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Comment by SCAQTony | Hacker News Reader

A space station is a bad investment for any country.

The annual cost of the ISS is $3-billion-year. It will cost an additional 24-billion for the next 6-years to keep it up

The total budget cost of the Kepler Spacecraft was $0.6-billion and discovered something like 2,740 planets outside our solar system.

The Mars Science Laboratory cost was $2.5-billion and as of last month revealed that Mars once was a habitable planet.

The Hubble space telescope in all cost $9.6-billion over the decades (plural) and sincerely over-delivered by refining the predicted age of the universe and validating that the universe is indeed expanding faster and faster.

I would rather they launch more probes, telescopes, and comet samplers than a space station that costs more than it delivers.

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It's hard to really quantify scientific returns as a per-dollar measure. The space station has provided a place to do countless experiments that could only be done by people in space. Of course, the results of these experiments rarely make it into pop science articles so they're not often publicized. But they do happen and it's important not to just brush them aside as not worth the cost of the station itself.

Not only that, but it's a first step in learning how to construct large objects in space and then live up there fulltime.

> The space station has provided a place to do countless experiments that could only be done by people in space.

Most of these experiments though were about effect of space on humans, no? It's a bit of circular reasoning.

Even with those, I'm not sure there was really any big discovery since the previous Mir/Salyut/Skylab decades of orbital hanging around.

If humans like Elon Musk and the rest are serious about becoming a spacefaring nation that can actually travel to Mars, this wealth of experimental data would be invaluable when the time comes, if the time comes. Let's not presume that it would never be useful (and besides that, who knows if there ever could be use applied down on earth too).

ISS has made a lot of progress on learning and ameliorating the effects of 0g on humans. It's only about this year that techniques to control bone loss over the long term have gotten really good. Astronauts can now routinely return after six months not crippled, which is a huge advance on the state of knowledge circa Mir.

Yes, most of the science on ISS is human science, related to 0g, and it is pretty expensive, but there's not much other way to do it. I'm not sure that 0g habitation has a long-term future (it's still not very good for you) but we wouldn't really know that without the ISS.

It also hosts plenty of materials science and remote sensing experiments along with the biology and space medicine. It's a weird environment that we're only just beginning to figure out.

More than $800 billion has been requested by the president and appropriated by Congress for the war in Iraq over the last 10 years.

It is impressive that for just over 1% of that budget we've measured the age of the universe and its rate of expansion. I'm happy for my tax dollars to go to any type of scientific advancement rather than killing other humans.

You explained how much it costs, which is a lot, but not why it's a bad investment. We get quite a lot of tech and science out of the space statio + the experience to go further.

It won't be a bad investment when some aliens come to visit. At least they won't think we're that stupid.

Depends on the alien, no? They might think we should've just built more supercomputers and colliders, and predicted everything else out from there.

This all seems quite good value for money compared to the money wasted bailing out the world's banks over the past few years, or the money spent in those Iraq and Afghanistan misadventures and "the war on terror".

But it would be such a huge positive political asset that can feed so many people for years.

Lets kill two birds with one stone and just land the ISS on the moon. ISS done. Moonbase done.

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