OT: A bit of a long shot, but

Now that would be one bitching spacewalk. Mick C

I wonder how many hundred billion dollars more, and how many more lives, we will lose before we abandon that idiotic idea. Return on investment so far has been zero.

John

Look on the positive side. All those NASA employees could be tax collectors instead :-(

...Jim Thompson

Indirect gains may have occured, like the ability to service the Hubble telescope, which has been a great benefit to astronomical science.

martin

One Hubble repair mission costs more than launching another space telescope, or 10 times more than building a ground-based adaptive-optics telescope of superior resolution. So we have one ailing Hubble when we could have launched a new one every year and done several times as much science, without killing crews.

NASA's unmanned science missions have been spectacular and economical; the men-in-space stuff has been insanely expensive, deadly, and absolutely useless.

John

The starry-eyed optimist's view. We pessimists see it as one of the few things worth doing.

-- Joe

That's not true. There are a lot of experiments which cannot be done on earth because of the gravity. You may benefit from past experiments every day without even knowing it :-)

Why worth doing? Nothing is happening in the ISS except trying to maintain the ISS. It's proven how dangerous and difficult it is to keep humans alive in space. That's all. It is not a bridge to anywhere, much less to the stars.

"The shuttle was built to service the space station, and the space station was built as a place for the shuttles to go."

The unmanned stuff - Pluto orbiters, comet missions, Mars rovers, have been spectacular.

John

Do you know of any microgravity experiments that yielded anything useful? As far as I know, the flame/semiconductor/crystal-growing things all turned out to be useless. I think they did prove that insects can mate in zero-G.

The shuttle and ISS are consuming the budget that should go to science and weather. We're running out of hurricane tracking satellites, and one shuttle mission would buy several of them, saving lives instead of risking them.

And NASA has a long history of taking credit for things they actually didn't do.

John

I dont think the Ultra deep field thing or UV stuff could be done from the surface.

What is the point of doing an experiment, if you already know the outcome?

Stop a war or two.It might release some funds.

Vote for a president who has at least a vague concept of an atom, or even what a chemistry set from the 1950's does, apart from making oil

martin

Right. Some very cool UV and gamma astronomy had been done by non-Hubble satellites. We need more of them.

The experiments were mostly silly make-work stuff. The 100% uselessness results are telling.

Care to name names? Hillary? Obama? Algore?

John

IIRC, the argument has been made that the "people" won't support just Robots in Space. That it takes People up there doing stuff to keep the General Populace, not the Tech Crowd, behind the Space Program.

Don't know.

Robert

Then they should build a big water tank and point a TV camera at people in "space suits" floating aroud in them weightlessly. Then make the black-and-white images a bit noisy and put those funny alignment crosses in them. Nobody will know the difference.

robert

Do you think the waste and loss of life will ever approach the horror of the Iraq disaster?

Thanks, Rich

If they could... they would.

Robert

The manned space program has certainly been more expensive. And it's demonstrably useless, whereas the jury is still out on Iraq.

John

"Demonstrably useless" to you, sure. But it's just about the one thing I'd be willing to pay a tax for - call it a membership fee for the Space Age. ;-)

When the Mars rovers were landing, there was a call-in show on some cable channel, where they were having a discussion about them - they cost about $300,000,000.00 each. Bush spends that in two days in Iraq.

Anyway, I called in and asked, "Is it not true that if the government refrained from purchasing only one aircraft carrier or nuclear-missile- carrying submarine, that the savings would cover the entire cost of NASA since its inception?"

The answer was, "Yes."

So, John, please get some perspective.

Cheers! Rich

Just a couple minutes googling will show how absurd that is. NASA is running about $16 billion per year. A Nimitz class nuclear-powered carrier costs about $4.5 billion, and has an estimated service life of

John

Well! It MUST be true, Rich heard it on TV, and liberals AND libertarians swear by the tube ;-)

...Jim Thompson