15350. (Timothy Kyger) The International Space Station (ISS): Past, Present, and Future — A Critique [article]

If, like me, you’ve been con­fused by NASA’s con­stantly shift­ing plans for a space sta­tion, this brief arti­cle will clear up the fog. Those of us who grew up want­ing to see a sus­tained and log­i­cal pro­gram of space explo­ration, not for imme­di­ate polit­i­cal and social motives, but for the long-term ben­e­fit of the human race, have always expe­ri­enced some frus­tra­tion with NASA. It’s as if we were gen­uinely reli­gious peo­ple who dis­cov­ered that their church was more inter­ested in pro­mot­ing bin­go and church bazaars than in serv­ing god. Tim’s paper pro­vides many details that explain why manned space explo­ration has had such a lurch­ing, unsat­is­fac­tory progress. Unmanned space explo­ration, by com­par­i­son, has a his­tory of rel­a­tively smooth, log­i­cal pro­gres­sion. Hope­fully, Tim will write anoth­er paper to explain why this is so.

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