Of course, Columbus didn't sail endlessly to an artificial island 100 kilometers from the seashore. Remember – space is called so for a reason. It means nothing – an empty void. The interesting objects are far away – and we haven't been there for almost 40 years.

To me there is more sense in the ISS than in the Mars Rovers. Once we have an established orbital population there will be an almost singular jump in exploration. To manufacture anything on earth will seem stupid. In orbit you have all the energy you need to smelt metals, manufacture rockets. you have all the resources you need from the moon and astroids and all of this costs far less energy than getting even a small satellite into orbit.

As Jerry Pournelle has said in numerous places, half the energy you need to go anywhere in the universe, you are going to spend getting out of earth's gravity well.

Look at the size of the rockets used to get into orbit vs the size of the rocket to get from orbit to mars or the moon. Deep space used an ion drive. An asthmatic parrot can blow with more force than an ion drive.

But the toilet… How can managing human excrement be such a challenge. Why don't they just microwave it till its dry and vacuum it up. Even a 5 year old knows that dry doggie-do doesn't smell. Condense the steam and run it through the water purifier if you are worried about h20 loss.

!!! Wake up man ¡¡¡¡

I can't believe they still need to look at 40 years old heatshields to make new ones it's unbelievable.

Just ask the russians! In fact Orion should have been outsourced to russia, it'd already be up and afloat if you ask me. Talk about re-inventing the wheel geessh!

And i'm sure it'll end up the same way for the 150billions ISS.

Sorry but i'm just bitter today. At least this guy will have cleverly made use of his cash instead of investing it (and loosing most of it) in crooky wall street….

You think our technology is still not ripe for it? True. But it won't become ripe unless we do what we can with the tech we have in any given moment. We learn to do things better by actually doing them and making mistakes, thus identifying flaws and finding better solutions. It's true that we still can't build an off-world outpost, we just don't know enough for that. But just waiting for the "right moment" won't get us there.

If one were to argue, he is at most a cosmonaut since he went to space in a Russian rocket.

Regardless, being an astronaut is a career and I don't think it is fair to allow a rich tourist into their club.

Ya'll just hatin cause this dude gets to ride atop a rocket and hang with all the peeps chillin at the ISS and your stuck down here. Don't hate congratulate.

I'm with you Jorge, we have people constantly in orbit because we can. And if we could, it wouldn't be robotic space craft out there having all the fun.

Let's support these people children.

I usually get two answers. The first one is that space exploration is needed for human survival. Oh, come on, we know that it's impossible to build such a big space habitat with existing technology. ISS is the biggest thing and it breaks constantly. Shuttle launches are so expensive and all these delays worsen the situation – look at Hubble, for example.

Human Survival? Maybe. But not now. Is the ISS a stepping stone to this? Probably… Anyway, programs like the shuttle and ISS stretched out into decades. It's impossible to keep the public interested for a long time.

The second answer I get is that ISS is needed for future deep space missions. However we don't need a station to send people to the moon – Apollo 11 flew before the first Salyut was launched. As for Mars – such a project will cost thousands of billions dollars and it seems unlikely that any human will travel to there until 2050.
Also, all of the deep space exploration is carried out by robots.

The fact is that as we plunge deeper into space, at each step we'll be faced with new challenges and situations we have to overcome. The sheer level of complexity of the ISS is unprecedented, and we need to learn how to deal with the problems generated by such a structure, if we want to have any hope to build permanent habitats in orbit (Earth's or otherwise) or in other worlds. The ISS is a step in that road. That it is reveiling to be a problematic step is at the same time a curse and a blessing, but it should have been expected.

A curse because it curbs the enthusiasm of the optimists out there, who often seem to think that going to and living in space is, or should be, a walk in the park. It isn't. In fact it's something extremely difficult to do. Every problem that hits the ISS is one more delay in going forward because it's one more problem for which a solution has to be found. But this brings us to the blessing part of the deal:

We learn when we're hit by problems, by the unexpected. The more problems we find in building and operating the ISS, the best prepared we'll be for the next step. And that is invaluable.

The biggest error that was made around the ISS was in how it was presented to the public. The ISS should never have been presented as an end in itself, as a place to make all sorts of discoveries dealing with anything other than the constant presence of people in Earth's orbit. Perhaps that was necessary to guarantee public support to a very expensive endeavour, perhaps presenting it as a step to something even more complex and hard to do would not have worked, but the fact is that it is now generating frustration in all those that actually believed in the scientific wonders the ISS would bring. That's the problem with propaganda: when reality settles in, people feel defrauded.

I don't expect from the ISS anything other than to be a place where the challenges of life and construction in orbit are put to a real-life test. We'll never have larger stations up there, or even factories, without this second (or third, if we count the Skylab… I usually don't) step, much the same way we'd never have the ISS without the work done in the Mir station.

The International Space Station will be remembered with its constant problems, not scientific achievements. Both professor Steven Weinberg and Robert Park said it right – a techno turkey.

These days MESSENGER flied by Mercury and sent a lot of interesting new images. Phoenix detected that there's snow on Mars. Using Kaguya data we know new things about gravity anomalies on the Moon. All these projects will be remembered as successful and worthy to science.

When does the International Space Station appear in the press? Only when something is breaking down – the toilet, the SARJ, the computers. This year they took the Columbus and Kibo modules. Where is the science promised?

By the way I still expects something great to be discovered aboard ISS until its deorbiting, but my faith constantly fades away.

NAME?
JOB?
BYE

(Sorry, Ultima joke. )