doesn’t scale so well to a multi-use facility.

Out of curiosity, how are our other National Laboratories judged?

“As far as I can tell, that’s correct, It’s ME who is challenging CASIS, not the feds. (Not that my challenge is likely to go anywhere!)”

As a taxpayer, it’s a fair question. And I definitely think that NASA is not asked to validate the worth of what they’re doing enough. Programs like the Shuttle go on automatic and it’s assumed that they are worthy, but like I mentioned earlier, no one ever validates that assumption.

I like rules to be applied evenly, so not only should the ISS be evaluated for “value”, but the SLS too – better now than after it wastes $50B.

Good heavens. You can certainly do a cost assessment for an ISS science topic, and decide whether dollars would be saved by doing with an expendible launcher and robotic systems instead of with ISS. That’s just daft to believe that you have to DO something to cost it. If that were the case, nothing would ever get done.

‘As far as I can tell, they are not charged with doing a cost assessment.”

As far as I can tell, that’s correct, It’s ME who is challenging CASIS, not the feds. (Not that my challenge is likely to go anywhere!)

It’s really simple. It appears to me that there is a lot of “science” that the ISS team proud of having done that could have been much more easily been done by unmanned systems. I named a few above. But I think the lesson that this is teaching us is that we don’t do these things with ISS because that’s the cheapest way to get it done, but because we’ve decided that people need to be there, and heaven forbid they get bored to tears twiddling their thumbs.

I believe that people need to be there, and I believe that ISS is doing great, and valuable work in providing experience with human survival in space. But let’s just not pretend that ISS is the godsend for science, when sometimes it really isn’t.

Or if the deep space spacecraft does depart from L1/L2, but the payloads get there through EOR with a prefueled transfer stage, just like Constellation or DIRECT would have done. There’s no reason EOR would only work with HLVs, in fact EOR makes them unnecessary, even before we have depots. After that, large rockets become even less useful, although a larger upper stage would become very useful and that would give a larger rocket as a side effect.

I repeated your post exactly as you wrote it. You wrote “Soyuz”, not “Progress”. You’re the one who can’t follow your own writing, not me.

“and simply refuse to accept commercial for ISS operations isn’t necessary”

It’s necessary if you don’t want to send a half-billion U.S. taxpayer dollars to Russia each year. It’s necessary if you want to have an alternative for crew transport if Soyuz has a bad day. It’s necessary to sustain operations because the flight rates for ATV, Progress, and HTV aren’t high enough. It’s necessary if you’re going to bring the cost of space transport down to a level where there’s enough funding left over in NASA’s budget to develop and operate BEO systems. It’s necessary if you’re going to crew and sustain those BEO systems affordably.

“LEO is a ticket to no place.”

LEO is the only place you have to go through to get to anywhere else in the solar system.

Compare that to the two ccdev craft. Dragon can bring up 6mt and bring down 1MT in 10 m3 worth of space. Cygnus can bring up 2mt worth of dry and has 18.9 m3 worth of volume and can handle up to a. Orbital’s contract is for 1.9 billion for 8 flights. Space X’s contract is 1.6 billion for 12 flights. Total 3.5 billion, barely enough to buy 1 flight of the shuttle.

Let’s say you wanted to support another space station or moon base or even stock a mars bound craft. You can use what currently exists or modify for this function. For instance in terms of life-support the biggest problem isn’t mass but volume. Food and clothes are not really heavy, they are bulky. Something like Cygnus could hold about 3 months worth of supply and could easily be launched towards l1/l2 using a delta rocket. If solar electric propulsion is available (or if you deep spacecraft departs from LEO) no bigger rocket needed.

“If our country can find a way to maintain and support the national parks in a way that is a lot less expensive than the National Park Service does right now, I’d say that that agency isn’t providing value.”

How do you find out if you can do something better than the way it’s currently being done, unless you do it differently? For the ISS, that’s hard to do in parallel, and it wouldn’t be cheap either.

But I think the science community would be the best organization to make that determination, wouldn’t you? Based on our goals for space?

“ It’s a challenge to the CASIS review team to do that cost assessment that they could do far better than I could.”

As far as I can tell, they are not charged with doing a cost assessment. On their website they say “CASIS is designed to maximize the utilization of the ISS U.S. National Lab…” Unless that’s something that Congress has authorized them to do, however Congress usually asks the GAO to make those kinds of assessments.

Except they do, have and will. The ISS’s crew of six won’t miss a meal. And most wheels of cheese and can fit in a Soyuz and a Progress just fine.

Well, yes it is. If our country can find a way to maintain and support the national parks in a way that is a lot less expensive than the National Park Service does right now, I’d say that that agency isn’t providing value.

“Today, with automation and better robotic systems with better end effectors, maybe the equation would be different.”

That’s precisely right.

“You though – you – haven’t tried coming up with a cost for individual experiments to be run independently from the ISS. Until you do, all you have is a supposition, or theory, with no basis of comparison.”

Exactly right. It’s a supposition, or better yet, a question. It’s a challenge to the CASIS review team to do that cost assessment that they could do far better than I could. It’s not up to me to do it. I’m paying for ISS science, but that doesn’t mean I have to assess the value of it. I’m not saying that ISS science isn’t cost effective. I’m just saying that I’ve never seen good assurance that it is compared to other options for doing that science. Now the CASIS evaluation team is assuredly not being charged by HEOMD to do that assessment, about whether we need humans in space, and that’s part of the problem.

Now, let’s be fair. If the main goal of ISS is to do science, then that’s a cost assessment that really needs to be done. If the main goal is to understand how to support humans in space, then it’s nice to give those humans something to do while we’re trying to support them. As long as they’re going to be there anyway, asking them to do some science isn’t hard. But let’s not pretend that the science is driving the bus.

But the “Benefit for Humanity” document doesn’t put it that way.

“This unique scientific platform continues to enable researchers from all over the world to put their talents to work on innovative experiments that could not be done anywhere else.”

While that statement may well be correct in a limited way, for much of ISS science, my humble supposition is that it’s not quite true.

“Soyuz can carry up whatever is strapped inside…”

You mean as long as it’s small enough. Besides the size limitation because of the docking system it uses, Soyuz only has 8.5m3 of volume between it’s two modules, and Progress has 7.6m3 of volume for cargo. The most cargo the Progress can carry is 2,650kg (5,842lbs). Pretty small, and pretty limited.

Compare that to ESA’s ATV, which has an interior volume of 48m3, and which can carry 7,667kg of cargo. Or JAXA’s HTV, which has 14m3 of cargo volume, and because it uses the common berthing mechanism (CBM), it can carry up International Standard Payload Racks (ISPR).

Soyuz and Progress are OK for some tasks, but they can’t support a full-sized space station on their own. It would be like supplying all the needs of an Earth-bound science facility using a 1967 VW Beetle.

As always, your lack of knowledge about anything built after the 60’s leaves you looking quite ignorant.