In response to a post about John Glenn's vague boostering of the ISS, there's an interesting discussion in comments over at Space Politics about its utility.

I agree with "anonymous" that orbital assembly techniques are crucial skills, and disagree with Donald Robertson that the ISS was a good or cost-effective (or even necessary) way to get them. Like Shuttle, to the degree we've learned things from ISS, it was much more how not to do things, and the cost of the education was far too high.

My guess is that the experience will prove of some use, but on the whole not very useful.

The KC/C135 and 707 experience is to some extent useful here, as is any comparison between purely civilian aviation types operated by the government vrs their use in private industry.

NASA cannot even operate its T-38's for what the USAF does.

There are two useful things in "experience". The first is the actual performance of a task and the second, and by far the most important is the structure that the "task" is performed in.

the actual performance of a task is more then anything else "individual" perishable, the organizational structure is something that can be cloned to some extent...but who in their right mind would copy the operational structure that NASA has...

The airlines made sure that the 707 could be flown "inside" their operational structure, not copying the militaries.

Robert

When the

Can anyone cite specific significant research results from ISS (journal article title)? Also is there a repository for ISS publications? I’m not interested in AIAA type papers that detail the building of it, but papers that were written about experiments done on it. When I have searched for ISS papers in the past I find a smattering of rather insignificant work, it’d be nice to have it all in one place so one could get a real idea of its value.

There has been very little in terms of sophisticated experiments since the days when Dan Goldin took all of the money for utilization and put it toward construction. That was never rectified.

It takes two to four years to build quality microgravity experiments. There have been some flown and I will look for some of the papers. We did some really good work in microgravity in the 90's at the Consortium for Materials Development in Space. One of the most significant ones was that you did not need the 1ug specification to be met in order to do good microgavity. That was one of the biggest design requirement drivers for ISS.

A lot of the microgravity research is not in AIAA journals but in materials science and biological journals. Larry DeLucas (University of Alabama in Birmingham) is a name you can search on scholar.g$ogle.com

One thing from memory is that by examining in detail the structure of proteins from protein crystal growth experiments that it enabled the ground based manufacturing processes to be tweaked to improve their results (the pcg crystals flown have far fewer lattice defects, if any), and that provides a standard by which to measure and improve the terrestrial process.

I would make a bet that today you could fly a nanoparticle production system and through examining their regularity from a flown sample, improve the process for nanotubes and other nanoproducts here on the Earth. Watch for the Japanese to do some of this research after Kibo gets up there.

I love micogravity research but I still feel that orbital assembly has a far larger, and far more lucrative, near term promise with an ISS already built.

This would provide a real and commercial market for COTS operators as well.

There is also a LOT of data on the performance of ECLSS systems on orbit and the practical problems and solutions to keeping them running that ISS has been developing since it went operational in 2000. That will be valueable to anyone seeking to do the same or for exploration systems as well.

Orbital assembly techniques might be crucial skills, but we didn't need to build the ISS in order to have them. We could just ask the Russians about building Mir.

>Posted by Dennis Ray Wingo

Thanks for the info I’ll look into that. So far my opinion is that even the materials research has been marginal. I have yet to see any clear commercial value in human spaceflight activities including proposed moon/Mars/asteroid type missions. The robotic space program has written the scientific text books on knowledge of the universe, but also has not contributed much in the way of commercial value.

Being a scientific type myself, I certainly don’t want to diminish that contribution.

Brain

I don't agree about the marginal research. Dr. DeLucas works at one of the biggest medical research university's in the country and I have heard him talk on this subject. He repeatedly stated that the value of the space research was to help to improve the process here on the Earth. His focus was not on doing manufacturing in orbit for materials, but to use the results of the space research to obtain a greater understanding of the structure of proteins and other materials. This has had an impact on the manufacture of drugs. If you are really interested I would suggest contacting Dr. DeLucas.

Of course he is totally pissed at how the station research budget has shaken out but that does not diminish the value of that research. If we ever did have a viable COTS like system where rapid acess ot station was possible, there is a great likelyhood that microgravity research would again flourish, and this time privately funded. This is certainly one of Bigelow's market hopes.

There are a lot of experiments that never flew because of the paucity of funding. We had an experiment to fly a turbine blade. This blade would be covered in a ceramic material. In orbit the turbine blade would be melted and then allowed to cool. This would result in a single crystal turbine blade, which theoretically would be far stronger than today's processes. If that had worked, then a whole set of blades would have been flown and then fitted to an engine. The theory is that these blades could spin faster, have better balance, and would result in a jet engine with much higher performance and lifetime than today's systems.

This is where Ed Wright is exactly right in calling for RLV's and CATS. If you had a CATS system with low marginal costs and then you set up a manufacturing level process for blades, there would be a market for them.

It would have been fun.

However, to me this style of orbital manufacturing is down the road. I can make the numbers work today with orbital assembly. I see a progression whereby the higher value enterprises lead to a demand that leads to the confidence in investors to fund truly reusable systems. Tourism has great potential here but will not do it all by itself.

I meant Brian.

:)

Dennis

"Gee Brian, what do you want to do tonight?"

"The same thing we do every night, Pinky ... try to take over the world!"

Ed

I LOVED that show.

:)

Dennis