Support the Blog — Buy This Book!
For Kindle and with free ePub version. Only $9.49 Great reading.
Here is what Gary Shapiro CEO of the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) said: Dvorak's writing sings with insight and clarity. Whether or not you agree with John's views, he will get you thinking and is never boring. These essays are worth the read!
Put this ad on your blog!
Syndicate
Subscribe to Main Blog feed here:
Subscribe to Comments too (below):
Junk Email Filter
Marc Perkel, making nice with Vladimir Putin.
My question about the ISS is,
What has all that money bought us? Show me the great new medicines, materials, and technologies the ISS brought us.
Where is our Return On Investment??
Leading with the premise that man will eventually travel within the solar system and then interstellar:
– human health in near zero g (eye site degradation, circulation issues, muscle and bone loss, psychological stresses)
– materials science (how metals fatigue, batteries decay, radiation effects shielding)
– communications (RF K-band anomalies and how to handle them, laser communications, operations streamlining)
– navigation (resupply docking and rendezvous, IR tracking, star position navigation)
And then there’s a swell of Earth-benefiting technologies:
– Earth science (polar ice changes, weather patterns, lightning strikes)
– nanosat/picosat advances and launches from the ISS
– systems engineering best practices (international collaborations, lessons learned from massive engineering coordination)
Or the economic drivers that have stimulated new technologies (which is probably what you were really asking):
– velcro
– water/waste purification techniques
– SSD drives and other solid state technologies
Why? What were YOU going to do with the money? You should really be more concerned with the factor of 20 more dollars the U.S. and others are spending on pointless wars.
Nope, nothing on your list is good enough.
Economic drivers.
Velcro – invented in 1948 by George de Mestral. No ISS in sight.
Purification Techniques – not here either. Already developed for nuclear subs.
SSD Drives. Not this. SSD drives were first introduced in 1976 by Dataram as a computer server accessory. Subsequent improvements ran apace with the computer industry. ISS has nothing to do with this.
Earth-benefiting technologies
Everything mentioned is being done more cost efficiently by private industry. Maybe putting the 75 BILLION spent on the ISS into the hands of entrepreneur endeavors such as Blue Horizons, Space X, etc. would have been MUCH better??
Leading with the premise
The Russians already had all this info with Mir.
NewFormatSux has the right answer. The ISS was all about the Russians and keeping them busy, for all the good it did us.
http://russianspaceweb.com/iss_chronology.html
http://spacepolicyonline.com/news/nasa-ig-iss-cost-u-s-75-billion-so-far-estimates-of-future-costs-overly-optimistic
The purpose was to provide jobs to Russian scientists to keep them from working on weapons, and getting Russian cooperation on nuclear material. Plus NASA spread jobs out over lots of Congressional districts, after they nearly lost the vote.
You are right. See my comment above.
A delay of the return of the dark ages.