Starship Asterisk*

The International Space Station Expands Again

Explanation: The developing International Space Station (ISS) has changed its appearance again. In a recently completed rendezvous, the Space Shuttle orbiter Discovery, in its final flight, visited the ISS and added components that included the Leonardo Multi Purpose Logistics Module. The ISS and many of its modules and expansive solar panels are visible in the above picture taken by the Discovery Crew after leaving the ISS to return to Earth. The world's foremost space outpost can be seen developing over the past several years by comparing the above image to other past images. Also visible above are many different types of modules and supply ships. Construction began on the ISS in 1998.

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How long is the station? Also would it be possible for a future APOTD to have labels pointing out some of the features and areas of the station?

BTW love this site!

Here's your starter for ten: http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/1666 ... 012007.jpg

Shows most of the latest additions.

John

and as of February 2011: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c ... en.svg.png

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISS wrote: Mass 375,727 kg (828,340 lb)
Length 51 m (167.3 ft) - from PMA-2 to Zvezda
Width 109 m (357.5 ft) - along truss, arrays extended
Height c. 20 m (c. 66 ft)

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?

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?

Carl Fredricksen: [Carl, with his house high in the air, opens his door to see who knocked on it. Looking around, he spots Russell and yells... ] Whaa!

Russell: Hi, Mr. Fredricksen! It's me, Russell!

Carl Fredricksen: What are you doing out here, kid?

Russell: I found a snipe, and I followed it under your porch, but this snipe had a long tail, and looked more like a large mouse.
[His flag then blows away in the wind, and he gasps]

Russell: [Turns to Mr. Fredricksen] Please let me in.

Carl Fredricksen: [pause] No.
[He slams the door shut]

Carl Fredricksen: [Russell waits uncertainly for a few seconds. The door opens again] Oh, all right... [Russell runs inside]

The amount of engineering in the ISS is overwhelming. It must be the most complex machine ever built.

Hey neufer, I thought that we are running out of Helium?

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.

We could have welcomed immigrants.

You mean we haven't been?!

owlice wrote:

We could have welcomed immigrants.

You mean we haven't been?!

Clearly mexicans are not welcome, that's why they have no choice but to come as illegals, and I myself have spent 32 years trying to emigrate to the US from Canada but was never allowed to because I have no family there. Yet we are all humans beings.

Do you have an escape pod for those that are on the space station in case something goes wrong? What do they do incase something hits the station?

nighthawk wrote:
Do you have an escape pod for those that are on the space station in case something goes wrong? What do they do incase something hits the station?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Space_Station wrote:
Spacecraft from four different space agencies visit the ISS, serving a variety of purposes. The Automated Transfer Vehicle from the European Space Agency, the Russian Roskosmos Progress spacecraft and the HTV from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency have provided resupply services to the station. In addition, Russia supplies a Soyuz spacecraft used for crew rotation and emergency evacuation, which is replaced every six months

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?

I sure can't prove it, but I like to think, not implausibly, the space station has played a role in maintaining peace between the participants and their minions.

Preventing wars is always something worth spending money on. Figure out, somebody?, how much of anyone's actual tax bill went to pay for it. The number is prob a good bit lower than you think because it has been a group effort by more than one country.

I fear that "Guest" is a Utilitarian, who like Gradgrind would begrudge his children a visit to the circus, because it is a "bastion of Fancy and Conceit" (Hard Times)

And as a guest he may not realise that the common feature of all the usual suspects here is a sense of wonder, of what is and what might be, in the Universe and of the Universe. A little wonder is worth an awful lot.

John

Guest wrote:How long is the station? Also would it be possible for a future APOTD to have labels pointing out some of the features and areas of the station?

BTW love this site!

Have you seen the WIKI entry on the station?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internatio ... ce_Station

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?

What we have achieved is international cooperation between countries on 4 continents to build and maintain this station.
Remember, the Shuttles weren't as cost effective as we thought they would be.

Wiki wrote:Roger A. Pielke, Jr. has estimated that the Space Shuttle program has cost about US$170 billion (2008 dollars) through early 2008. This works out to an average cost per flight of about US$1.5 billion

It takes significantly less fuel to boost this ammount of material into Low Earth Orbit than it would to carry the same ammount of material to the moon.
The Saturn V, the Moon rocket:
utilized more fuel in the first stage (to lift the remaining 2 stages) than the Space Shuttle does to reach orbit as a single stage rocket,
stood an impressive 363' tall while the Shuttle is 184' tall
could lift 285,000 lbs to orbit while the shuttle can lift 53,600 lbs to Low Earth Orbit
could lift 48,500 lbs to the moon but is a one time use vehicle

http://www.nasm.si.edu/exhibitions/gal1 ... sec384.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle

Wiki wrote:From 1964 until 1973, a total of $6.5 billion ($43.99 billion present day) was appropriated for the Saturn V, with the maximum being in 1966 with $1.2 billion ($8.12 billion present day).[24]

One of the main reasons for the cancellation of the Apollo program was the cost. In 1966, NASA received its biggest budget of US$4.5 billion, about 0.5 percent of the GDP of the United States at that time. In 1969, the cost of a Saturn V including launch was US $ 185 million (inflation adjusted US$ 1.11 billion in 2011).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_V#Cost
It would take at least 50 launches to carry the same ammount of material to the moon as comprises the ISS including supplies and construction workers. It is just 2 hours to the ISS but a trip to the moon is 4 days and you need to take everything with you because if you forget something, you have to wait 4 days for it to arrive.

I remember when people used to applaud human achievement. Now its hand wringing over costs and risk. We'd still be living in caves if this attitude continues.

Today is a very sad day. The Discovery on its final flight. Another stage of NASA's massive great leap backward. The ISS is testament to what was achievable before all the bean counters, clipboard carriers and risk assessors crawled into NASA HQ. The Shuttle was the most amazing machine ever built in my opinion. Its really a very sad day to see that vision reduced to a museum piece with nothing even remotely more advanced on its way. The private ventures will flounder as the very first time there is an accident that will be curtains. Concorde only needed one accident and it was retired for good. I give any private company a maximum operating life of about ten years - in which they will barely get to low earth orbit for a few minutes...an accident will occur and one by one the companies will fold. It takes the resources of a country for exploration into an environment as hazardous as space. It will take the resources of the world to exploit it.

Each B2 Spirit costs $1.6bn...how many shuttles could have been built and run for that?

But how many Shuttles could have bombed Iraq and toppled Saddam?

It's a great APOD and I became curious by what seems to be reflections of some sort behind the ISS.

I did a simple "levels" adjustment in Photoshop to bring out the reflections better (Ctrl+L, then move the center triangle on the Input Level Bar to the left.
To my surprise, up came a big circular object right above the ISS and a smaller circular object to the upper right of the ISS.

Can anyone explain me what phemomena I am seeing?

Boldly go where no man has been before! Nice find in the links!

MennoRs wrote:It's a great APOD and I became curious by what seems to be reflections of some sort behind the ISS.

I did a simple "levels" adjustment in Photoshop to bring out the reflections better (Ctrl+L, then move the center triangle on the Input Level Bar to the left.
To my surprise, up came a big circular object right above the ISS and a smaller circular object to the upper right of the ISS.

Can anyone explain me what phemomena I am seeing?

Almost certainly, dust on the camera lens or low level flare in the optics

Nick

Hello: When astronauts excercise do they generate electricity? Example; cycle wheel turns a gen set...

JohnD wrote:I fear that "Guest" is a Utilitarian, who like Gradgrind would begrudge his children a visit to the circus, because it is a "bastion of Fancy and Conceit" (Hard Times)
John

"Guest" did suggest we could have been "exploring Callisto, Enceladus, building telescopes", so it may be unfair to tag him as a "Utilitarian who would begrudge his children a visit to the circus". Since he has been visiting this site at least once, he probably does have a little sense of wonder.
In any case, many projects or missions have contributed to human knowledge, whatever their daily life usefulness, like HST (Hubble), Pionner, Voyager, Vikings, Magellan, Galileo, Cassini, Ulysses, MGS (Mars Global Surveyor), Kepler, LRO (Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter), MRO (Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter), the Mars rovers, all the hawaiien and chilean telescopes (Keck, Subaru, Gemini, Magellan, MMT, SALT, LBT, VLT, ...), and many others.
Comparing these to the whole STS-ISS (Shuttle/Space station) extravaganza, and considering the cost, a critical judgement is not out of place.

kwalton1 wrote:Hello: When astronauts excercise do they generate electricity? Example; cycle wheel turns a gen set...

Why bother? They have abundant solar power.

-Noel

Greyhawk wrote:Its really a very sad day to see that vision reduced to a museum piece with nothing even remotely more advanced on its way.

What's that unmanned shuttle lookin' thang the Air Force has in the works?

-Noel