NASA plans to hand over the ISS to a private corporation

Not to mention the programmable electronic computers and open internet without which we couldn't even be having this discussion!

Examples: My time, the skills of guys who chase balls around in sneakers, the skills of scientists who develop the Theory of Relativity, the Theory itself, my child's education, or my child.

The market, ie, people individually and in groups buying stuff, value stuff according to the goals of those buyers. Saying that the market as done a terrible job of pricing in the future costs of climate change to society makes no sense; it was never supposed to!

Which is why he never said that. Hes says market value is equal to what it is worth.

The value to society also depends on how much society is worth. They are completely unrelated concepts.

However, I can't imagine why any commercial entity would be interested in burning cash in LEO, unless they have a very lucrative microgravity production requirement. But so far that scenario has just been a fable.

That's still selling it.

http://www.space.com/4432-nasa-weighs-excessive-vibrations-s...

The next version of the Dragon will dock with the station by it self just like the Soyuz does.

Delta-V Earth/Mars is 5,748 m/s, says http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/appmissiontable... .

That's 3.5 days of boost.

The ISS mass is 419,455 kg. The minimum energy needed is 1/2 m v^2 or 7E12 J.

A Saturn V is about 1E11J, says http://www.ocean.washington.edu/courses/envir215/energynumbe... .

So if you attach a few score Saturn Vs to ISS, you might be able to pull it off.

Anybody remember Skylab? 1973 to 1979. Longest human time in space at the time, 84 days. And Mir, where Valeri Polyakov spent 438 days in zero G in 1994-1995.

At the risk of quoting all of this essay - http://idlewords.com/2005/08/a_rocket_to_nowhere.htm - from 2005, when the shuttle still flew:

At the now-usual cost of around a billion dollars , STS-95 spent ten days engaged in the following experiments: see how microgravity would affect cockroach growth, Studied a "space rose" to see what kinds of essential oils it would produce, at the suggestion of elementary school children, monitored everyday objects such as soap, crayons, and string to see whether their inertial mass would change in a weightless environment. Preliminary results suggest that Newton was right. Monitored the growth of fish eggs and rice plants in space, checked to see whether melatonin would make the crew sleepy (it did not)

Along with these craggy summits of basic research, the astronauts performed a raft of prepared experiments in metallurgy, medicine, fluid mechanics, embryology, and solar wind detection, all of which had one thing in common - they were designed to minimize crew interaction, in most cases requiring the astronauts to do little more than flip a switch (NASA policy requires that experiments on manned missions involve the crew)

Over the past three years, while the manned program has been firing styrofoam out of cannons on the ground, unmanned NASA and ESA programs have been putting landers on Titan, shooting chunks of metal into an inbound comet, driving rovers around Mars and continuing to gather a variety of priceless observations from the many active unmanned orbital telescopes and space probes sprinkled through the Solar System. At the same time, the skeleton crew on the ISS has been fixing toilets, debugging laptops, changing batteries, and speaking to the occasional elementary school over ham radio

The NASA obsession with elementary and middle school participation in space flight is curious, and demonstrates how low a status actual in-flight science has compared with orbital public relations. You are not likely to hear of CERN physicists colliding tin atoms sent to them by a primary school in Toulouse, or the Hubble space being turned around to point at waving middle schoolers on a playground in Texas, yet even the minimal two-man ISS crew - one short of the stated minimum needed to run the station - regularly takes time to talk to schoolchildren

This brings up a delicate point about justifying manned missions with science. In order to make any straight-faced claims about being cost effective, you have to cart an awful lot of science with you into orbit, which in turns means you need to make the experiments as easy to operate as possible. But if the experiments are all automated, you remove the rationale for sending a manned mission in the first place. Apart from question-begging experiments on the physiology of space flight, there is little you can do to resolve this dilemma. In essence, each 'pure science' Shuttle science mission consists of several dozen automated experiments alongside an enormous, irrelevant, repeated experiment in keeping a group of primates alive and healthy outside the atmosphere.

The science which was advanced, effective, worth doing, could have been done more cheaply with unmanned launches of automated experiments and no ISS.

[..]

NASA dismisses such helpful suggetions as unworthy of its mission of 'exploration' [..] Of course, the great explorers of the 1500's did not sail endlessly back and forth a hundred miles off the coast of Portugal, [..] The interesting bits in space are all much further away, and we have not paid them a visit since 1972. In fact, despite an ambitious "Vision for Space Exploration", there seems to be no mandate or interest in pursuing this kind of exploration, and all the significant deadlines are pushed comfortably past the tenure of incumbent politicians.

The goal cannot be to have a safe space program - rocket science is going to remain difficult and risky. But we have the right to demand that the space program have some purpose beyond trying to keep its participants alive.

Your casual mention of 'ongoing exploration of space' is deceptive because manned missions to the ISS aren't part of the ongoing exploration of space, by virtue of them not doing any actual exploring.

SpacePharma is designing an end-to-end biological and chemical lab that can be launched on cubesats to perform experiments in zero g at the fraction of the cost and they aren't the only ones.

http://www.geektime.com/2016/01/06/beyond-spacex-10-space-co...