I guess that's significantly better than just de-orbiting the thing.
Wonder who would be interested in such a thing, google and spaceX are really the only two that come to mind, and I honestly can't come up with much of a reason for google to buy it.
That's assuming NASA is planning to sell it. What if they simply gave it to Google or SpaceX? Perhaps a deal could be made to exchange the ISS for a few launches.
If someone was willing to take on the operating costs and still lease out access/experiment time for anything less than billions, NASA would be champing at the bit to give it away.
However, I can't imagine why any commercial entity would be interested in burning cash in LEO, unless they have a very lucrative microgravity production requirement. But so far that scenario has just been a fable.
The cost of operating would be... astronomical. They would have to subsidize it's operation, and convince Russia and the minor international partners to go along with it.
It needs to be reboosted a couple times per year. You could cut a lot of ground crew, but the power and thermal control systems have to remain operational. Telerobotics could replace astronauts for repair and maintenance. Probably 200-300 million per year minimum.(decreasing as the cost to orbit decreases)
To put it in a stable orbit maintained by gravity itself you'd need to put it at a Lagrange Point, any of the Earth-Moon points aren't exactly LEO last I checked.
I'll modify my statement, since "good science" has two meanings. ISS has produced competently done science (one definition of "good"), but at a high prices. The same amount of money spent either on the ground, or on unmanned space science missions, would have given more science for the dollar.
But a lot of those experiments are "let's see what X does ... in space!", or rather, "in microgravity!." When all you have is a hammer, then you will do a lot of hammer science. But it's not that transferable, except in the most vague of terms - which that document does over and over.
To quantify it, that's 1052 pages of summaries across 11 years. And not all of them are science. Call it 95 pages of summaries per year. BTW, it's about 550 individual items, so 50 per year.
ISS cost, what, $100-$150 billion over 20 years, or 5-7 billion/year? The NIH budget is $32 billion/year, which goes to 50,000 grants. That's about 6x larger. In terms of science per dollar, I'm pretty sure an equivalent summary of the NIH-funded research would exceed 6x95 = ~600 pages.
The other definition of "good" is "better than average". For example, if microgravity gave a significantly better to make protein crystals for x-ray analysis, then that would be great science. But in practice, no, it isn't. There are only a handful of crystallization experiments in those 11 years of experiments, and one of the things we've found out is that ultra-centrifuges are more useful than microgravity. A lot cheaper too.
The quality of the science is about average for the fields I'm used to, and the cost is much higher. That's why I say "there hasn't been much good science" out of the ISS.
So, a lot of science has been done, but it isn't "good" science because it costs way more than other alternative lines of inquiry. I think that's fair.
The problem with LEO is the Earth's atmosphere, while tenuous, is enough to deorbit.
Farther orbits are just fine. SNAP-10A, a Soviet nuclear reactor, is in a 1,300-kilometer orbit which won't decay for 4,000 years (estimated).
"Stable" is also very relative. The Earth has been in a stable orbit for a few billion years, though it's not at a Lagrange point. A satellite in GEO has an effectively unlimited orbital life.
> The US-A programme was responsible for orbiting a total of 33 nuclear reactors, 31 of them BES-5 types with a capacity of providing about two kilowatts of power for the radar unit. In addition, in 1987 the Soviets launched two larger TOPAZ nuclear reactors (six kilowatts) in Kosmos satellites (Kosmos 1818 and Kosmos 1867) which were each capable of 6 months of operation.
Realistically, you don't have to go all the way to a Lagrange point to be a stable orbit—the moon itself is in a stable orbit and isn't sittin in a Lagrange point of the Earth/Sun. You just need to get high enough that atmospheric drag doesn't tangible affect velocity.
LEO costs less to get people to and have fewer micrometeoroid impacts making it safer to operate at. Boosting out of LEO would cost a few billion and also reduce total lifespan as more things get dammaged faster. Further, it risks the Kessler syndrome unless you boost it outside of earths orbit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome
There are many trade offs involved but simply replacing it in 20 years is a much better plan.
Another roadblock would be whether the ISS has enough radiation hardening to survive outside LEO.
It has ~100 commercial off-the-shelf Thinkpads on board¹, so none of those are radiation hardened for sure. I can't find any information on whether the mission critical computer systems are radiation hardened or not.
You have to maintain it to the extent where the eventual de-orbital process lands it in a an ocean and not above population center to ensure no bits that didn't burn up hit anything.
> That's assuming NASA is planning to sell it. What if they simply gave it to Google or SpaceX? Perhaps a deal could be made to exchange the ISS for a few launches.
Could the ISS be retrofit with boosters and sent to mars? Honest question... I don't know the physics behind this. Would the structure hold enough fuel to be able to slow down? We have shown people can live there for a year at a time.
Years at a time, yes, but with regular resupplies from the surface...
I'd be more worried about how much force the structure can actually take - is it stiff enough to hold together if you strap a big rocket to the back and turn it on?
Spacecraft dock with the ISS without the robotic arm, the arm is used only with the current version of Dragon spacecraft because it's not certified for unilateral docking.
The next version of the Dragon will dock with the station by it self just like the Soyuz does.
I have asked this same question before and the consensus response was that it would be more expensive to try and retro fit the station then to build a new interplanetary vehicle. For example the joints between the compartments are probably not designed to have a rocket strapped to one compartment and fired up.
They already have a rocket strapped to one of the compartments, which they use several times a year to reboost the ISS to higher altitudes. Getting to Mars just requires boosting for longer.
Reboosting is a capability that ISS supports. If it can handle the G force of acceleration through a reboost, it could presumably handle the same acceleration and deceleration for the longer burn time it takes to get to Mars. But in reality it's probably just more economical to send a new ship to Mars.
The ISS engines might be more efficient than the F-1 was, so the mass could be less than 70 Saturn Vs. Still a ridiculously enormous amount of energy. Makes you wonder how we're ever supposed to build anything significant on or around Mars.
That is the only option which makes sense. LOX isn't good for things which wait. Solids have low efficiency. Hypergolics are a good choice for something that has to sit idle for a very long time, and the chemistry has been understood for decades. I guess I was hoping the Russians had figured out ion thrusters in the 70s or something.
What about ion engines? I'm extremely not sure I have this math right but NEXT claims 4190 second ISP [0]. Plugging that into the rocket equation I get:
Total vehicle mass: 482,646.89 kg
Fuel to add: 63,046.89 kg
Dragon 2 launches: 19
Total cost: $1,178,000,000.00
Not what you'd call cheap but at least in the realm of the possible. I'm assuming the ISS' solar panels (~120 kW [1]) is sufficient to power the thruster, that a dragon launch costs no more than a falcon launch (certainly false), and that the ion engine is already on board the station.
I believe the biggest issue is that ISS is not built to withstand the higher radiation you are exposed to in higher orbits / between planets. Also the thermal loads are different when you are in sun 24/7/365 rather than orbiting the earth and spending a significant portion of time in a shadow - though I don't know if that is better or worse.
NASA does provide most of the funding for the station, it also provided most of the funding for the other modules including the Russian ones when they were built, I'm not sure how the actual "ownership" is actually split.
Remember that the ISS started as "Freedom" NASA passed the designs of the various modules to be built by other nations.
IIRC Russia is planning to launch a new space station it's going to be build around a similar module to Zvezda which they already have mostly built they aren't going to reuse the existing one.
"...but it's going to be tough renting out the station or selling it for how much it's actually worth."
Sigh. In monetary terms, it would be precisely worth as much as the price at which it clears the market[1]. The idea that somehow the value of the space station has a monetary value that isn't tied to the price at which the market clears is incorrect.
Remember... the cost of station is not what it is worth, that's simply the cost.
[1] Yes, there can be fraud or disparities of information between the parties in the transaction that can cause the selling price to not be properly reflective of the worth of the property in exchange. But the overall tendency of market pricing is to draw the monetary price to the value of the property.... and in my experience the exact opposite of the article's point tends to be true... the seller almost always knows more about the property sold than the buyer, thus the buyer is more likely to overpay for the property rather than the seller getting too little.
While this is almost tautologically true for many things (guns, butter), I'm not convinced it holds for everything.
The market doesn't value everything optimally, especially when you consider present vs. future value. The market has done a terrible job of pricing in the future costs of climate change, for instance. It's improving, but slowly and (seemingly only) with significant intervention (for instance, carbon credits).
Is the market going to properly value future scientific gains from ongoing operation of the ISS? Would the market have paid for the LHC? For NASA, 50 years ago? Even if you believe the ongoing science collected is of minimal value, what about the effects of inspiration for kids to enter STEM fields?
I'm not saying the ISS is worth it. I'm only saying I don't believe your thesis that "market value" is fundamentally equal to "value to society". It may be a good approximation in many, or even the majority of cases. But acting like it's the only correct way to value something is, I think, foolish. One of the benefits of government is to get everyone to chip into large-scale projects that (hopefully) benefit all, but are difficult to monetize. A network of roadways, research into science and medicine, and general education all come to mind.
Examples: My time, the skills of guys who chase balls around in sneakers, the skills of scientists who develop the Theory of Relativity, the Theory itself, my child's education, or my child.
> the skills of guys who chase balls around in sneakers
That's a poor example and you're wrong. A very, very, very large, consistent, long duration market says that they're worth a lot.
Quality entertainment can be worth a vast amount of money, and it has a very real/tangible value to it. Whether you personally think a specific entertainment is quality is purely subjective. What's not remotely that subjective, is the scale of the market, its historical record, and the reasonable future forecasts for its business prospects.
> A very, very, very large, consistent, long duration market says that they're worth a lot
I agree with that. My point and the point of the GP is that the market isn't good at valuing some things.
The 'market' is just a tool, a technology, not a God or scripture. Any tool works well for some tasks and less well for others. Also, the concept 'free market' is a theoretical abstraction that doesn't exist in reality; the NBA, for example, operates a monopoly in a market distorted heavily by law, regulations, a collective bargaining agreement, and market power.
As someone said, Theory is a useful servant but a bad master, liable to produce orthodox defenders of every variety of the faith.[1]
People who don't jibe with deifying the market shouldn't themselves talk about "The Market" as if it was some kind of natural force.
The market, ie, people individually and in groups buying stuff, value stuff according to the goals of those buyers. Saying that the market as done a terrible job of pricing in the future costs of climate change to society makes no sense; it was never supposed to!
No it isn't. A market is just a collection of actors who perform transactions within the group. The only rules set are the ones by nature, and markets would exist with or without humans.
You're talking about markets in a different sense. You're talking about the 'force-of-nature' market: the stark fact that positive-sum transactions can be made.
stuaxos is talking about markets in situ, or reality. And in that sense of markets, there is no "free" market in the entire world. As Ha-Joon Chang points out, immigration control has a far bigger effect on wages than minimum wage, and if we (I'm in the USA) had a maximally free market we would also have open borders. There are many ways that "free" markets are not socially desirable.
Oscar Wilde: "A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing."
> the cost of station is not what it is worth, that's simply the cost.
Yeah, but isn't it also wrong to say that the price is simply what it's worth?
Maybe a lot of the value is scientific, and maybe difficult to capture.
If corporations can't extract this value, maybe they won't be able to justify the running costs, the auction will flop and it will be de-orbited; but doesn't mean the value doesn't exist.
Maybe the item is so large and so rare the market won't clear efficiently - maybe investment is too risky, the worst case future costs too high - there's a limited supply of capital willing to take such high risks; insurance has its limits etc.
You did say: "In monetary terms" - maybe you were moving the goalposts there; but if so, that's you, not the original article.
> Sigh. In monetary terms, it would be precisely worth as much as the price at which it clears the market[1]. The idea that somehow the value of the space station has a monetary value that isn't tied to the price at which the market clears is incorrect.
Oh look, you know econ101 and think you are smart. The worth/value of an object != its price. There is a reason different words are used, you might have figured this out if you actually read some econ books.
There is no market for space stations. Market pricing only works when assets are fungible and their sale can be abstracted into a statistical model. A sample size of 1 is not enough to establish an efficient pricing model for an asset, and space stations are not fungible. The ISS is literally priceless.
The ISS just isn't very useful. A list of the four most exciting experiments: 1) 3D printing in zero G, 2) Growing yeast in zero G, 3) Virtual reality to provide an overlay for looking at the ground, and 4) a small teleoperated robot.[1] Those are science fair projects with a big budget.
I think that's underselling the ISS just a bit. It has been invaluable to our knowledge of how humans (and other organisms) can survive in space/zero gravity, as well as providing comparatively easy access for all manner of research and commerce in LEO.
If you take the stance that space exploration/utilization isn't useful than it's possible to argue for decommissioning the ISS as a waste of money. However if you believe the ongoing exploration of space has significant value to the world it's hard to say the ISS is/will only be useful for science fair experiments.
"It has been invaluable to our knowledge of how humans (and other organisms) can survive in space/zero gravity"
Anybody remember Skylab? 1973 to 1979. Longest human time in space at the time, 84 days. And Mir, where Valeri Polyakov spent 438 days in zero G in 1994-1995.
At the now-usual cost of around a billion dollars , STS-95 spent ten days engaged in the following experiments: see how microgravity would affect cockroach growth, Studied a "space rose" to see what kinds of essential oils it would produce, at the suggestion of elementary school children, monitored everyday objects such as soap, crayons, and string to see whether their inertial mass would change in a weightless environment. Preliminary results suggest that Newton was right. Monitored the growth of fish eggs and rice plants in space, checked to see whether melatonin would make the crew sleepy (it did not)
Along with these craggy summits of basic research, the astronauts performed a raft of prepared experiments in metallurgy, medicine, fluid mechanics, embryology, and solar wind detection, all of which had one thing in common - they were designed to minimize crew interaction, in most cases requiring the astronauts to do little more than flip a switch (NASA policy requires that experiments on manned missions involve the crew)
Over the past three years, while the manned program has been firing styrofoam out of cannons on the ground, unmanned NASA and ESA programs have been putting landers on Titan, shooting chunks of metal into an inbound comet, driving rovers around Mars and continuing to gather a variety of priceless observations from the many active unmanned orbital telescopes and space probes sprinkled through the Solar System. At the same time, the skeleton crew on the ISS has been fixing toilets, debugging laptops, changing batteries, and speaking to the occasional elementary school over ham radio
The NASA obsession with elementary and middle school participation in space flight is curious, and demonstrates how low a status actual in-flight science has compared with orbital public relations. You are not likely to hear of CERN physicists colliding tin atoms sent to them by a primary school in Toulouse, or the Hubble space being turned around to point at waving middle schoolers on a playground in Texas, yet even the minimal two-man ISS crew - one short of the stated minimum needed to run the station - regularly takes time to talk to schoolchildren
This brings up a delicate point about justifying manned missions with science. In order to make any straight-faced claims about being cost effective, you have to cart an awful lot of science with you into orbit, which in turns means you need to make the experiments as easy to operate as possible. But if the experiments are all automated, you remove the rationale for sending a manned mission in the first place. Apart from question-begging experiments on the physiology of space flight, there is little you can do to resolve this dilemma. In essence, each 'pure science' Shuttle science mission consists of several dozen automated experiments alongside an enormous, irrelevant, repeated experiment in keeping a group of primates alive and healthy outside the atmosphere.
The science which was advanced, effective, worth doing, could have been done more cheaply with unmanned launches of automated experiments and no ISS.
[..]
NASA dismisses such helpful suggetions as unworthy of its mission of 'exploration' [..] Of course, the great explorers of the 1500's did not sail endlessly back and forth a hundred miles off the coast of Portugal, [..] The interesting bits in space are all much further away, and we have not paid them a visit since 1972. In fact, despite an ambitious "Vision for Space Exploration", there seems to be no mandate or interest in pursuing this kind of exploration, and all the signific...
I completely agree that at this point there is much less to 'explore' in LEO than in the past. However there's a huge difference between spending 10 days in orbit in the shuttle and dozens of man-years in zero-g with high radiation and in an isolated environment.
Several of the goals for the ISS (at least from NASA's perspective) were based on getting experience operating in space for extended periods of time, for human health, for construction and engineering, and for operations over inter-planetary length periods. Experience and knowledge on all those fronts is needed to progress to further out, more isolated manned missions.
It's also not quite true in sentiment to say that humans survive in zero-g the same way they did in 1969. None of the early space missions spent that much time in zero-g, and we continue to learn a lot even after MIR and Skylab about the lack of gravity and radiation on human health.
Even now there is new research coming out of the Apollo-era missions related to human health. [1]
A similar situation exists exploring the depths of the ocean. You don't build a submersible to go 7km down until you've got a good grasp of operating at 300m. Likewise it's still quite valuable to explore at 300m since there's a lot we don't know (far more than LEO) even though we've been to 7km.
Putting humans into space at all is hugely difficult and expensive. There were a lot of arguments in the scientific community against a manned mission to the moon. And it's completely fair to consider the ROI and dollar/manpower value spent on manned space (and the ISS in particular.) I personally think there is huge value to manned space exploration beyond first-order economics, and from that perspective I think the ISS has and continues to accomplish much more than just random science projects. Especially given the political constraints it operates under.
It really isn't helpful. Due to the high inclination orbit that the ISS is in, you can't actually get anywhere from there; it takes a huge amount of fuel to get into the right orbital plane. Plus the ISS has no real facilities for spacecraft construction, maintenance, or refueling. In theory those could be added, but at that point it wish be cheaper just to build a new station suited to the purpose.
In the 'world of the future' type books I read as a young lad of the 80's there was much said about factories in orbit... Admittedly in hindsight these books appear quite far-fetched about the pace of humanity's expansion into space (titles by Usborne and Neil Ardley if you're playing along at home).
Has anything been learnt from ISS about zero-G manufacturing that might make it a suitable platform for such by a private group?
Isn't the ISS supposed to be a staying waypoint for a mission to Mars?
I don't think that's possible. The ISS is in an inclined orbit (iirc for easy access from certain launch sites that orbit passes over) and afaik is useless as a waypoint to anywhere (because an orbital plane change is very expensive).
The big attraction of the ISS is laboratory where gravity can 'removed,' which can be useful for understanding processes on Earth. This is valuable to some companies. Right now a couple companies are currently running experiments on the ISS.[0]
Proctor and Gamble wants to better understand why colloids(shampoo, liquid detergents, medicine) separate, because that affects the shelf life of their products. If they can turn off gravity, they can figure out what other processes cause colloids to separate besides just gravity.
As far as manufacturing goes, there are not many products that are worth making in space right now. You need a product that is more valuable per unit mass than the cost per unit mass to launch something to LEO.
Now the interesting thing is that there have been commercial products manufactured in space. Latex microspheres were produced on the space shuttle and sold as calibration sources for microscopes.[1] Because microscope calibration needs literally microscopic amounts of these microsphere, per unit mass the product was very valuable.
There are a few startup companies that are building solution for zero g research as we speak.
SpacePharma is designing an end-to-end biological and chemical lab that can be launched on cubesats to perform experiments in zero g at the fraction of the cost and they aren't the only ones.
This may sound crazy but it has been my hope that Elon Musk would buy it and send it to Mars to orbit the red planet. Just attach a couple of booster rockets to many of the docking ports to slowly send there. Even if it took 5 years it would provide a habitat in Orbit for emergencies, etc.
If that is not feasible I believe that at the end of it's life we should try to place it on the moons surface as intact as possible. It's parts could be salvaged to build a base, etc. It makes sense to take anything that is end of life in orbit around the earth and send it to the moons surface. Sort of like a wrecking yard that future generations might use for parts if there is ever a moon settlement.
Remember that it took an entire Saturn V rocket to launch 3 people and a pair of tiny spacecraft to the Moon, which is relatively close. The ISS weighs 420Mg; the Apollo LM+CSM pair weighed about a tenth of that.
Landing it on the Moon would also not be possible, because that would require an engine capable of accelerating the ISS at approximately 1/6g.
That's an interesting idea,but not as easy as it sounds. You would need to get a significant amount of fuel (about an ISS mass' woth? I havent done the calculation) to the ISS to pull this off.
I sent an email to Elon Musk[1] suggesting that SpaceX should consider attaching to the ISS and boosting it to the Earth-Moon L1 point. It could station keep there more easily, it would be out of the radiation belts [2] and while it would be "hard" to keep a presence on board (resupply would be a bigger rocket), it could be a 'stocked cabin' that provides an 'out' in the event of a problem going to or from the Moon.
[1] He never answered so its likely he never read it.
The iss has only two possible resources to be exploited for profit in space. Both of them by conventional unmanned satellite companies.
1) the possibility or repurposing it's solar cells.
2) generic mass in orbit to be used for orbital inertia or counterjettisoned in orbit and used as propellant.
Most likely, the iss is just a liability or at best, worthless.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 202 ms ] threadWonder who would be interested in such a thing, google and spaceX are really the only two that come to mind, and I honestly can't come up with much of a reason for google to buy it.
However, I can't imagine why any commercial entity would be interested in burning cash in LEO, unless they have a very lucrative microgravity production requirement. But so far that scenario has just been a fable.
And more significantly, the infrastructure to get them up there, support the operation, and return them safely.
Is there a elevation that would be a stable orbit? Why not just boost it to that point?
If science were our goal we could have done much more science with the same money.
I strongly disagree with this statement. Here are 1052 pages of summaries of the results of scientific experiments on the ISS.
http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/iss_tech...
But a lot of those experiments are "let's see what X does ... in space!", or rather, "in microgravity!." When all you have is a hammer, then you will do a lot of hammer science. But it's not that transferable, except in the most vague of terms - which that document does over and over.
To quantify it, that's 1052 pages of summaries across 11 years. And not all of them are science. Call it 95 pages of summaries per year. BTW, it's about 550 individual items, so 50 per year.
ISS cost, what, $100-$150 billion over 20 years, or 5-7 billion/year? The NIH budget is $32 billion/year, which goes to 50,000 grants. That's about 6x larger. In terms of science per dollar, I'm pretty sure an equivalent summary of the NIH-funded research would exceed 6x95 = ~600 pages.
The other definition of "good" is "better than average". For example, if microgravity gave a significantly better to make protein crystals for x-ray analysis, then that would be great science. But in practice, no, it isn't. There are only a handful of crystallization experiments in those 11 years of experiments, and one of the things we've found out is that ultra-centrifuges are more useful than microgravity. A lot cheaper too.
The quality of the science is about average for the fields I'm used to, and the cost is much higher. That's why I say "there hasn't been much good science" out of the ISS.
Farther orbits are just fine. SNAP-10A, a Soviet nuclear reactor, is in a 1,300-kilometer orbit which won't decay for 4,000 years (estimated).
"Stable" is also very relative. The Earth has been in a stable orbit for a few billion years, though it's not at a Lagrange point. A satellite in GEO has an effectively unlimited orbital life.
> The US-A programme was responsible for orbiting a total of 33 nuclear reactors, 31 of them BES-5 types with a capacity of providing about two kilowatts of power for the radar unit. In addition, in 1987 the Soviets launched two larger TOPAZ nuclear reactors (six kilowatts) in Kosmos satellites (Kosmos 1818 and Kosmos 1867) which were each capable of 6 months of operation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosmos_954
SNAP-10A is a US nuclear reactor (the only US one launched, apparently), though the Soviets have launched bunches (just not that one.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNAP-10A
There are many trade offs involved but simply replacing it in 20 years is a much better plan.
It has ~100 commercial off-the-shelf Thinkpads on board¹, so none of those are radiation hardened for sure. I can't find any information on whether the mission critical computer systems are radiation hardened or not.
¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Space_Station#Co...
That's still selling it.
I'd be more worried about how much force the structure can actually take - is it stiff enough to hold together if you strap a big rocket to the back and turn it on?
http://www.space.com/4432-nasa-weighs-excessive-vibrations-s...
The next version of the Dragon will dock with the station by it self just like the Soyuz does.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reboost
Delta-V Earth/Mars is 5,748 m/s, says http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/appmissiontable... .
That's 3.5 days of boost.
The ISS mass is 419,455 kg. The minimum energy needed is 1/2 m v^2 or 7E12 J.
A Saturn V is about 1E11J, says http://www.ocean.washington.edu/courses/envir215/energynumbe... .
So if you attach a few score Saturn Vs to ISS, you might be able to pull it off.
The station mass is 419,455 kg. F = ma so the acceleration is 1 µ G.
It will take a very long time to get to Mars that way.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=acceleration+formula&ra...
NASA only owns part of ISS... and without the other nation's modules, it's not much of a functional space station.
And maybe other stakeholders can be also convinced to sell, but apart from Russia they weren't planning to detach their modules and go alone.
Remember that the ISS started as "Freedom" NASA passed the designs of the various modules to be built by other nations.
Sigh. In monetary terms, it would be precisely worth as much as the price at which it clears the market[1]. The idea that somehow the value of the space station has a monetary value that isn't tied to the price at which the market clears is incorrect.
Remember... the cost of station is not what it is worth, that's simply the cost.
[1] Yes, there can be fraud or disparities of information between the parties in the transaction that can cause the selling price to not be properly reflective of the worth of the property in exchange. But the overall tendency of market pricing is to draw the monetary price to the value of the property.... and in my experience the exact opposite of the article's point tends to be true... the seller almost always knows more about the property sold than the buyer, thus the buyer is more likely to overpay for the property rather than the seller getting too little.
The market doesn't value everything optimally, especially when you consider present vs. future value. The market has done a terrible job of pricing in the future costs of climate change, for instance. It's improving, but slowly and (seemingly only) with significant intervention (for instance, carbon credits).
Is the market going to properly value future scientific gains from ongoing operation of the ISS? Would the market have paid for the LHC? For NASA, 50 years ago? Even if you believe the ongoing science collected is of minimal value, what about the effects of inspiration for kids to enter STEM fields?
I'm not saying the ISS is worth it. I'm only saying I don't believe your thesis that "market value" is fundamentally equal to "value to society". It may be a good approximation in many, or even the majority of cases. But acting like it's the only correct way to value something is, I think, foolish. One of the benefits of government is to get everyone to chip into large-scale projects that (hopefully) benefit all, but are difficult to monetize. A network of roadways, research into science and medicine, and general education all come to mind.
Not to mention the programmable electronic computers and open internet without which we couldn't even be having this discussion!
Examples: My time, the skills of guys who chase balls around in sneakers, the skills of scientists who develop the Theory of Relativity, the Theory itself, my child's education, or my child.
That's a poor example and you're wrong. A very, very, very large, consistent, long duration market says that they're worth a lot.
Quality entertainment can be worth a vast amount of money, and it has a very real/tangible value to it. Whether you personally think a specific entertainment is quality is purely subjective. What's not remotely that subjective, is the scale of the market, its historical record, and the reasonable future forecasts for its business prospects.
I agree with that. My point and the point of the GP is that the market isn't good at valuing some things.
The 'market' is just a tool, a technology, not a God or scripture. Any tool works well for some tasks and less well for others. Also, the concept 'free market' is a theoretical abstraction that doesn't exist in reality; the NBA, for example, operates a monopoly in a market distorted heavily by law, regulations, a collective bargaining agreement, and market power.
As someone said, Theory is a useful servant but a bad master, liable to produce orthodox defenders of every variety of the faith.[1]
[1] Harry Guntrip, as far as I know
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/kawhi-leonard-like-all-t...
The market, ie, people individually and in groups buying stuff, value stuff according to the goals of those buyers. Saying that the market as done a terrible job of pricing in the future costs of climate change to society makes no sense; it was never supposed to!
stuaxos is talking about markets in situ, or reality. And in that sense of markets, there is no "free" market in the entire world. As Ha-Joon Chang points out, immigration control has a far bigger effect on wages than minimum wage, and if we (I'm in the USA) had a maximally free market we would also have open borders. There are many ways that "free" markets are not socially desirable.
Which is why he never said that. Hes says market value is equal to what it is worth.
The value to society also depends on how much society is worth. They are completely unrelated concepts.
> the cost of station is not what it is worth, that's simply the cost.
Yeah, but isn't it also wrong to say that the price is simply what it's worth?
Maybe a lot of the value is scientific, and maybe difficult to capture.
If corporations can't extract this value, maybe they won't be able to justify the running costs, the auction will flop and it will be de-orbited; but doesn't mean the value doesn't exist.
Maybe the item is so large and so rare the market won't clear efficiently - maybe investment is too risky, the worst case future costs too high - there's a limited supply of capital willing to take such high risks; insurance has its limits etc.
You did say: "In monetary terms" - maybe you were moving the goalposts there; but if so, that's you, not the original article.
Oh look, you know econ101 and think you are smart. The worth/value of an object != its price. There is a reason different words are used, you might have figured this out if you actually read some econ books.
The ISS just isn't very useful. A list of the four most exciting experiments: 1) 3D printing in zero G, 2) Growing yeast in zero G, 3) Virtual reality to provide an overlay for looking at the ground, and 4) a small teleoperated robot.[1] Those are science fair projects with a big budget.
[1] http://theweek.com/articles/446134/4-coolest-science-experim...
Space was the place. NASA 1962-1973
If you take the stance that space exploration/utilization isn't useful than it's possible to argue for decommissioning the ISS as a waste of money. However if you believe the ongoing exploration of space has significant value to the world it's hard to say the ISS is/will only be useful for science fair experiments.
Anybody remember Skylab? 1973 to 1979. Longest human time in space at the time, 84 days. And Mir, where Valeri Polyakov spent 438 days in zero G in 1994-1995.
At the risk of quoting all of this essay - http://idlewords.com/2005/08/a_rocket_to_nowhere.htm - from 2005, when the shuttle still flew:
At the now-usual cost of around a billion dollars , STS-95 spent ten days engaged in the following experiments: see how microgravity would affect cockroach growth, Studied a "space rose" to see what kinds of essential oils it would produce, at the suggestion of elementary school children, monitored everyday objects such as soap, crayons, and string to see whether their inertial mass would change in a weightless environment. Preliminary results suggest that Newton was right. Monitored the growth of fish eggs and rice plants in space, checked to see whether melatonin would make the crew sleepy (it did not)
Along with these craggy summits of basic research, the astronauts performed a raft of prepared experiments in metallurgy, medicine, fluid mechanics, embryology, and solar wind detection, all of which had one thing in common - they were designed to minimize crew interaction, in most cases requiring the astronauts to do little more than flip a switch (NASA policy requires that experiments on manned missions involve the crew)
Over the past three years, while the manned program has been firing styrofoam out of cannons on the ground, unmanned NASA and ESA programs have been putting landers on Titan, shooting chunks of metal into an inbound comet, driving rovers around Mars and continuing to gather a variety of priceless observations from the many active unmanned orbital telescopes and space probes sprinkled through the Solar System. At the same time, the skeleton crew on the ISS has been fixing toilets, debugging laptops, changing batteries, and speaking to the occasional elementary school over ham radio
The NASA obsession with elementary and middle school participation in space flight is curious, and demonstrates how low a status actual in-flight science has compared with orbital public relations. You are not likely to hear of CERN physicists colliding tin atoms sent to them by a primary school in Toulouse, or the Hubble space being turned around to point at waving middle schoolers on a playground in Texas, yet even the minimal two-man ISS crew - one short of the stated minimum needed to run the station - regularly takes time to talk to schoolchildren
This brings up a delicate point about justifying manned missions with science. In order to make any straight-faced claims about being cost effective, you have to cart an awful lot of science with you into orbit, which in turns means you need to make the experiments as easy to operate as possible. But if the experiments are all automated, you remove the rationale for sending a manned mission in the first place. Apart from question-begging experiments on the physiology of space flight, there is little you can do to resolve this dilemma. In essence, each 'pure science' Shuttle science mission consists of several dozen automated experiments alongside an enormous, irrelevant, repeated experiment in keeping a group of primates alive and healthy outside the atmosphere.
The science which was advanced, effective, worth doing, could have been done more cheaply with unmanned launches of automated experiments and no ISS.
[..]
NASA dismisses such helpful suggetions as unworthy of its mission of 'exploration' [..] Of course, the great explorers of the 1500's did not sail endlessly back and forth a hundred miles off the coast of Portugal, [..] The interesting bits in space are all much further away, and we have not paid them a visit since 1972. In fact, despite an ambitious "Vision for Space Exploration", there seems to be no mandate or interest in pursuing this kind of exploration, and all the signific...
Several of the goals for the ISS (at least from NASA's perspective) were based on getting experience operating in space for extended periods of time, for human health, for construction and engineering, and for operations over inter-planetary length periods. Experience and knowledge on all those fronts is needed to progress to further out, more isolated manned missions.
It's also not quite true in sentiment to say that humans survive in zero-g the same way they did in 1969. None of the early space missions spent that much time in zero-g, and we continue to learn a lot even after MIR and Skylab about the lack of gravity and radiation on human health.
Even now there is new research coming out of the Apollo-era missions related to human health. [1]
A similar situation exists exploring the depths of the ocean. You don't build a submersible to go 7km down until you've got a good grasp of operating at 300m. Likewise it's still quite valuable to explore at 300m since there's a lot we don't know (far more than LEO) even though we've been to 7km.
Putting humans into space at all is hugely difficult and expensive. There were a lot of arguments in the scientific community against a manned mission to the moon. And it's completely fair to consider the ROI and dollar/manpower value spent on manned space (and the ISS in particular.) I personally think there is huge value to manned space exploration beyond first-order economics, and from that perspective I think the ISS has and continues to accomplish much more than just random science projects. Especially given the political constraints it operates under.
[1] https://news.fsu.edu/news/science-technology/2016/07/28/apol...
Has anything been learnt from ISS about zero-G manufacturing that might make it a suitable platform for such by a private group?
Isn't the ISS supposed to be a staying waypoint for a mission to Mars?
Proctor and Gamble wants to better understand why colloids(shampoo, liquid detergents, medicine) separate, because that affects the shelf life of their products. If they can turn off gravity, they can figure out what other processes cause colloids to separate besides just gravity.
As far as manufacturing goes, there are not many products that are worth making in space right now. You need a product that is more valuable per unit mass than the cost per unit mass to launch something to LEO.
Now the interesting thing is that there have been commercial products manufactured in space. Latex microspheres were produced on the space shuttle and sold as calibration sources for microscopes.[1] Because microscope calibration needs literally microscopic amounts of these microsphere, per unit mass the product was very valuable.
[0] http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/news/comm... [1]http://www.panix.com/~kingdon/space/manuf.html [1]http://www.panix.com/~kingdon/space/manuf.html
SpacePharma is designing an end-to-end biological and chemical lab that can be launched on cubesats to perform experiments in zero g at the fraction of the cost and they aren't the only ones.
http://www.geektime.com/2016/01/06/beyond-spacex-10-space-co...
If that is not feasible I believe that at the end of it's life we should try to place it on the moons surface as intact as possible. It's parts could be salvaged to build a base, etc. It makes sense to take anything that is end of life in orbit around the earth and send it to the moons surface. Sort of like a wrecking yard that future generations might use for parts if there is ever a moon settlement.
Remember that it took an entire Saturn V rocket to launch 3 people and a pair of tiny spacecraft to the Moon, which is relatively close. The ISS weighs 420Mg; the Apollo LM+CSM pair weighed about a tenth of that.
Landing it on the Moon would also not be possible, because that would require an engine capable of accelerating the ISS at approximately 1/6g.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Orbital_Segment
[1] He never answered so its likely he never read it.
[2] https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/604657main_4-%20GER%20Stakeholders%...
1) the possibility or repurposing it's solar cells. 2) generic mass in orbit to be used for orbital inertia or counterjettisoned in orbit and used as propellant.
Most likely, the iss is just a liability or at best, worthless.