Comment by chernevik | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chernevik | Hacker News Reader

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It seems to me that there are two NASAs: The unmanned exploration programs, which do amazing things, and the manned exploration programs, which look very much like jobs programs.

I'm not an expert, but I haven't yet seen a good science rationale for returning to the moon. I'm not aware of what we've learned from the International Space Station. And the Space Shuttle was an expensive and needless boondoggle that killed fourteen people for no good reason. If someone can correct me on the science we gain from these programs I'd welcome it. Because it seems to me that we get precious little science from the treasure and blood dedicated to these programs.

The Apollo missions were a different thing, they taught a lot about the Moon and brought back crucial material like the Genesis Rock.

On the other hand the unmanned program does amazing things like Hubble, Voyager, Magellan, the Mars probes, and on and on. And soon, Webb. These have told us amazing things about our world, and we should be doing more of them.

> I'm not aware of what we've learned from the International Space Station

If you watch videos of the people on the space station you begin to be reminded of "remote hands" in a data center. The space station is like a colo-facility that houses science experiments instead of racks of computers. The people on board seem to exist as "remote hands" that maintain those science experiments for whatever science team is on the ground running them.

This is all conjecture, of course... but I've watched enough of "Hi I'm somebody on the space station, let's walk around" videos to draw this opinion. The ISS is a science lab that orbits the earth. The people on board are there to be remote hands.

Have there been any interesting breakthroughs or findings from the science done aboard the ISS?

I know you're asking specifically about results from on board the ISS but here's something more broad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spinoff_technologies

Oodles. NASA puts out reports every once in a while detailing the benefits of the ISS.

Some of them are not too surprising. For example looking at hurricanes from space helps you predict where they will go.

I think the medical research is pretty interesting though. Of course a lot of the medical research is focused on the sorts of things that happen to people living in space for long periods of time. But there's also interesting experiments where microgravity has enabled medical advances that'll help people here on Earth.

On the "curing cancer" front, there's been a lot of exciting developments over the last few decades in immunotherapy, which tends to have milder side-effects than chemo. The monoclonal antibody Keytruda is used to treat a BUNCH of different cancers, but has some downsides: it's a pain to store (needs to be refrigerated, limited shelf life), and it has to be administered intravenously (takes more effort, leads to side-effects, not fun for patients). Thanks to lessons learned creating suspensions of the medicine in microgravity, Merck is currently testing a version of Keytruda that can be delivered as a quick shot.

As another example, TAS‐205 (a treatment for muscular dystrophy) is starting phase 3 trials after promising results in a smaller study. However if it eventually becomes an approved medicine, it'll probably be 20-30 years after the original protein experiments were done on the ISS

There's also the NICER mission (Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer; https://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/nicer/nicer_about.html) which is a payload on the ISS that's mapped pulsar surfaces: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zukBXehGHas

> I'm not aware of what we've learned from the International Space Station.

We learned about the effects of microgravity on the human body for one. Useful for future trips to the Moon and/or Mars.

Plus we’ve had the benefit of a microgravity laboratory staffed by world class scientists for two decades.

Putting people back on the Moon is valuable just as a technology demonstration and test for more ambitious missions like Mars.

As you say, Apollo taught us a lot about the Moon. But it didn’t teach us everything. So if Apollo taught us something then clearly there is value in sending humans.

> And the Space Shuttle was an expensive and needless boondoggle that killed fourteen people for no good reason.

Without the Shuttle there is no ISS. So any benefit gained from the ISS is owed at least in part to the Shuttle.

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