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Comment by spike021 | Hacker News Reader

Not a big space person, but this makes me wonder: why have we not planned for a new ISS? We must have better tech nowadays from all the working countries/groups currently involved, plus SpaceX and other space companies' backing that would not have existed as it does now back when this ISS was first designed/created.

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Largely because it's a fantastically expensive undertaking, and hasn't quite borne out the fruits that were speculated about over the years. USA provides a huge bulk of the funding, expertise, and personnel required to keep the program running. That's not to say that Russia, Canada, Japan, etc. don't do their part, but it's really not as much of a truly global joint effort as you might be led to believe.

Then there's a genuine question of what this enormous expenditure truly buys us. NASA's budget has been strangled for decades now, and robotic probes and missions to other planets have been perennially delayed due to cost, while their scientific ROI would truly be much greater than for ISS experiments in many cases. Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge fan of the ISS and manned spaceflight in general, but this kind of money does require serious explanation to Congress to justify the costs. Oh, and there's the entire money pit that is Artemis/SLS that stays on NASA books.

Also, why now? The private space industry is at what seems to be the beginning of an inflection point with heavy launch capabilities (SpaceX Starship) looking likely to drive down costs by over an order of magnitude. A single Starship might provide 800 cubic meters of volume, and the whole ISS is 1,000 cubic meters. Why not wait for that to come online and then launch many many ISS' worth of volume to several labs?

Lastly, the privatization of launch vehicles in particular has a lot of people questioning if private industry might be better able to step up to this challenge of manned orbiting labs. It has a potential to expand the range of solutions, massively decrease costs, and provide efficiencies that NASA might not be able to provide. When you don't have to manufacture space parts scattered all across the globe, it's easy to see why this could be cheaper and more efficient.

>Then there's a genuine question of what this enormous expenditure truly buys us.

It helps to answer the question of whether or not humans can even survive long term away from Earth. Sure, if you judge it purely by the price tag, it's not doing very well. If you judge it by the scientific, societal and philosophical implications, we're not spending nearly enough.

> It helps to answer the question of whether or not humans can even survive long term away from Earth

How will it answer that question that we already don't know of? I don't think that was the aim of ISS anyways and will definitely won't be the aim of second ISS. Humans can survive in space for year without significant physical damage but with lot of training.

To me, it's just so odd that people don't seem to understand why we have an ISS. Is the main argument "We've already learned what's needed about life in space, and now we don't need a space station anymore"? That seems absurd.

The ISS exists to give Russia cover to keep the ex Soviet rocket scientists employed and thus not tempted to work for some evil dictatorship.

No, the argument is that there's plenty to learn, and it's all very interesting, but it doesn't stand up against people's very real needs here on Earth. I'm about the biggest fan of space you'll find, but even I, sadly, find the ethical calculus unassailable. Manned spaceflight won't accrue material benefits for ten generations or much more, and meanwhile human beings are dying of treatable or curable diseases, suffering under poverty, and living without access to clean water.

This spoken-word work from 1970 conveys the sentiment well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goh2x_G0ct4

>I'm about the biggest fan of space you'll find, but even I, sadly, find the ethical calculus unassailable.

I'm not the biggest fan of manned spaceflight, and I couldn't care less about the ISS in particular.

But how does "ethical calculus" tell you to care about killing the ISS, vs. say LIGO, or wasteful military spending, or the video game industry, or foie gras, or goldschlager, or TikTok or astronomy in general or the Xbox or selfie sticks or...

If I was dictator, I'd prefer missions like New Horizons, but I can't see what ethical calculation is involved, I'd just rather see pictures of far away stuff than pay taxes for a space station to go around in circles.

> if you judge it purely by the price tag, it's not doing very well.

This is a bad time for the ISS program to ask for more money. The USA Congress is not going to give NASA and the ISS program more money when they've already committed to print an enormous amount of dollars for COVID stimulus and various other COVID-related bailouts. NASA and the ISS is going to be on a budget for awhile. Even moreso than they were before.

The problem with Privatised space industry is your country doesn't control the agenda. SpaceX is a pretty rare thing, the rest of the private space industry (Blue Origin, Virgin, Boeing) is as much of a money pit as NASA was.

Then you have rapidly progressing government run space programs like China and India. The fact that the US banned China from the ISS and banned Non-Americans from participating in what it deems as weapon systems has only driven more resolve for home grown/soveraign alternatives.

> you don’t control the agenda

True, but not really in the way you describe. The US is the main (often, the only) customer of US space companies. If you control the money, you control the operational agenda. If you want a a new ISS? Just write up the contract.

The way in which you don’t control the agenda is only inasmuch as the strategic interests of the space company diverges from those of the US govt. But typically, with outsourced high-value work, vendors will evolve to MORE closely align to their big customers. (It screws the small customers often, but hey, the govt isn’t small).

The issue in my mind is much more value extraction & leverage, but as long as there’s multiple players (including an in-sourced option), I don’t see how it’s a problem.

Gigadollar-scale space projects seem like a particularly poor fit for the private industry model, though. Conventionally the idea of free-market competition is that companies stand to gain if they succeed but have to eat the losses if they fail, and so competition eventually selects the best. But we're not talking about making widgets or sandwiches or launch vehicles. Things like the ISS, JWST, etc are all one-off projects, and they cannot be allowed to fail, so competition doesn't really help and the public is left holding the bag, just like we see in the endless cost overruns of politically unkillable DoD contracts.

"Public bad private good" isn't a coherent strategy. If NASA isn't good enough then the preference should be to improve NASA rather than to insert an unnecessary layer of profit-taking for SpaceX or Boeing to do the same thing anyway.

>Things like the ISS, JWST, etc are all one-off projects, and they cannot be allowed to fail

True

> "Public bad private good" isn't a coherent strategy

Also true

Still, an infinite series of one-off projects comprise a continuous market. If SpaceX royally screws up one project, then yes, the public is left holding the bag _on that project_. But you know who's getting a lot fewer projects? SpaceX.

A federal gov't monopoly isn't the answer, just as abolishing NASA isn't the answer. Both are good. But... SpaceX is proving they can launch cheaper, quicker, and just as safely - isn't that a thing worth encouraging?

But space x work in spite of the nasa system... could you dream of nasa celebrating SN8 plowing into the ground as a raging success... it’s a huge cultural shift, not so much driven by private sector competition (Honestly who competes with space x?), more to do with leadership style.

BlueOrigin is a perfect Nasa 2.0 comparison.

  > could you dream of nasa celebrating SN8 plowing into
  > the ground as a raging success.

Nobody is celebrating SN8 plowing into the ground. We are celebrating the fact that SN8 plowed into the correct square meter of ground. We also celebrate the fact that SN8 plowed into that particular meter of ground while oriented in the direction that we hoped, but barely dreamed, that it would be oriented.

That’s my point... I’m not saying space X is bad or irresponsible, they are just different (and I think in a good way). Agree SN8 was amazing! And something NASA would never have done. Nor would they livestream it, nor keep it available on their website.

Echoing the sister comment to add more color, I think when it comes to this scale of money, it becomes too easy to conflate public and private capability. The ISS cost $150 billion. That is a kind of cost that even the tech behemoths of the world today would not be able to stomach. Some efforts really require country-coffer levels of money to be realized.

That means the US government directly controls which projects live and die, simply because they control the purse. Most space endeavors don't require this scale of money, and even a small token of innovation incentives can often result in outsized societal benefits. Even for SpaceX to just think about the Starship program, they literally had to corner the global orbital launch market for nearly a decade to come.

While I do agree that Boeing is a money-pit due to their involvement with SLS, I still wouldn't put Virgin or Blue Origin in anywhere close to that bucket. While these two might not be as incredibly innovative and capital efficient as SpaceX, they're still orders of magnitude better than anything like the SLS, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and others that are considered "old space".

China is pouring an absurd amount of its own money through thinly guised military development arms, and they're excelling at it. It's truly a shame that the US cut them off from the ISS, and its even more detrimental that the rest of the world has not paid close enough attention to their efforts. They're about the only player that's even close to competing with anything like SpaceX.

I wouldn't put India in the same club as China either. India has done extremely well at making cheap reliable orbital class launch vehicles by cost cutting and incremental improvements. Once SpaceX comes to the scene, they will be obsolete. They do not have the public appetite to invest the scale of money required to build programs the likes of US & China can build.

Russia meanwhile seems obsessed with trampolines.

China is more crazy because SpaceX got access to Nasa research and development (through people and location)... China have kind of home grown there whole system in an insanely short time

China finally have their own heavy lift rockets, the Long March 5B. This gives them the ability to finally launch a Mir-like space station, which they will start assembling this year.

The 5B also gives them more options.

In 10 years, when they complete their own Super Heavy Lift rocket, the Long March 9, of Saturn V class, then things will get interesting. It seems like they will ace this one as well. This can help them send human missions to the moon.

But the interesting developments, are their space plane research. Which they started back in 2006, and estimated it would take 15 years, and would require a heavy lift rocket, the 5B, which they now have. This would put it around the 2021 time frame, which is now. And last year, they successfully tested their secret space plane prototype. If they scale up their space plane, and enable it to transport humans too, then they’ll have an interesting mechanism to transport their astronauts to their space station, and return them gracefully back to the earth.

Then, it seems they will succeed with their Long March 8R, for reusable vertical take off and vertical landing, similar to SpaceX. It seems they will be the 2nd organization, after SpaceX, to achieve an operational VTVL system.

I figured, if they can robotically stick the moon landing in a vacuum, using retroactive propulsion, then they can probably land a reusable booster back on earth.

Electron Labs are a successful competitor to SpaceX in the satellite launch space. They don't have the same capabilities, but they are much more cost effective than Boeing. Virgin Orbit also just successfully launched a satellite with a rocket attached to an airplane. I think it's possible we could see more serious competitors to SpaceX given enough time.

You mean Rocket Labs? - yes agree they have a similar innovation culture to spaceX (from the outside)

> NASA's budget has been strangled for decades now

It’s higher than it was in the 70s and has remained pretty constant since then trending upward (when adjusting for inflation)

http://static1.squarespace.com/static/500caca8e4b0e4a25027aa...

Yes. But in another way to look at it, as a percentage of the US federal budget, in 2017 and 2019 it was the lowest it's been since 1959. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA

As there continue to be more and more federal programs that will pretty much be the case for any individual portion of the federal budget - smaller proportionally but larger over all - so that really doesn’t say anything

The program might not have borne all the speculative fruits, but the one very major thing that has come out of it is the learning about the effects of living in micro-gravity on the human body. If ever we want to get humans out into the rest of the solar system, this knowledge is priceless. Oh, I know that NASA has this constant pressure to justify that learning in terms of stuff like "medical benefits" (and there surely are a bunch of those!) but really it's the foundational pure science that's critical here. I don't think there's any monetary value can be put on that.

The ISS mostly happened because it was a way to keep ex-Soviet aerospace scientists and engineers doing aerospace things rather than, say, go build ICBMs for third world countries.

Same as Arecibo happened because the USAF wanted a big radar and the Hubble happened because (I forgot which spy agency it was) had a spare satellite.

Sad when you think about it...

Satellites in general happened as a result of an arms race.

The space race at all was 90% a pissing match between the USSR and the USA.

Hubble’s optics were designed around contemporary manufacturing infrastructure for spy satellites, presumably the KH-11 design developed by the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-11_Kennen

Don't forget the other half of it: the ISS was basically the only justification for the Shuttle's continued existence

>The ISS mostly happened because it was a way to keep ex-Soviet aerospace scientists and engineers doing aerospace things rather than, say, go build ICBMs for third world countries.

Nope. It's funny you seriously consider it being true. Building space stations and ICBMs are two VERY different fields for one thing. And number of launches to ISS is significantly smaller than number of satellite launches.

One of the main reasons for the US was a chance to buy space station building technology and transfer relevant expertise for a relatively cheap price tag. Russian/USSR scientists and engineers were far ahead in this field thanks to the Mir station. Creating a demand for the Space Shuttle was a good bonus as well.

Because the scientific value is dubious. Most of the experiments tend to be "doing X, but in space" or looking for solutions to medical problems that only occur because you are on the ISS on the first place.

We do have plans for its replacement. Axiom is going to launch three modules, starting from 2024. When it's time to retire ISS (2028 probably), Axiom's modules will detach, effectively becoming ISS 2.0.

I'm fine with ISS being open for commercial operations, but can't help but feel unease by the entire ISS being a commercial endeavour. But then again, about a fifth of NASA's budget goes to keeping the lights on in ISS.

I'll believe it when there's more than renders or they've booked a rocket. The current decomm date floating around for the ISS is 2025 so they're not long left.

The ISS is modular.

There's no need for a "new" ISS, per se. You just attach new modules and, if need be, detach and deorbit old modules.

It's less exciting, kind of like maintaining an old code base.

It's literally the most expensive single structure built in the history of our species. Perhaps this little fact can put in perspective why we have yet to plan for another one.

There are plans on the Russian side. If it will be decided to discontinue ISS after 2026, then the new Russian modules (Nauka, Prichal, and SPM-1) will be undocked to form core of a new station. Depending on negotiations it could either become ISS-2, or sovereign OPSEK [0]. But unfortunately I don't have high hopes for those plans to be implemented in reality for a number of reasons.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_Piloted_Assembly_and_E...

When Starship comes online, building a thing like this will be hecka fast.

Nope - there'll be not much difference.

It's not just the getting things into space that's the hard and costly part. Modules take years to design, build, and test.

That's why the current trend moves towards ever smaller and thus cheaper satellites and big launchers like Delta IV Heavy, Ariane 5, and Falcon Heavy barely see any action at all.

Starship would enable single-launch space stations, yes. But there are no single-launch space station designs yet and building one will either take time (ISS/MIR) or end up being much more expensive per person day due to weak design (e.g. Skylab).

>> It's not just the getting things into space that's the hard and costly part. Modules take years to design, build, and test.

Using the traditional approach, yes. But SpaceX is proving that there are other approaches that yield fruit far faster and also for drastically less money.

Yes, but there's a good reason why they have so-far reserved this approach for unmanned vehicles.

Well, how many space stations have SpaceX designed so far?

And what, pray tell, is the "traditional approach" in designing space stations compared to magical "approaches that yield results faster"? Are you aware that Skylab was designed, built, and launched in under 4 years and consisted of a converted Saturn-IVB rocket stage?

The total program cost was $275M per year over 8 years (including design, 4 stations, 4 Skylab- and 3 Apollo launches, as well as operations), which translates to $1.6Bn/yr in 2021 dollars.

Today, Bigelow Aerospace would have - maybe (they're currently defunct due to the pandemic - the B330 more or less ready to fly, but that is launched on an Atlas V.

It took two demonstration models, launched in 2005 and 2007 to get them ready for prime time. In 2013 they developed the BEAM module under a 16 month NASA contract, which was launched and attached to the ISS in 2016.

So BA built and deployed two prototypes in 2 years and a crewed fully functional module in 16 months with just $17.8M. Yet you assume that SpaceX, who never built a space station before, can somehow do it even faster and cheaper? Why? On what factual basis and on which historical examples do you base this assumption on?

Why not? The ISS is a spacecraft in all but name. It wouldn't be strange if they decided to use starship as a space station development platform, since they already planned for starship to carry humans to Mars.

> And what, pray tell, is the "traditional approach" in designing space stations compared to magical "approaches that yield results faster"?

Well, the first thing that comes to mind is the huge amount of work done to keep things light, thin, self-contained and fit within existing payload bay sizes and can be constructed with minimum number of launches.

If launch costs drop through the floor there is less need for that.

You could build heavier, more robust stations because mass to orbit prices are so low. You could build it without having to minimise the number of launches. You could have much bigger and heavier sections sent up in pieces and built "on-site" so to speak.

Much easier to consider when the price to move those heavy components up to space orders of magnitude cheaper and launches take place daily / weekly.

(Yes I know I am glossing over a lot of things here).

It's a self-feeding culture. Launches were expensive, so you designed your spacecraft very thoroughly for many years before sending it up. If launches have become cheap, in part due to iterative design processes and letting oneself fail, then the same techniques can be applied to orbiting bodies. Launch a bunch of cheap inflatable labs, test them in real (out of) world conditions, and iterate towards a final design faster

NASA had no vehicle for launching a replacement. It didn’t even have a domestic vehicle for launching astronauts for 9 years. SLS ate up any funds that were left.

Private industry doesn’t need a station.

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