David Leckrone's Premature Judgement of ISS

Two thoughts here:

1. It may not be "done" yet, but it's been usable for quite some time now.

2. The comment is a little "my dad can beat up your dad".

Indeed it is premature to compare them today.

But let's see where this is heading. Hubble launch and new instruments and repair work and all is maybe $10B. Space Station is more than $100B. So will Space Station return more than ten times the science of Hubble? Considering what's been discussed so far, I'm wondering if it will even return one tenth.

But for the cost of ISS, we could have built 10 Hubble-class missions and serviced them each 5 times (though for most astrophsyics missions we envision, we wouldn't want to service in LEO). But even beyond that, what is the exciting science planned for ISS -- will it just be finding out how humans take to zero-g, which is a circular argument for a space station? Or will it be something that really captures the human spirit and inspires people to wonder about the Universe?

While the ISS is still "under construction" by some definition (for 10+ years, by the way), people have circled the Earth and done micro-gravity experiments of all kinds for almost 50 years, sometimes using expensive laboratories like those provided by Skylab, the Saluts, Mir, the Spacelab in many configurations and the SpaceHab.

So: Where are the hard figures about the *impact* the research done in micro-g has had on the respective fields of biology, physics, etc.? There are established metrics for the value of science facilities (based on how often papers resulting from their use are quoted in good journals etc.), but you almost never see these mentioned when it comes to manned space flight.

Aah, and please go away with this "we didn't have the right facilities in orbit yet, but just wait til we have XXX" argument - I've heard that by top defenders of crewed space activities all the way back to the 1980's when it came to dealing with the (apparently mediocre, even to key managers) results from the early Spacelab flights ...

I see it as a way to learn to live in space for a long time using minimum mass. This is essential for manned missions past LEO and the moon. It is much more than just human tolerance to zero gravity. All the systems to provide for the people need to be developed and tested. The recent success with recycling water is a great example.

Are there any plans to up the time for some crew members to simulate Mars of NEO missions? The Russians tried this a while ago but they stopped. Did they find out it wasn't a good idea?

Danny Deger

Real simple. HST is a scientific triumph. ISS is a technological triumph. The reverse is not true. (HST was a very significant technological achievement, but at least now we know how to do it a lot better. Not a triumph.) OK, ISS may well turn into a scientific triumph, but I don't see that in the cards.

This is comparing apples and oranges. Or, Leckrone is right, but he's only telling half the story. Not worth arguing about.

Let's be honest. The ISS has been an unmitigated disaster for the US. If it had been completed on schedule and on budget in the early '90's it would have had value. Now that we've expended huge sums of money and burned through the careers of tens of thousands of professionals to produce a platform of extremely limited utility, we may finally be able to start using it to perform meaningful research. Unfortunately, there's no money available to use it, and the hundreds (perhaps thousands) of scientists and engineers that have waited almost a generation to utilize it are off doing other things. It should be noted, however, that the Europeans and Japanese have a new generation of of excellent experiments, and scientists trained to utilize it, and will harvest the value of our investment.

>It should be noted, however, that the Europeans and >Japanese have a new generation of of excellent experiments, >and scientists trained to utilize it, and will harvest the >value of our investment.

Truth be told they have paid for and built those facilities.

STScI didn't build HST, they just made it work. Unlike JWST, where STScI is participating in observatory I&T, HST was had limited input from STScI until after launch. Chris Burrows, at STScI, was the first person to figure out what was wrong, and was among the first people to come up with good suggestions for what to do about it.

And those first three years did include a lot of great science. Much of the early planetary work got done precisely because it still could be, while crowded-field and deep stuff couldn't be. Some key projects got pushed off, but HST never sat idle.

hh>

"Real simple. HST is a scientific triumph. ISS is a technological triumph. The reverse is not true."

Actually, ISS is another triumph of politics over common sense. It is situated in an LEO backwater too far out plane to be of any use for lunar or planetary missions because Russia wanted it there. People go up to it and spend some time collecting data on living in LEO to be used by other people going up to it to collect more data on living in LEO to be used by...

Apples and oranges.

Leckrone's assessment is correct; ISS is just getting started as a science/research platform. A key difference is that the ISS discovery space isn't limited to astrophysics.

This is a good thing as ISS is poor platform for UV/optical/IR astronomy.

Actually, ISS is another triumph of politics over common sense.

Yes, I'll buy that. But such a triumph isn't necessarily bad. Think about pyramids. They were a political monument to engineering prestige. They still are. We marvel over them even now. But they weren't really of any functional use, and their development could be considered an activity bereft of common sense.

Leckrone's assessment is correct; ISS is just getting started as a science/research platform. A key difference is that the ISS discovery space isn't limited to astrophysics.

It's just a very pricey discovery space. If we're hoping to see it justified scientifically, which it most certainly is not right now, let's hope the discoveries that it produces can justify the expense. That's not going to be easy.

I see one of ISS's major contributions already as a great test/development bed for long term (semi)closed loop life support technologies that would be necessary for crew transfer vehicles (e.g. Mars) of any scope.

To address some comments: ISS's orbit is no 'backwater LEO'; Actually it's 'prime LEO' in some sense (i.e. earth observation, busies launch sites accessibility)

The only bad thing about it is a slight mass penalty when launching from launch sites like Canaveral or Kouru, while allowing sites like Baikonour to reach it at all.

If LEO station staging makes sense for Lunar missions at all (which is a debatable notion in itself), ISS is in a pretty good plane (other than not being co-planar with the Moon for tiny gains in propellant mass, but what LEO station would be?). A burn to increase the apogee, and then break into Lunar orbit as you would anyway from 28deg or whatever. You don't have to changes planes until you LOI. You just get slightly different area of the Moon directly accessible.

The one major experiment that I always thought would be a 'signature' for a long-duration manned platform (but, AFAIK, has never been attempted at a large scale) is zero-gee nutrient production. Where is the large aeroponic or hydroponic garden to see if large-scale crops are possible? Where is the 'grow it in a flask' fungal protein farms?

This technology could be a lifesaver on long-term deep-space missions and the ISS strikes me as the ideal place to test it out. I'm not talking about a little tray of seedlings grown in an EXPRESS pallet here, but large crop trays to establish the power and consumable requirements for freefall agriculture as well as next-generation seed viability.

(Ultimately, of course, similar experiments should be carried out on the Moon to see how crops handle the extra-magnetosphere environment but that is going slightly OT.)

The ISS may well turn into a great platform for the sort of high-risk/high-return research that governments are able to finance.



In the meantime, it's taught us a couple of potentially valuable things, if you view manned exploration as a goal:



1) How to do a lot with a little. Not just money, but (especially in the early days) making every ounce of upmass count; developing systems that are compact and consume very little electricity to do their jobs; etc. For a long-term planetary mission, those are critical because we won't be flying something the size of the ISS to Mars - it's going to be a small vessel with a lot of size/thermal/power/etc constraints. Now there's experience in designing and building those kinds of devices.



2) How to actually live in space. Anyone remember Biosphere 2? *That* was seen a disaster, of sorts, but it taught us that we had a lot to learn about building a sealed environment and living in it. The ISS has taught us a lot about what it takes to build a closed environment and be successful about it.



These aren't necessarily marketable lessons (though I would imagine that NASA could have been a leader in the suddenly popular field of efficiency had it actually cared) but they are very valuable for long-term manned spaceflight.



Now - is NASA able to actually learn from these experiences? I doubt it - cost and schedule seem to be the only drivers for most decisions and there generally seems to be very little interest in taking something that works "well enough" and making it better.



But as long as there's manned spaceflight, the ISS is a place for us to learn lessons about that. As a bonus, we can do scientific research there too. The notion of complaining about cost seems silly to me; of course it's expensive - it's big, and complex, and in space! This isn't college students launching satellites the size of baseballs, it's something that half a dozen people are expected to live in. I'm not sure how cheap you can make that and still have it reasonably safe and effective.

This is an old, old discussion and its clear that ISS struggles to find a purpose and value. This is even detracting from what is, after all, the quite staggering accomplishment of building it. OK, so it was delayed. Yes, it did cost a fortune. But that's past now (mostly).

The longer this goes on the more I believe that ISS would benefit from having it's own mission and it's own independent leadership spun off from NASA instead of being just one more headache in the NASA portfolio of intractable problems.

This would leave it exposed of course, and there is a risk that no-one would find sufficient use for it. It could become a proven white elephant and left to die, but I don't believe that.

If _you_ had a baby like that you would find something to do with it pdq.

258 publications from 1990 to april-1994 (search is on the publication date, so I went a bit after the first servicing mission. 388 if you go out to the end of 1994 (hard for me to find when the first post-servicing papers came out)

http://bit.ly/zM70w

The ISS is nothing but a glorified Skylab.

There's no logical reason for a centralized international space station. Small space stations are much more economical. Every nation should have their own individual space station (US, Russia, China, EU, Japan, etc.). And private corporations should also have their own small space stations. The Ares V should be able to launch a large space station more than twice as massive as Skylab for whatever country or business that desires them.

Hopefully when the Ares V is up in running, we could also start launching and assembling the first rotating artificial gravity space stations.

But for now, the US needs to substantially curtail its funding for the ISS (over $2 billion a year) and use this money for the Ares V and for establishing a permanent base on the Moon.

I like to argue that if the shuttle program accomplished nothing else (it didn't, of course), then the Hubble telescope deployment and subsequent servicing missions alone (and the science they produced) completely justifies the entire shuttle program. I am convinced that the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) when installed on ISS will be to ISS as Hubble is to shuttle. AMS, and the cosmic ray observations that will be made with it completely justifies the ISS. All of the other science that will be done on ISS is a bonus. The only question that I have is how will AMS be returned to earth after three years (to aid in calibrating data obtained during its use on ISS) with the shuttle retired. Any ideas?

At the time that the primary mirror was finished, 1982, STScI was in an embryonic state and had zero hardware responsibility for the Hubble, and in fact had no anticipated operational responsibility for the spacecraft (where I mean direct command and control authority). STScI's anticipated role at the time was solely as an executive for the science program. The optics were fabricated at (then) Perkin-Elmer under the direct supervision of Marshall Spaceflight Center.

Personnel at STScI (Burrows) and WFPC1-IDT (Faber, Holtzman) were responsible for the diagnosis of the spherical aberration. STScI led the effort in 1990 to find the best path for hardware solutions to the aberrated mirror.

Many parties engaged the problem of finding the optimal scientific use of Hubble prior to the 1993 repair. During the years 1990-1993 HST produced unique and path-finding research on a number of objects, primarily for bright objects, where enough photons could still be collected to recover unique high-spatial resolution information, and in the UV, for many objects the spectra did not require high spatial resolution. Many works produced during this time are still highly cited in 2009, and set the path for subsequent work after the repair mission.

Just about any astronomer associated with the Hubble would cite it as a strong case where the synergy between human-space flight and space science research has proven to be of exceptional value. No one has anything but the deepest admiration for the Shuttle crews that have serviced and deployed HST. David Leckrone's lament is that despite this success we have now abandoned this capability.

I concur with Hewitt... I think it very unlikely that ISS will ever make the science per dollar metric that HST has achieved; It has cost far too much before producing; a deficit I think it will never close. I hope I'm eventually proven wrong.

Tod:

Fire the explosive bolts...I'm on JDEM then IDECS then JDEM again.

Tare Victor George