garry wrote:How much money exactly has been spent on this station? What really has been accomplished? Would it of been easier to just put a base on the moon? The shuttles are finished, no replacements, what are we trying to achieve?
The only real purpose of the ISS was to give jobs to those involved. It never accomplished anything, never was useful for anything.
They might as well have been paid instead to dig holes and fill them up, or being paid to stay home.
The inside habitable space of the whole ISS is smaller than the average laboratory at a small neighborhood medical clinic, where much much more useful work is being done for much much less.
The sad thing is that the 100's of billions of dollars wasted for that could have gone elsewhere, exploring Callisto, Enceladus, building telescopes, hospitals, rail transit, high speed trains, high speed internet.
Internet access in the US is 100 times slower than in South Korea or Hong Kong.
High speed trains in the US are 50 years behind those in France, UK, Germany, Spain, Japan, China.
The Wuhan–Guangzhou High-Speed Railway covers 663 miles in 2 hours and 45 minutes, and average 190 mph for the entire trip.
We could have built such a railway between New-York and Chicago, Boston and Washington.
We could have built a levee around New-Orleans. We could have helped industries in Detroit. We could have welcomed immigrants.
We could have prepared for the next catastrophic hurricane that will destroy Miami, or for the next earthquake that will devastate LA.
Those are coming, one day sooner today than yesterday.
We could have done all of that.
But no, we built the ISS, while bridges are falling in Minneapolis, while it's raining in the obsolete New York subway, while there's no decent bus service in Detroit.
This country is crumbling, but we have a pie in the sky, and we can not eat it.
The International Space Station Expands Again
