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Would you defund ISS to fund BLEO exploration?

Yes
No
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Author Topic: POLL: Would you defund ISS to fund BLEO exploration?  (Read 18302 times)

Offline joek

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Re: POLL: Would you defund ISS to fund BLEO exploration?
« Reply #40 on: 07/02/2013 02:45 am »
No.  For all the reasons others have stated. In addition, there should be a commitment sooner rather than later to extend ISS life beyond 2020 (or at minimum until alternatives become available).  Much of the R&D and careers attached to that R&D take years to develop, refine and consummate.  Views towards ISS life and funding need to be adjusted accordingly.

Offline ClaytonBirchenough

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Re: POLL: Would you defund ISS to fund BLEO exploration?
« Reply #41 on: 07/02/2013 03:34 am »
WARNING: CONTAINS AN OPINION!!! DON'T JUDGE!

I voted yes. I voted yes because although we are learning a lot (to say the least) utilizing the ISS and its capabilities, I think we could be learning more BLEO. When humans first started going into space, the wealth of knowledge being gained was tremendous all the way through the Apollo program! I feel pushing the pace of human endurance and spaceflight capabilities will benefit us humans in ways we cannot comprehend!

Now that being said, I would defund the ISS to fund BLEO exploration. I'm not saying it should be done, but yeah, sure I'd go for it!

Also, I do love the ISS and support it, I'm not someone who comes into this conversation not supporting the ISS in the first place...
Clayton Birchenough

Offline Bubbinski

Voted no. 

ISS can be a great testbed for tech that can be used on future BEO flights.  And people can live and work on there for the same duration as a Mars flight if such a test were approved, maybe that can answer some questions about whether and how people could make it through a Mars trip.  (Looking forward to seeing how the 1 year segment in 2015 goes).

There's no guarantee that axing ISS (or SLS or anything else for that matter) would send money to other space projects anyway.
I'll even excitedly look forward to "flags and footprints" and suborbital missions. Just fly...somewhere.

Offline apollolanding

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Re: POLL: Would you defund ISS to fund BLEO exploration?
« Reply #43 on: 07/07/2013 12:58 am »
Despite my passion for getting out of LEO as soon as possible I voted no! This is the space program we have.  I cannot stomach another Apollo, Skylab, Shuttle where we make a National level commitment and dump it in the dustbin when public support and or political winds change.  I could ramble on for pages but everyone else has covered the specifics.
Proud Member of NSF Since 2006-04-10.

Offline vulture4

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Re: POLL: Would you defund ISS to fund BLEO exploration?
« Reply #44 on: 07/07/2013 02:49 pm »
Would I send someone to Mars or Moon? Yes. But beeing realistic, society doesn't.

It all depends on the cost. The market for all luxury services follows the law of supply and  demand. A couple of reasonably accurate market surveys have concluded that if the cost of a seat to LEO can be reduced to about $1M there would be sufficient non-NASA customers (both government and nongovernment) to sustain a viable market.

Offline EE Scott

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Re: POLL: Would you defund ISS to fund BLEO exploration?
« Reply #45 on: 07/10/2013 03:52 am »
I voted yes. Folks tend to list all the things we could be doing with ISS to justify it, but it mostly looks to be an exercise in maintenance of systems...which is valuable in and of itself, but I'd rather put that money toward an effort to put astronauts where they haven't been before - that is exploration.  ISS is not exploration.  It's practicing doing stuff that you may or may not need to do when you are actually exploring.

It is a great platform to cooperate in space with other nations, and that is valuable, I admit. With more money in the budget, I would keep it as long as practical, but the budget future for NASA is so dismal as to make me depressed if I think too long about it.

Also I admit to being selfish.  I am realizing that I am not immortal.  I can't just sit back and say, oh whatever, it will happen someday.  (I'm 47.) I don't want to die before I see human on Mars or at least one of its moons.  And the path we have been on, and continue to be on, will not get us there.  There is not enough money, not even close.
« Last Edit: 07/10/2013 03:54 am by EE Scott »
Scott

Offline yg1968

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Re: POLL: Would you defund ISS to fund BLEO exploration?
« Reply #46 on: 07/10/2013 11:48 am »
I voted no. ISS should continue until 2028 at least. Even in 2028, it will need a replacement such as the Bigelow Alpha station.

Offline mikegro

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Re: POLL: Would you defund ISS to fund BLEO exploration?
« Reply #47 on: 07/21/2013 05:06 pm »
Voted yes, but not until at least 2020-2028 or until an Exploration Gateway Platform or some other permanent outpost in the vicinity of the Moon (L2, L1, surface) exists.  At that point the ISS will become much more of a burden to fund at the levels the US currently provides.  I'm not saying it should be de-orbited; but we should find a way to divert as many NASA dollars away from it as soon as possible.
Part time F-16 and KC-135 Crew Chief, full-time spaceflight enthusiast!

Offline hydra9

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Re: POLL: Would you defund ISS to fund BLEO exploration?
« Reply #48 on: 08/22/2013 02:16 am »
Continuing to spend $3 billion a year on the ISS after 2020 would be a huge waist of NASA dollars!

Continuing to conduct a variety of microgravity experiments at one centralized facility where human occupants (even space tourist) are constantly moving around in other areas of the space facility, really makes no sense at all. Even Bolden said that last year.

Microgravity research at LEO should be shifted away from NASA after 2020 to private industry. Its time for private companies like Bigelow to take commercial advantage of what we have learned from the space station by putting up private microgravity facilities.

NASA needs to use those ISS funds to focus on a new generation of SLS hydrogen tank derived habitats that can  accommodate internal centrifuges capable of generating temporary periods of high G  to see if such devices can help to mitigate the deleterious effects of a microgravity environment on the human body.

NASA also needs to develop SLS derived habitats joined together by cables and booms along a rotating  axis  to see if the human body can adjust to permanent artificial gravity conditions.

Marcel F. Williams


Offline beancounter

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Re: POLL: Would you defund ISS to fund BLEO exploration?
« Reply #49 on: 08/22/2013 04:36 am »
Continuing to spend $3 billion a year on the ISS after 2020 would be a huge waist of NASA dollars!

Continuing to conduct a variety of microgravity experiments at one centralized facility where human occupants (even space tourist) are constantly moving around in other areas of the space facility, really makes no sense at all. Even Bolden said that last year.

Microgravity research at LEO should be shifted away from NASA after 2020 to private industry. Its time for private companies like Bigelow to take commercial advantage of what we have learned from the space station by putting up private microgravity facilities.

NASA needs to use those ISS funds to focus on a new generation of SLS hydrogen tank derived habitats that can  accommodate internal centrifuges capable of generating temporary periods of high G  to see if such devices can help to mitigate the deleterious effects of a microgravity environment on the human body.

NASA also needs to develop SLS derived habitats joined together by cables and booms along a rotating  axis  to see if the human body can adjust to permanent artificial gravity conditions.

Marcel F. Williams


I wouldn't quote Bolden for anything these days.  He's showing more and more signs of impending senility and you don't need SLS to undertake hour experiment iin rotating habitats.  There are existing vehicles that would easily do the job.  So that's another fail for needing SLS.

Cheers.
Beancounter from DownUnder

Offline pagheca

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Re: POLL: Would you defund ISS to fund BLEO exploration?
« Reply #50 on: 04/16/2014 08:13 pm »
STANDARD DISCLAIMER: this post expresses hard opinions on the ISS and may disturb some readers :)

I arrived very late to vote for this poll but IF I could I would have voted YES! YES!! YES!!!

There are only a few polls in space science where if asked I would express such a strong vote. This is because:

1) it's a dangerous exercise featuring an high risk to lose everything because of a little, marginal problem. I'm not only talking about the life of people onboard, although this aspect is obviously of paramount importance: the ISS got several time close to evacuation because of really marginal issues (unavailability of resupply, computer glitches, oscillations induced by incorrect maneuver, etc.).

2) it absorbs a HUGE amount of money that could be dedicated to real exploration.

3) science/cost ratio is almost nil. I know has never been designed for science, but engineering and management cannot justify such a budget.

4) in particular, microgravity (the real one, unaffected by local movements and oscillations!) science could be done on board of dedicated spacecraft at a fraction of the cost.

5) ADDED: it's a dead-end. It's not an incremental project like an Antarctic Station. It will be thrown away all together. One could say that we can build up from this experience, that is certainly true, but bringing such a mass on LEO to throw it away after some time doesn't look to me as the smartest way to spend money. A station on the Moon - for example - could do the same job but building up on what you do rather than dumping with no way to recycle after some time. Another possibility could have been to build a more solid and flexible, but smaller station with a clear aim in mind, that could be used as a future station to support other projects (servicing satellite? "fuel station"? I really don't know...).

The main point here is not if the ISS is justified but which is the best way to spend the funding available, and I think this, like many other choices, has been de facto stopping a lot of valuable efforts. BLEO exploration would have been much advanced today if there was no ISS to fund and feed like an always hungry goddess.

I know that as a member of the scientific community I maybe accused of protecting my interests, but it is not so, as I work on something ground-based and feel no competition at all from space: I just protect science and technology tout-court. In particular the real advancement of space science and technology. ISS is now an obliged choice, I know. As it happen often when you do something wrong with consequences going very far on time, there is a no-return point, in which stopping the project means more waste of money. But I really hope that the ISS will be terminated as soon as possible.

This while I enthusiastically watched almost every video captured on board the ISS, followed any launch, enjoyed every technical detail of it, appreciated the quality of the work done around it. But I still think the beauty of all of this cannot justify such a gargantuan budget, and especially what this cost meant to other, much more valuable space-related projects, cancelled, reduced or delayed because we have to keep the ISS alive.
« Last Edit: 04/16/2014 10:23 pm by pagheca »

Offline Go4TLI

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Re: POLL: Would you defund ISS to fund BLEO exploration?
« Reply #51 on: 04/16/2014 08:20 pm »
Partial Cut - Sustaining Engineering contract really needs to be scrutinized.  We could find substantial savings there. 

For every dollar from SE, you could redirect into different BLEO programs... even those that may not utilize SLS/Orion.

Respectfully,
Andrew Gasser
TEA Party in Space

I know this an old post but really????  I think you need to see what part of the budget is Boeing and then what percentage of that is Sustaining. 

Offline AncientU

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Re: POLL: Would you defund ISS to fund BLEO exploration?
« Reply #52 on: 04/16/2014 09:00 pm »
Sorry that I'm so late to the game here.

ISS is the largest piece of space infrastructure that we have; learning to operate, maintain, resupply it are first steps to permanent manned outposts beyond LEO.  We need to learn by doing, not just creating PowerPoints, so that the next outpost will be better... and the next.  There should never be a time in the future when mankind is not in space.
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Offline pagheca

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Re: POLL: Would you defund ISS to fund BLEO exploration?
« Reply #53 on: 04/16/2014 09:49 pm »
Sorry that I'm so late to the game here.

ISS is the largest piece of space infrastructure that we have; learning to operate, maintain, resupply it are first steps to permanent manned outposts beyond LEO.  We need to learn by doing, not just creating PowerPoints, so that the next outpost will be better... and the next.  There should never be a time in the future when mankind is not in space.

Two questions:
1) why? Why there should never be a time in the future etc.? I can understand the need to building up the capability to be in space, but not at the cost of sacrificing all the limited resource we have to build an infrastructure that spend most of its time and money just in daily routine.
2) also supposing that you are right, are you sure the ISS is the right way to do it? What if we had waited a little bit to build an incremental outpost on - for example - the Moon. Something like an Antarctic station, just a "bit" farther but with some valuable return in terms of science and technology? p.s. I'm not proposing this as an alternative. I'm just using this to show there were alternative.

The US went to the South Pole, never to return back. But they did a lot of science there. There was an instant return building up over time, not just a time-limited project to be thrown away at the bottom of an ocean at the end. The ISS costs at least 10 times more than any other space project probably, with the only exception of the Apollo project, that allowed a tremendous development in rocket and technology. A return that I can't really see on the ISS. We are there, spending money for what?

p.s. please don't take my strong opinion personally. It's true: I am really "upset" with the ISS because I think it is just another dead-end in the field and that several misconceptions about it has been built over time, but not with you or any other person expressing different opinions.
« Last Edit: 04/16/2014 10:20 pm by pagheca »

Offline Jim

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Re: POLL: Would you defund ISS to fund BLEO exploration?
« Reply #54 on: 04/17/2014 12:39 am »

p.s. please don't take my strong opinion personally. It's true: I am really "upset" with the ISS because I think it is just another dead-end in the field and that several misconceptions about it has been built over time, but not with you or any other person expressing different opinions.

And gov't BLEO is just as much a dead end.

Offline guckyfan

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Re: POLL: Would you defund ISS to fund BLEO exploration?
« Reply #55 on: 04/17/2014 05:41 am »
I vote no.

The ISS is still very useful and will remain so. One day it should be decomissioned and replaced with a new station that is easier to maintain and has lower running cost. But no end to research in LEO.

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