Tag Archives: INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION:

THE BEADY EYE SAY’S. NO HUMAN IS EVER GOING TO LEAVE THIS PLANET SOON. WITH THE PLANET CRYING FOR SOME TLC WOULD IT NOT MAKE SOME COMMON SENSE TO PUT FUTURE SPACE EXPLORATION ON HOLD TILL WE CAN TRUST AI.

01 Saturday Dec 2018

Posted by in Space Exploration.

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( FIVE MINUTE READ.)

Exploration of space is an expression of one of our finest aspects — curiosity.

To truly satisfy that curiosity we need to be participants, but humans are heavy, fragile, dirty, vulnerable, picky about their environment, and have a low tolerance for the space environment. (i.e., high energy radiation, extreme heat and cold, etc.)

The fragility of humans, our aversion for risking human life, and the all-too-human need for consumables (food, water and oxygen) require vast amounts of money to pay for the extra engineering and multiple redundant systems we demand to reduce risk to astronauts, as well as for the vastly larger support crews needed to babysit every aspect of daily life during a manned space mission.

In any exploration, reconnaissance dominates the earliest phases and realistically there is no choice between human and robotic exploration when it comes to travelling to any planet.

Robotic exploration is the only realistic game in town.

The International Space Station is no longer a platform for cutting-edge space science.

Unmanned probes can explore Mars and other planets more cheaply and effectively than manned missions can. Robotic space programs are a far more cost-effective means of advancing our scientific knowledge of the universe. And a moon colony would be a silly destiny.

Some scientists believe that artificial-intelligence software may enhance the capabilities of unmanned probes, but so far those capabilities fall far short of what is required for even the most rudimentary forms of field study.

Building a manned base on the moon makes even less sense.

Unmanned spacecraft can study the moon quite efficiently, as the Lunar Prospector probe has shown. It is not our destiny to build a moon colony any more than it is to walk on our hands.

Considering the current limited range of human exploration the countdown to sending humans to Mars is light years away never mind the rest of the solar system.

In 15 years’ time, will this be a photograph rather than an artist’s impression?

But robots aren’t heroes. No one throws a ticker-tape parade for a telescope.

A program of purely robotic exploration is inadequate in addressing the important scientific issues that make the planets worthy of detailed study.

But is the physical presence of people really required?

Telepresence—the remote projection of human abilities into a machine—may permit field study on other planets without the danger and logistical problems associated with human spaceflight.

THIS WILL NOT BE POSSIBLE UNTIL WE DEVELOPE FULLY ACCOUNTABLE ARTIFICAL INTELLIGENCE THAT IS TRUTHFUL AND TRUSTWORTHY.

HUMAN SPACELIGHT is extremely expensive. A single flight of the space shuttle costs about $450 million. Even the most optimistic experts estimate that sending astronauts to the Red Planet would cost tens of billions of dollars. Other estimates run as high as $1 trillion.

NASA LIKE HOLLOWOOD has learned a valuable lesson about marketing in the 21st century: to promote its programs, it must provide entertaining visuals and stories with compelling human characters.

Vision is the most important sense used in a field study, and no real-time imaging system developed to date can match human vision, the technology is not yet available.

Robots will never be replacements for people. Robotic spacecraft still need human direction, of course, if explorers Lewis and Clark were alive today, they would be sitting behind a computer screen.

All exploration whether Robotic or otherwise will be worthless if we have an Earth that is void of people.

All human comments appreciated. All like clicks chucked in the bin.

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The Beady eye looks at the enormous cost of space travel.

17 Friday Jul 2015

Posted by in Space., Technology, The Future

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In the last few days we all watched a few hundred people if that clapping themselves on the back all over a photo or photos of a planet 6 billion mile away that we never set foot upon.  A technological achievement indeed.

Knowledge is invaluable. Furthering our understanding of how the universe came into being, and ultimately how we came into being, cannot be measured as useful solely in terms of cost.

The question is looking at the present state of our planet do we really need to be taking photos of planets that we will never step on.

America was the first nation to land on the moon, but what tangible benefits to mankind have occurred as a result?

The Hubble Telescope has sent back fascinating pictures of our universe. But again, how has this benefited anyone other than providing marvelous sights which awe us?

The only life found on Mars, from the incredibly expensive probes, is some dead amoeba.

All of it hasn’t led to any medical cures or any answers to the origins of the universe.

There are many things in our world that have not discovered yet; do cures to AIDS and cancer ring a bell? And what about over coming poverty?

The point is, space exploration is extremely expensive.

I don’t feel that the solution’s to our problems can be solved by a space expedition. Perhaps it time to find a solution to what we don’t know in our world before exploring a different one. We simply don’t have the money or resources.

Besides, if it’s unemployment you’re worried about, more people to devote their lives to over-coming the problems we know about, and not digging up more for us to “solve”.

We all know that there are major crisis going on at your home planet.

Global warming and the world wild economic crisis, which will cause the collapse of Capitalism not to mention a return to Barbarity – ISIS.

Why rush off to space when we’ve can see our own planet yet?

Why bother spending all this money on exploring space when we could be helping our own planet that us humans live on.? It’s a strong argument.

Why Not?

Out in space there is virtually unlimited resources. It is all just a matter of collecting it and bringing it back, which granted will not be an easy task.

Many discoveries and products have been developed from the knowledge gained from space exploration.

For example, NASA created Velcro which is now used in many clothing items, bags and so forth. Non-stick pans and surfaces were also created as a result of space exploration.

Space travel has also given us a lot of other new things for example the micro chip, the CAT scan and so on. Plastic was invented by material engineers working on the space program. The Internet was a joint military and NASA project.

Satellites were some of the first venturers into space and are now a critical part of our society. Very important for hurricanes and dangerous storm systems.

GPS allows Google to track you ever movement.

If we compared space exploration to other areas of government spending (e.g. military), the cost of space exploration simply isn’t ridiculously high.

It’s about $10,000 to put a pound of anything into a near-earth orbit. To put a pound of anything on the moon costs about 10 times as much.

It use to costs $500 to $700 million every time the shuttle flies combined with overall cost yielding a per-flight cost of nearly $1.7 billion. The average cost to launch a Space Shuttle is about $450 million per mission.The shuttle Columbia lifts off on the first space shuttle mission ever, STS-1, on April 12, 1981.

 

Billionaire space tourists have flown to the space station at a reputed price of $20 million per head.The space shuttle Endeavour and International Space Station shine front and center in this amazing (and historic) photo of the two vehicles docked together as seen from a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. Astronaut Paolo Nespoli snapped this view and others durin

The space station costs upward of $100 billion.

The bottom line:

So was the shuttle program worth the 40 years (10 years of development and 30 years of flight) of the $209 billion that NASA and the nation poured into it? That probably depends on your priorities and your point of view.

In 1966, NASA’s budget was $5.9 billion (4.4 percent of the federal budget). By 1972, Nixon had cut it to $3.4 billion (1.6 percent of the budget). To Day its less than one half of one penny out of each dollar the national government spends goes to NASA.

It’s still a lot of money—about 17.7 billion dollars.

And in the four decades since, NASA’s budget has continued to decrease as a proportion of national spending. The agency got $18.45 billion in fiscal year 2011, less than 0.5 percent of the federal budget.

Space exploration isn’t cheap. Let’s put those trillions of dollars to good use here on Earth, where it could change the lives of millions. Send probes to space, but spend the money here on Earth.

For me the real value lies in we are starting to see how small and fragile we are out there floating in space, maybe, just maybe we will not be so prone to abusing our one true home.

To put it in perspective think about this: Apple earns $325,000 every minute.

The next and last step of human evolution is overcoming the mind and learning the truth of life.

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THE COST: HERE A FEW MIND BLOWING VALUE FOR MONEY DETAILS THAT MIGHT MAKE YOU THINK.

17 Wednesday Sep 2014

Posted by in Uncategorized

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To end extreme poverty worldwide in 20 years, Sachs calculated that the total cost per year would be about $175 billion.

Get a globe and spin it. Jab your finger down at random and, without doubt, you will have located a spot entangled in war, revolution, rebellion, terrorism, famine, plague, drought, dictatorship, poverty and/or illiteracy.

If I told you the year was 1810, you wouldn’t be surprised. Tragically if I told you the year was 2014, you wouldn’t be surprised, either.

So are we getting value for money.  CAN WE AFFORD IT!  HAVE A LOOK:

INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION:

The cost of the International Space Station, including development, assembly and running costs over 10 years, comes to €100 billion.

The good news is that it comes cheaper than you might think.

That €100 billion figure is shared over a period of almost 30 years between all participants: the United States, Russia, Canada, Japan and 10 of the 20 European nations who are part of ESA.

The European share, at around €8 billion spread over the whole program, amounts to just one Euro spent by every European every year: less than the price of a cup of coffee in most of our big cities. NOT BAD

CERN:

The European Organization for Nuclear Research, commonly known as CERN, announced that its Large Hadron Collider had discovered a particle that’s consistent with that of the Higgs boson.

The Large Hadron Collider took about a decade to construct, for a total cost of about $4.75 billion. There are several different experiments going on at the LHC, including the CMS and ATLAS Detectors which discovered the Higgs boson.

CERN contributes about 20% of the cost of those experiments, which is a total of about $5.5 billion a year. The remainder of the funding for those experiments is provided by international collaborations. Computing power is also a significant part of the cost of running CERN – about $286 million annually.

Electricity costs alone for the LHC run about $23.5 million per year.

The total operating budget of the LHC runs to about $1 billion per year.

Taking all of those costs into consideration, the total cost of finding the Higgs boson ran about $13.25 billion.

 

TRIDENT:

The combined cost of replacing the Trident nuclear missile system and building, equipping and running two large aircraft carriers will be as much as £130bn,

MOON LANDING:

The Apollo moon landings are considered the greatest achievement in human history and the beginning of humanity’s expansion into the universe. At its height over 400,000 people were directly or indirectly involved in the project. But what was the cost?

Apollo Spacecraft – $5.3 Billion
Saturn Rockets – $8.7 Billion
Other Costs – $11.4 Billion
The Total Estimated Cost in 1969 Dollars is $25.4 Billion and $145 Billion in 2007 Dollars.

Human costs: The lives of 3 astronauts: Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee.

The US spent $20 to $25 billion US (in 1969 dollars) to fund all of the Apollo program activities.

IRAQ WAR:

The U.S. war in Iraq has cost $1.7 trillion with an additional $490 billion in benefits owed to war veterans, expenses that could grow to more than $6 trillion over the next four decades counting interest. 

The war has killed at least 134,000 Iraqi civilians and may have contributed to the deaths of as many as four times that number, according to the Costs of War Project by the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University.

The 2011 study said the combined cost of the wars was at least $3.7 trillion, based on actual expenditures from the U.S. Treasury and future commitments, such as the medical and disability claims of U.S. war veterans.

That estimate climbed to nearly $4 trillion

The estimated death toll from the three wars, previously at 224,000 to 258,000, increased to a range of 272,000 to 329,000 two years later.

Excluded were indirect deaths caused by the mass exodus of doctors and a devastated infrastructure, for example, while the costs left out trillions of dollars in interest the United States could pay over the next 40 years.

The 2011 study found U.S. medical and disability claims for veterans after a decade of war totaled $33 billion. Two years later, that number had risen to $134.7 billion.

The report concluded the United States gained little from the war while Iraq was traumatized by it.

The war reinvigorated radical Islamist militants in the region, set back women’s rights, and weakened an already precarious healthcare system, the report said.

Meanwhile, the $212 billion reconstruction effort was largely a failure with most of that money spent on security or lost to waste and fraud.

IRAQ AFGHANISTAN WARS COMBINED:

The cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could reach as high as $6 trillion dollars – or $75,000 for every household in America – a new study from Harvard University has found.

Europe’s Rosetta comet-chaser satellite. 

On Jan. 20 awakened itself on schedule after a 31-month hibernation and began preparations for a spring rendezvous with a comet and a fall attempt to attach a probe to it. Rosetta cost ESA and its participating member states some 1.3 billion euros ($1.75 billion), a figure that includes the Airbus Defence and Space-built satellite, the Philae lander, launch aboard a European Ariane rocket and its planned operations.

THE COST OF 9/11.

Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Congress has appropriated more than a trillion dollars for military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere around the world. The House and Senate are now considering an additional request for $33 billion in supplemental funding for the remainder of FY2010, and the Administration has also requested $159 billion to cover costs of overseas operations in FY2011.

In the face of these substantial and growing sums, a recurring question has been how the mounting costs of the nation’s current wars compare to the costs of earlier conflicts.

 

HERE IS THE COST TO USA IN getting involved in recent Wars. (Not the two world wars and all of its own wars since it founders.) 

In the 10 years since U.S. troops went into Afghanistan to root out the al Qaeda leaders behind the September 11, 2001, attacks, spending on the conflicts totaled $2.3 trillion to $2.7 trillion.The final bill will run at least $3.7 trillion and could reach as high as $4.4 trillion, according to the research project “Costs of War” by Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies.

 

COST OF USA SUPPORT OF ISRAEL 

All estimates are of the costs of military operations only and While it is commonly reported that Israel officially receives some $3 billion every year in the form of economic aid from the U.S. government, this figure is just the tip of the iceberg.

There are many billions of dollars more in hidden costs and economic losses lurking beneath the surface.

A recently published economic analysis has concluded that U.S. support for the state of Israel has cost American taxpayers nearly $3 trillion ($3 million millions) in 2002 dollars.

According to the Congressional Research Service , the amount of official US aid to Israel since its founding in 1948 tops $121 billion (adjusting for inflation, $233.7 billion as of March 2013), and in the past few decades it has been on the order of $3.1 billion per year this amounted to $8.5 million every single day.

MIND BOGGLING TO SAY THE LEAST.
This represents less than one percent of the combined income of the richest countries in the world. The military budget in the USA is about $680 billion per year.

THE UN:

VALUE FOR MONEY The UN hasn’t done enough good, and has caused enough damage for a top-to-bottom reconsideration of its future.

A full legal argument against the UN. would make a formidable document.

A snapshot of its failures will more than suffice.

Going back to its own charter, we see that the mission of the UN is split between peacekeeping and humanitarian efforts.

The cost of running the United Nations is substantial. According to its own data, “The UN system spends some $15 billion a year, taking into account the United Nations, UN peacekeeping operations, the programmes and funds, and the specialized agencies, but excluding the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD).

Around half of this amount comes from voluntary contributions from Member States, the rest from mandatory assessments on those States.

That comes out to a little more than $2 for every man, woman and child on the planet.

Cost of running THE UK Parliament:

Houses of Parliament.

The cost of running the Houses of Parliament fell by more than £30m last year to just under £500m. The cost of the House of Commons increased by more than £12m,

MPs’ wages and pensions were the biggest single outgoing which came to £157.2m this figures include wages for members and staff, building expenses, security and other administration.

The amount spent on MPs’ salaries and pensions rose by almost £6m.

The overall expense for taxpayers in 2008/9 came to £498.4m, down from £531.8m the previous year.

However the good news is that the cost of running the House of Lords was reduced by £46m.

The reason for this was that the amount spent on what is listed as “other administration costs” went down from £89.8m to £39.8m. However, the total cost of keeping the Commons going increased from £379.2m to £391.8m.
In 2008/9 the cost of running the Lords fell from £152.5m to £106.5m. A Lords spokesman said that the 2007/8 accounts included a final payment of £26m towards the purchase of 1 Millbank, a new addition to the Parliamentary estate.

They also included a £23m loss, following a revaluation of the entire Parliamentary estate, a process which is carried out every five years.

VALUE FOR MONEY? YOU TELL ME.

BELOW A FEW PICTURES TO REMIND YOU OF WHO YOU WALK BYE EVERY DAY.

 

This post I feel needs a personal statement.

“ As much as I appreciate that all of the above keep people off the street and that the landing on a moon or meteorite with or without the Higgs Boson advances mankind knowledge and brings benefits of all sort yet to be seen.

The whole lot seems to me to be useless until we put our own house in order.”

WITH 80% OF HUMANITY LIVING ON LESS THAN $10 DOLLARS A DAY AND 22,000 CHILD DEATHS EACH AND EVERY DAY SURELY IT IS TIME TO COP ON.

Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn’t.

 

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