Posted on 08/30/2011 7:47:13 PM PDT by Nachum
WASHINGTON — The risk of an unprecedented evacuation of the International Space Station will spike if Russian craft cannot resume their missions and return by November, a senior NASA official has warned.
"There is a greater risk of losing the ISS when it's unmanned than if it were manned," Michael Suffredini, the ISS program manager for the US space agency, said in a conference call with Russian officials.
"The risk increase is not insignificant," he added.
Russia on Monday delayed its next manned mission to the ISS by at least a month after an unmanned cargo vessel crashed into Siberia instead of reaching orbit on August 24. The head of Russia's manned spaceflight programme also warned that a significantly longer delay would force the six people on board the station to abandon the orbiter due to fatigue and supply problems.
The station crew normally consists of six -- currently three Russians, two Americans and one Japanese -- working six-month rotations.
Staff safety and the "very big investment" that the Russian and US governments have made in the ISS would guide future decisions, Suffredini said during the call on Monday.
"We prefer not to operate in that condition without crew on board for an extended period of time just to make sure we end up in that situation.
(Excerpt) Read more at google.com ...
What about that dang "astrobot" that they have up there? It's been sitting up there for months and there was a story about how they unpacked it for the first time last week. Supposedly, it's designed to "help" the occupants. Beats me if it could do anything on its own. Even with commands from the ground.
Two areas right off the bat... material science and medical science. We’ve got to figure out how to prevent bone and muscle loss in our astronauts and it’s hard to do those studies on the ground.
I don’t know if it’ll cost us billions. The lion’s share of the expenditures have already been spent. From now on, costs would primarily involve lifting crews and supplies up, and maintenance. I think the American share has been a couple of hundred million to date, far more than any other country’s share, a large chunk of that due to the Russians throwing wrenches into the works at every opportunity, as anyone who wasn’t wet behind the ears could have anticipated they would do. imo
The Department of Education has five times the budget and it is a destructive force. NASA is not.
We sure got a lesson in cold welding.
44 years to Alpha Centauri using the original design. The British came up with some improvements in the '80s that would increase speed by 20%.
Cold welding. Good. The only way we could have figured that out is by investing billions in NASA?
And what has cold welding have to do with exploring the universe?
Well we have several $billions less to invest in that project because we invested it in the space station.
The credit card is still overdrawn and the money is still wasted no matter the percentage.
Here a billion or ten, there another hundred billion, it all adds up. You want to take some from the Dept. of Ed.? Have at it but I didn’t hear any suggestion to do so.
Do you have any evidence that there’s a planet at Alpha Centauri that could support human life? Why would anyone go there?
Let’s talk cost effectiveness. ISS is the epitome of a “white elephant”. And it is not actually “in space”... hell, it’s not even in a stable orbit, which is why it needs the rocket boosts to keep it from falling down.
ISS was designed from the ground up to be a contractors’ gravy train. We could have given 1/100th of the money to someone like Burt Rutan and gotten a better product out of the deal.
Our sewers leak and our bridges topple while inflation eats the old folks food budget but hey! Think of the prestige and PR of spending hundreds of billions to sprout some seeds in space! and who can live without a centrifugal toilet?
(From Wiki):
The discovery of planets orbiting other star systems, including similar binary systems (Gamma Cephei), raises the possibility that planets may exist in the Alpha Centauri system. Such planets could orbit Alpha Centauri A or Alpha Centauri B individually, or be on large orbits around the binary Alpha Centauri AB. Since both the principal stars are fairly similar to the Sun (for example, in age and metallicity), astronomers have been especially interested in making detailed searches for planets in the Alpha Centauri system. Several established planet-hunting teams have used various radial velocity or star transit methods in their searches around these two bright stars.[70] All the observational studies have so far failed to find any evidence for brown dwarfs or gas giant planets.[70][71]
However, computer simulations show that a planet might have been able to form within a distance of 1.1 AU (160 million km) of Alpha Centauri B and the orbit of that planet may remain stable for at least 250 million years.[72] Bodies around A would be able to orbit at slightly farther distances due to A's stronger gravity. In addition, the lack of any brown dwarfs or gas giants around A and B make the likelihood of terrestrial planets greater than otherwise.[73] As of 2002, technologies did not allow for terrestrial planets like Earth to be detected around Alpha Centauri.[73] But theoretical studies on the detectability via radial velocity analysis have shown that a dedicated campaign of high-cadence observations with a 1-m class telescope can reliably detect a hypothetical planet of 1.8 Earth masses in the habitable zone of B within three years.[7
I daresay we'll know if there are planets long before we'd be ready to go.
I’d like to kill the Education Department. That money is used against our kids every day.
We need the ISS for the physiological knowledge we'll have to have to travel to the stars.
It has to do with the construction of ships in orbit.
Are you just yanking my chain with a question like that?
Agreed.
Straight out of the liberal Democrat playbook. They've been screaming those exact words for 50 years.
What next? Call me racist or an Islamophobe? That’s always good for a few chuckles.
Passing strange how a discussion of spending priorities elicits comments like that.
But when some grandma looks up into the night sky and sees the flash of light as The Billions of Bucks Boondoggle Burns she can be proud that living on $600 a month helped make it possible.
It’s all about priorities not playbooks.
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