International Space Station

This budget devouring tincan is the reason NASA can't send people to the moon let alone mars.
also
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No C nor D only H.

Stop all space exploration by humans. Only use robots. Never send another human being up into space for any reason. Only use robots to mine near Earth asteroids. Let companies do this, not governments.

Use freed up resources for humanity on Earth were it isn't being wasted.

>This budget devouring tincan is the reason NASA can't send people to the moon let alone mars.
You have that backwards.

The fact that NASA can't accomplish anything with humans in space is the reason why even a tin can is "budget-devouring". Orbital accomodations for 6 should not cost tens of billions of dollars to build, then billions of dollars per year to maintain.

NASA lacks the organizational competence and will to guard its resources and see that they're spent efficiently on achieving results. Look at SLS: that's a 12-year-old program to quickly cobble together an expendable launch system and space capsule from shuttle and Apollo parts, and they're still saying they're years from an unmanned test flight.

They're hauling water with a sieve. The problem isn't that the sieve is too small or they're not making enough trips.

What people don't understand about the Apollo Program, NASA's moment of glory, is that it was a failure. It was a failure of vision, a failure of efficiency, a failure of sanity. Land a man on the moon, plant a flag, putter around briefly, return to Earth. All at terrible expense. To what end? To sink to the level of Soviet propagandists wasting their people's resources to keep them poor and controllable, and to siphon off some of the wastage for the personal benefit of insiders? The American program was of the same character as the Soviet one, only larger and therefore a greater waste.

NASA was supposed to develop a practical, usable method for travel to the moon, not a method so absurdly inefficient, so utterly lacking in potential to be incrementally improved, that it would be abandoned after the demonstration missions were completed.

The Apollo Program failed in exactly the same manner as the space shuttle, ISS, and SLS: inefficient to the point of meaninglessness.

Ok, user. Suggest a way to experiment on what extended Zero G does to people

Such an absurdly large space station is not necessary to study the effects of extended weightlessness.

Furthermore, we already know that extended periods of weightlessness are very bad for health and effective functioning of astronauts. What we should be experimenting with is centrifugal gravity, for instance using tether and counterweight system, to see how much simulated gravity is sufficient to prevent the harmful effects.

NASA goal was to get someone to the moon and back, not to be a transportation company.

Half the reason Apollo existed was to prove that such a thing was possible. And to call Apollo a failure is a huge disservice to the billions that went into developing it. The fact that it wasn't followed up upon in a satisfactory way (despite otherwise having the capability to do so) is a mark against NASA, but not against the Apollo Program. Additionally, the idea that something could be "incrementally upgraded" or "modular" makes building any individual device far more complicated as it is expected to preform tasks the designer himself did not envision it doing. This is immensely difficult when you factor in that said device has to actually get up 100 km at 8 m/s. This "incremental upgrade" stuff is how the Shuttle manged to get greenlighted all the way through development.

The problem with NASA is that they tried to do exactly what you are suggesting: be a transportation company. This was exactly, EXACTLY, the logic behind the shuttle as it would be like an airliner and could be used and improved upon as such. That's why NASA didn't ditch it even in the early 90s when it was clear that it couldn't go to the moon like they had wanted it to.

If you want to be asshurt, that's your problem. But don't suggest things that are patently stupid and wildly incorrect.

You can't save everyone. Ethically, it is better to kill the poor people that suffer everyday than it is to let them live and create more people that will only suffer. This is what would truly free up the resources needed to progress humanity.

>This was exactly, EXACTLY, the logic behind the shuttle as it would be like an airliner and could be used and improved upon as such.

For proof: the original 1987 demo/debut issue if Airliners Magazine which was featured at various aerospace industry expos at that time. It straight up quoted Boeing PR people as saying they would be able to upgrade the shuttles for moon or mars missions like they were doing with the newly made 737-500s. Also Boeing still had this fantasy that the shuttle replacement would be a bigger shuttle, and drew up more concepts for that (most of them recycled 70s shuttle concepts).

Meanwhile, NASA was coming to the slow realization that they would have to build a device, from the start, capable of taking someone to the moon or into GEO. This was because the shuttle turned out to be too complicated to incrementally upgrade as originally conceived. This is how Constellation, and Ares V (now SLS) came about. It is better to design a device to do exactly what you want it to do, then it is to do half of that and then hope later on you can jury rig something together.

>NASA goal was to get someone to the moon and back
Fuck right off. NASA's primary purpose was supposed to be science and technology development, not pointless stunts for bragging rights. Interstates, not pyramids.

They were supposed to develop and demonstrate a PRACTICAL method of transportation to the moon. Something that could be handed off to civilian industry, or the military, depending on what was needed.

Yeah, they got to the moon. And the shuttle went to orbit and came back and went back up again. Both projects failed in the same way: no fucking point if it costs that much, and no contribution to ever making it cheaper.

>This was exactly, EXACTLY, the logic behind the shuttle as it would be like an airliner and could be used and improved upon as such. That's why NASA didn't ditch it even in the early 90s when it was clear that it couldn't go to the moon like they had wanted it to.
I'm never quite sure how to talk to insane people. The space shuttle was never intended to go to the moon. It was supposed to be flying by the late-70s (early enough to resupply and rotate crew at Skylab) and be discontinued as worn-out and obsolete in the mid-80s. It was supposed to be an improvement in cost-effectiveness over previous rockets and capsules, and it was also supposed to be a stepping stone to a whole industry of reusable launch vehicles.

A reusable launch system was a perfectly reasonable thing to have a national aerospace research program work on, and the early concepts for it were also entirely reasonable: build the smallest workable thing, and see what you learn from doing it before trying anything bigger. It would have been like a cross between the Gemini Project and the X-15 program. They would have deployed ~100 lb. satellites, and rotated crew, one man at a time, at Skylab.

Assholes in NASA management tried to turn this into a way to be managing an Apollo-size budget, profiteering ensued.