“Justin, the desperation to keep selling this turkey after decades and billions of dollats spent is evident. It comes down to this- what did they do up there today to justify the cost… or yesterday…that’s what it’s all about.”

Granted, congress made this the pork wagon of the century, but you are totally insane trying to characterize it like you do.

This is a lab, regardless of how long it took to get built, that was just finished. It doesn’t matter where you build a lab, it is insane to write it has produced nothing before the freakin’ thing is done.

Second, lets build a lab on the ground, and limit it to one truck load of material every few months. We do not have a reliable, consistant cargo transportation system yet.

AGAIN, it is insane to make these statements when a lab just comes on line but astrotechs still can’t travel to it on a regular basis and ground personal can not get experiments moved there and back …yet.

How soon after a lab is FULLY operation and max personal are employed does it take for a lab to get some results? According to you 5 minutes after they do the ribbon cutting dedication.

“You do realize that had the ISS been anchored to the floor of the Ocean of Storms,”

Can you name anyone from NASA that has suggested that a base at the floor of the Ocean of Storms would be a good place for a base?

The US has routinely abandoned bases. How many military bases have been abandoned in our history? Unless that base was buried under a few feet of regolith it’s life expectancy would actually be less than a base orbiting in LEO.

=yawn= As if we wait for Smitty to post to view televised herarings on matters space. Yep, you’re a fella who waits to be tols what do do allright. And youv’e been told.

Justin Kugler wrote @ July 28th, 2012 at 2:30 pm

Justin, the desperation to keep selling this turkey after decades and billions of dollats spent is evident. It comes down to this- what did they do up there today to justify the cost… or yesterday…that’s what it’s all about. When Apollo astrounats were doing EVA at their various landing sites, it was calculated that it was costing taxpayers about $1 million/minute as they worked out on the lunar surface. And subsequently virtually every fragment of time was busy time, with plenty to do, and thanks to checklists and TV, it was all pretty much accounted for. Yeas later in retrospect, it remains on of the common laments by Apollo crews that they had essentially no time to just personally internalize where they were and what they were doing. =sigh= The ISS is a dinosaur, Justin. A relic of Cold War planning and with each rev, fins it increasingly difficult to find a raison d’etre in the 21st century.

@Coastal Ron wrote @ July 27th, 2012 at 6:32 pm

=yawn= As if we wait for Smitty to post to kepe up w/ televised hearings on matters space. =eyeroll= Yep, you’re a fella who waits to be told what do do for sure. And you’ve been told.

“After 27 years of planning, $100 billion expended and over a decade on orbit, that’s all?”

Based on the timestamp of your post, you didn’t even watch the video.

As usual, you don’t even know what you’re talking about.

“It runs 1 hour 40 minutes.”

After 27 years of planning, $100 billion expended and over a decade on orbit, that’s all?!? LOL

“If all you see is its orbit, you’re not looking at the whole picture.”

No, in fact the ‘whole picture’ is what you’re missing- this is less of a HSF project than a leftover relic from Cold War planning. The ISS was originally supposed to be an element of a larger space exploration/exploitation plan, strangled as the financing fizzled over the years as the Cold War thawed and melted away. It is really no more than a government works project initiated as a solution to a Cold War political problem. Today, it is a one-off and increasingly obtuse within the geopolitical and economic framework of the early 21st century. It is a dinosaur that has more in common w/t Berlin Wall, carburators, Minuteman missile silos, boomboxes, cathode ray TV tubes and the back-up Skylab– museum pieces all.

“Splashing the ISS certainly doesn’t because it removes NASA’s ability to do sustained testbed work on-orbit.”

Rubbish- there’s half a century of LEO ops data to tap from varous programs, U.S. and others, and the cost/benefit analysis for this particular turkey worsens with each rev. Relentlessly under crewed w/an over abundance of time spent on maintenence chores rather than research, such as it is– and now time dicvered to ‘grappling’ a Dragon or two on occasion as well. If this was 1988 and the thing was up and running, you might have a pitch, but for this era, it’s woefully obsolete and represents past planning from an era long, long over.

@Coastal Ron wrote @ July 27th, 2012 at 2:35 pm

=yawn= You said it yourself, by labeling the ISS a ‘national lab’ =eyeroll= Edison had a ‘research lab,’ too, and the people financing him directed him to channel his research to produce results- that is, deliver a ROI for them, or they’d pull the fiscal plug. And he did just that. The ISS isn’t doing that. You have it backwards, it is DCSCA who does the telling. And you’ve been told.

“What did you mean by infrastructure?”

Wikipedia defines infrastructure as:

“Infrastructure is basic physical and organizational structures needed for the operation of a society or enterprise, or the services and facilities necessary for an economy to function. It can be generally defined as the set of interconnected structural elements that provide framework supporting an entire structure of development.”

In this case we’re talking about expanding out into space, and the ISS currently functions as our outpost. NASA and others have also viewed the ISS as a jumping off point for beyond-LEO trips, and it certainly has the flexibility to do that even today.

“Right now ISS is just a international laboratory, not shipyard or space fuel depo.”

True, but it wouldn’t take much to alter it’s capabilities. In fact the most important part about the ISS is that it’s already there, so if you wanted to do artificial gravity experiments using spinning structures, the ISS could either accommodate them connected, or act as a nearby base to do tests. You wouldn’t need to build a whole new outpost to support a free-flying test platform.

“And there is a need of goal/goals/destinations so different parts of LEO infrastructure is used simultaniously to complete those goals.”

The mission of the International Space Station (ISS) is to “enable long-term exploration of space and provide benefits to people on Earth.”

The other stuff you mentioned is much further out, after we’ve learned how to survive long-term first.

“Now ISS brings little – cause most of human health/plant research already done on Salut6-7 and Mir stations, except some experiments that can be done robotically on small lab sattelites cheaply.”

The Salyut and Mir stations were state-of-the-art at the time they were built and used, but they have been far surpassed by the ISS in both capabilities and science output. Our ability to collect and analyze what’s going on with experiments as they happen today far exceeds what was possible even with the Mir.

“And don’t give me BS that goverments can’t make money or can’t lease it to companies.”

I’ve already addressed this earlier when I said that the U.S. could lease, sell-off or even give the U.S. portion of the ISS to private U.S. entities.

Quick observation though – when the ISS was being planned to be ended in order to fund the Constellation program, there were no commercial transportation systems that would have allowed private U.S. entities take it over, so that wasn’t even considered. Once Commercial Crew is in place, that means that the U.S. won’t have to de-orbit the ISS if private organizations want to continue supporting it. THAT is one of the unrecognized benefits the cargo and crew systems bring, is the reuse of space assets that earlier could have only survived with 100% government funding.