Item — HN Reader

Tangentially: What purpose does ISS serve today? It cost $150 billion to get to this point, but is it doing anything which justifies the operating and maintenance costs?

vs. other uses of the money. On Earth, direct replacement with new in-orbit infrastructure/new station, or other space operations.

5 comments

The purpose was to keep the Russian rocket program alive and out of the hands of the Iranians, Koreans and other bad actors. It was also a PR effort where the west could strongly subsidize other countries for international harmony and goodwill.

Given the current state of Russia and Iran, it failed.

But ironically it is now doing good science.

I’m all in favor of letting the Russians go their own way at this point.

I say this as a huge space flight enthusiast: I believe the ISS has only symbolic value and serves a secondary function as a subsidy program for component producers. The same was largely true of the Space Shuttle program.

I also don't necessarily have any problems with that, unless it's siphoning away funds that could have been used to build up an actual orbital infrastructure or serves to further the impression that this is the reasonable maximum the public can expect from a human presence in space.

Since the Apollo program we have a history of hinting at, but then purposefully not following through on, the idea of expanding human civilization into space.

ISS is the reason SpaceX exists, for example. Without it, the government funded “commercial space” efforts and development help wouldn’t have happened and the other things spacex is doing and going to do wouldn’t have happened.

I have no idea whether the Crew Dragon contract rescued SpaceX financially or not, I'll take your word for it. However, I'm unsure why you're framing this as a counterpoint to my argument?

> I also don't necessarily have any problems with that, unless it's siphoning away funds that could have been used to build up an actual orbital infrastructure

ISS is/was being used as a first step in building “actual” orbital infrastructure. SpaceX was awarded $400M for the developmental of falcon 9 + dragon, phase two was paying for the actual subsequent launches which is ongoing.

“Rescued spacex” would be an odd way of putting it, developing then launching crew and cargo to iss is a huge part of their revenue which enables them to pursue other things like starlink and starship, etc. $2B in 2022 from NASA isn’t a rescue, it’s their business.

ISS isn’t an impressive end, it’s a necessary stepping stone which is enabling next steps like commercial space developing technology and companies, testing things in a relatively safe space relatively cheaply.

NASA plans to retire the International Space Station by 2031 by crashing it into the Pacific Ocean:

https://edition.cnn.com/2022/02/02/world/nasa-international-...

And it's already planning its replacement:

https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-selects-companies-to...

It's there to give the Space Shuttle program a reason to exist.

But the space shuttle program ended a decade ago?

That's the (sad) joke. The shuttle was one element of a larger plan, where the shuttle was an enabler of the broader plan but not really a useful end in itself (vs other rockets, etc.). The rest of the plan was cancelled before being built, but the shuttle existed. There was a mostly-post-hoc justification of military/IC missions (on orbit servicing of national security assets, and "nonconsensual servicing" of foreign/hostile objects on orbit...), but this was mostly turf protection. ISS was than mostly to compete with Mir, and then became some combination of "justify the shuttle we have at home" and then "jointness missions with Russia".

Science? Must every human endeavour generate profit?

It doesn't have to generate profit, but it does need to generate more science/better science than the next best alternative way to spend the money. (It's presumably not optimized solely for science, but also engineering and politics, both domestic and international, but it doesn't seem to be the most efficient way to accomplish what it accomplishes.)

The issue that comes up with 'efficiencies' in this context is that much of the money that has been spent at all on ISS-based science would probably not have been spent at all if it had to be done otherwise, because instead of a large up-front cost of the ISS + smaller cost of an experiment to be done inside or just tossed out an airlock, there would be no upfront cost and a large cost for a dedicated science satellite.

This is why Artemis is structured the way it is, the best way to guarantee that the US sticks to a commitment instead of every other president trashing the last one's work is to tie in so many international partners and so much large-scale up-front spending that it becomes too prestigious to cancel.

On top of that, there are lots of engineering benefits, where it's useful that we've learned the lessons from the ISS instead of needing to learn them later at the Moon or Mars or needing to have a sufficiently slow and expensive waterfall design process where they get figured out on the drawing board. Eg. simply being a destination for crewed spacecraft to go to is in itself useful as it creates a standard target to aim for. It allows SpaceX to discover that their toilet can leak urine into a compartment sometimes much faster because they're flying and refurbishing regularly.

It'd similarly be hard to quantify the benefit of things like regular resupply flights needed etc, considering that a big part of what helped SpaceX establish itself as a leader in the industry (and thus also giving rise to all of the other new launch companies and their potential technological improvements, private funding and cost reductions) was the ISS cargo resupply contract they won. Creating that regular demand has a similar effect on funding and costs as the emergence of megaconstellations as a viable project have had.

So, I'd say that ultimately the ISS is proving to have been worth the cost for the US. Without it acting as an easy destination, our space industry would be kinda like the SLS, absurdly expensive, very corrupt, barely usable and essentially non-existent (compared to the rest of the industry).