"Brian Thorn" wrote in message
...
On Tue, 16 Sep 2008 10:53:06 -0400, "Jeff Findley"
wrote:

So did the Titanic. Now we have lifeboats for everyone.

Tell that to the guys at the South Pole research station. Where's their
lifeboats?

Last I checked, dry-land facilities don't require lifeboats, no matter
how remote. Ships universally do.

Why do you think ISS is closer to a ship like the Titanic than it is to
something like the South Pole research station?

On top of that, evac from there in the middle of the winter is
extremely dangerous at best.

But not impossible. It has been done. Without a lifeboat on ISS,
you're dead when the O2, the scrubbers, or the power die.

True. My point is that evac from ISS using the shuttle is similar to evac
from the South Pole during the middle of winter. It certainly woudln't be
easy, but NASA already has plans in place for rescuing a stranded shuttle
crew for the Hubble repair mission.

At some point, your station grows so big you
simply can't supply lifeboats for everyone.

That's ridiculous. Why not?

Common sense. A truly big LEO space station is far more like a remote
research station than an ocean liner.

What do you do for a Mars mission?

We have to accept a greater risk for deep space exploration. That's a
given. Without warp drive, you can't get back to Earth in a reasonable
amount of time or expect a rescue ship in a reasonable amount of time.
ISS has no such excuse. There are no fundamental physics that prevent
a lifeboat for all ISS crew, it is simply a matter of cost. If an ISS
crew dies because they have no lifeboat, the press, critics, and the
crew's survivors will universally, and loudly, proclaim that the crew
died because the government was too cheap to pay for a lifeboat when
the technology was essentially off-the-shelf. And the government knows
this, which is why, as I said, it is a political non-starter.

So a Mars mission is "special", but a LEO station with a thousand people on
it would need to have "lifeboats" to return everyone to earth in case of an
emergency? That's just silly.

Jeff
--
A clever person solves a problem.
A wise person avoids it. -- Einstein