ISS: an astronomical waste of money?

Born as a colossal multinational project that would be the launching pad for human missions to Mars and beyond, the International Space Station (ISS) has been long criticized for the lack of scientific value it has brought to the scientific community, as its prohibitive maintenance costs soar higher every year and take away funds that could be allocated to other missions with more bang for the buck.

A bit of background

The International Space Station (ISS) is a habitable artificial satellite which is maintained at an orbital altitude of between 330 and 410 km (205 and 255 miles). It completes 16 orbits per day and can be seen from Earth with the naked eye.

After the Russians successfully constructed the MIR in 1986, the Americans and the Japanese were soon racing to keep up with them. But very soon, the very high costs associated with running a continuously inhabited space station became apparent.

In 1993 the Russian Mir-2, the American Freedom and the European Columbus merged into a single multinational programme which would give birth to the ISS, the ninth space station to be inhabited. Its first component was launched in 1998, and the station will be funded at least until 2020.

The station is being used as a microgravity and space environment research base in which the crew conducts experiments in biology, physics, astronomy, meteorology and other fields. The ISS is suited for the testing of spacecraft systems and equipment required for missions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond.

Gee, that suit does look pretty expensive...

Manned vs unmanned space missions

One of the big ongoing debates within space agencies has always been on whether to focus on manned flight or unmanned flight. This division runs deep, and for good reasons.

Manned space flight is fantastic to witness, let alone (I can only imagine) to experience first-hand. So, why would anyone be opposed to it? The short answer: its cost is prohibitive. Whereas a robotic probe can collect data on its surroundings, move, analyze data and even think on its own surviving years-long trips without the need for sustenance, humans — even on a trip as short as a few days — need quite a lot of room to move around, water, food, oxygen, toilets, much higher safety standards… the list could go on and on.

Facing a much cheaper alternative that would offer a tremendously improved amout of scientific research for the dollar, many scientists agree that unmanned space exploration is clearly the way to go, and some even wish manned missions to be as fewer and further between as possible. The malicious ones even sustain that the reason behind manned exploration being so predominant nowadays is merely a political one.

The launch of the Saturn V rocket

How much does the ISS really cost? 

The ISS program is tied together by a complex set of legal, political and financial agreements between the fifteen nations involved in the project. This makes it hard to estimate the total cost of the operation accurately, also due to the fact that many of those partner nations won’t release their data to the public.

As of 2010, NASA budgeted $72.4 billion for the station from 1985 to 2015. The most cited figures ranges between 80 and 160 billion dollars. ESA, the only agency actually stating potential overall costs on its website, estimates total costs at 100 billion euros.

Facing these prohibitive expenses, in 2009 NASA had made plans to end the ISS programme and deorbit the ISS in early 2016, according to President Bush’s policy. President Obama, however, announced a new policy in 2010 that will extend the program through 2020.

Is this all money down the drain? The experiments going on in the ISS do have, of course, scientific value and could teach us more about biotechnology, medicine and microgravity environments. But as far using the station as a stepping stone to send humans farther into space, it would seem the reasonable thing for NASA to do would probably be to rethink its strategy and orient itself toward an approach that returns more results for less of the taxpayers’ money.

Maya Chichen Itza temple pyramid

The kind of progress and scientific discoveries made by the Maya civilization is quite impressive for their time, especially considering their isolation from neighbouring civilizations.

As with many other prehistoric civilizations, the Mayans’ concept of time was cyclical. They built a series of calendars based on naturally occurring cycles observed in the sky, such as a 365-day cycle that approximated the solar year, one to record the lunation periods of the Moon, and even one to track the synodic period — the time a planet takes to assume twice the same position with respect to both the Earth and the Sun — of Venus, which the Mayans managed to measure with surprising accuracy.

All of these calendars can then be synchronized and interlinked with one another, generating further and more extensive cycles. One of such composite calendar, the so-called Mesoamerican long count calendar, forms the basis for the belief that a cataclysm will take place on December 21, 2012, a forecast that mainstream Mayanists consider a crude misinterpretation.

Maya stucco glyphs in Palenque, Mexico.

According to the Popol Vuh, an important mythological book in the Mayan culture, we are living in the ‘fourth world’. The book narrates how the gods attempted for three times to create a peaceful and harmonius world, but eventually failed. As they created the fourth world, men were placed on Earth.

All of the three previous worlds ended on a speficic date in the Mayan calendar, which coincided with the end of the cycle in the long count calendar. Each of those cycles lasted an impressive 1,872,000 days — over 5,125 years — and the fourth cycle is set to end on December 20, 2012, followed by the start of a ‘new era’ on the following day.

By following other clues within the Mayan culture and interpreting them in their own way, some researchers have come to the conclusion that a worldwide cataclysm — e.g. a pole shift — was predicted by the Maya on this date, a view that even the vast majority of experts in Mayan culture disagree with.

Sandra Noble, executive director of the Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, Inc., commented:

For the ancient Maya, it was a huge celebration to make it to the end of a whole cycle [...] To render December 21, 2012, as a doomsday or moment of cosmic shifting is a complete fabrication and a chance for a lot of people to cash in.

The hype has also been alimented by reports by NASA that sometime between 2010 and 2012 we will very likely experience violent solar storms:

This week researchers announced that a storm is coming—the most intense solar maximum in fifty years. The prediction comes from a team led by Mausumi Dikpati of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). “The next sunspot cycle will be 30% to 50% stronger than the previous one,” she says. If correct, the years ahead could produce a burst of solar activity second only to the historic Solar Max of 1958.

Some believe that, if the storms reveal to be strong enough, they could under the right circumstances black out the electrical grids of a few cities and fry satellites. But as far as an apocalypse… well, let’s just say it doesn’t look that likely.

But when I first heard that NASA was planning to land a solar-powered AI on Mars, I was just astonished. As advanced as NASA’s technology might be, I could not believe this technology was advanced enough to be talking about anything quite like this — and to be perfectly honest, I’m a little skeptic.

Honda's Ashimo

Many of the algorithms we use today for artificial intelligence applications are NP-complete: that is to say, they belong to a class of problems for which we don’t know an efficient solving algorithm just yet, and their typical solving time (and computational power required) increases exponentially or binomially relative to the number of inputs provided.

Since aerospace applications such as NASA’s would need to operate on very short response times, and given the very limited power that can be provided by solar power (even on a planet without an atmosphere), I’m curious to know just what kind of complex decisions this kind of artificial intelligence would be able to make on its own and without human help.

While NASA scientists can probably do without real-time response and let their robots crunch the numbers for a relatively long amount of time, they still need to deal with the huge power consumption AI algorithms entail. Our very best solar panel technology is only 28% efficient, which certainly doesn’t sound like enough to allow for a decent AI to compute anything useful.

This is from a NASA article from some time ago:

NASA is planning to add a strong dose of artificial intelligence (AI) to planetary rovers to make them much more self-reliant, capable of making basic decisions during a mission.

Scientists at NASA Ames Research Center, in the heart of California’s Silicon Valley, are developing very complex AI software that enables a higher level of robotic intelligence.

Later on, the article makes the very valid point that keep instructing our robots from Earth is definitely not the way to go, given the long reaction times that ultimately don’t allow us to exploit these multi-million dollar machines to their full potential. And the waste is going to increase even more with time, once we reach destinations further and further away from Earth.

Developing an AI so sophisticated and efficient that would be able to make the robot completely autonomous would be a huge step forward. Alien Planet, an interesting documentary simulating a mission to a planet light-years away in search for extraterrestrial life, might give you a better idea of what we’re talking about. If mankind is ever to send spacecrafts to distant solar systems, then we really have no choice: the unmanned explorers must be able to take decisions on their own, without human help.

Mars Phoenix - Artist's Concept

One of the leading companies devoted to developing breakthrough AI technology is Novamente, which is pioneering a new approach to the problem of testing and developing what they define as an “artificial general intelligence” — something capable of deduction, abstraction and other kinds of human-like reasoning.

Their approach is to test their AI (which is, by the way, being developed in C++) in virtual words such as Second Life rather than in the real world, in order to cut production costs and not to waste time worrying about countless sensor- and motion-related issues instead of concentrating on the actual problem.

On their site, you can watch videos that demonstrate their work. If you’re into computer science and don’t shy away from a bit of technical talk, their papers section is also quite interesting. What will first come to mind watching videos of the AI in action, though, is that the response time is currently very far from being real-time even for relatively simple tasks, and a powerful computer cluster is needed to keep those times within barely acceptable boundaries.

So, how can NASA be so confident that they will be able to develop AIs capable of elaborating such complex algorithms, including figuring out how to let robots decide where and when to move, and power them with something as inefficient as solar panels?

The answer is simple: according Moore’s law, the computational power of our microchips is increasing exponentially with time. Inevitably, there will come a time when we will be able to run algorithms that now we believe overly complex in an infinitesimal fraction of time. Then, we will have the potential to develop more and more intelligent machines that make good decisions faster and faster.

The real question is: when?