1) Dealing with the human sex drive on long-term missions is an important (if taboo) aspect of the larger human-issues side of any such missions.

2) Likewise, alterations in taste perception play into diet planning.

3) Your radar screen will show a bogie.

4) Somebody will beat you up, probably; however, medical treatment after decompression events is in its infancy. A few have been survived (on ground, not in space), but there’s a lot unknown about them. There’s a lot you can do with models and simulations, but at some stage you have to take actual live animals, throw them out the airlock and then try to resuscitate them. A lot of that can be done on the ground, of course.

5) The design of a space toilet is unglamorous but necessary, really.

The real problem with space research is that it’s so expensive and all the experiments are designed on the ground, mostly by people who’ve never been in space. It’s like someone who’s never seen water designing a boat. However, the only real solution to that is cheap access to space, which means either better rocket engines (high-impulse high-thrust) or that elevator someone was mentioning; not something that can really be solved by better engineering.

the space station has an orbital velocity of 27,700 km/sec or roughly 7700 meters/sec. and is orbiting at a height of 350 to 460 km above the earth.

Also according to wikipedia, drag from re-entry starts to become non-negligable at about 120 km altitude. So, the earthward velocity component when it finally drops to 120 km = sqrt(2 * 9.8 m/s/s * 230,000) is roughly 2,100 m/s.

Compared to the orbital velocity, that’s not a lot, but if you take the root of the squares of the two you end up with roughly 8,000 m/s or mach 23.

This is about as reasonable as seeing how a tissue survives a sustained 100 mph wind. They would have to use some sort of composite that can’t be reasonably termed paper for it to retain any structural integrity during deceleration to wind speeds.

This sounds like someone has been watching too much Bugs Bunny lately.

Paper airplane hits piece of space junk, knocks it off orbit. Piece of space junk hits micro meteor, alters its trajectory. [...] Giant meteorite hits planet Earth, kills all life forms.

Hooray for science?

Hmmm!

A low-density object like a paper air-plane would be more strongly affected by this, although it may still take quite a while to deorbit. But even worst case it would be years, not decades. Remember how quickly Skylab came down from a similar orbit, although at a time of solar maximum rather than the minimum we’re now in. Solar activity causes the atmosphere to expand, producing more drag on spacecraft in lower orbits.

Scientists do this kind of thing for fun, and one can never predict what kind of good might come of it, what ideas it might inspire, what insights it might provide. All of the money spent on the exploration of space is spent on Earth, and it has served to inspire a generation of scientists and engineers who wind up doing all kinds of things, including curing cancer and empowering the poor to feed themselves.

To me this whole project seems to be more of a materials and flight design experiment. This is not a fundamental study of fluid dynamics.

@#9: Nothing to do with NASA? Aren’t most of the modules of the ISS financially supported by the US and deployed by the space shuttle? I may be wrong.

In space!

NASA’s budget is extraordinarily small. Something on the order of 15-17 billion annually. By comparison we spend over 38 times that on Defense, and 98 times that on social programs. Our budget in 2007 was 2.784 trillion, NASA is 0.58% of that. By contrast 1.581 trillion were spent on social programs, over 56% of the budget.

http://www.thespacereview.com/article/898/1

The Space Review: Putting NASA’s budget in perspective

Everyone needs to shut the eff up about us “wasting” money on NASA, and realize that we need to get on top of this whole space elevator situation, build some giant space dry docks, construct some enormous interstellar ships (while developing some sort of standard long term stasis, duh), and GET THE EFF OUT OF HERE.

Paper airplane hits piece of space junk, knocks it off orbit. Piece of space junk hits micro meteor, alters its trajectory. [...] Giant meteorite hits planet Earth. All die. O the embarrassment.

Oh, wait…

http://www.space.com/news/051214_spaceport_newmexico.html

Yes, I am all for science and research, and I realize this costs a lot of money. Yes, I know that scientists learn and have learned wonderful things that help humankind. And yes, it would be “neat” to throw all sorts of things out of a space station just to see what happens. My only question was, “Is the expense of this type of research justified when there are better experiments or activities that could be done with that money?” I thought perhaps this would be a forum in which dissenting ideas would be welcomed just for the purpose of discussion. It bugs me when some people (not all, because I have learned some interesting things from the non-trolls) see an opinion they don’t like and start throwing the insults.

But before you experiment, you need to decide the purpose of the experiment, don’t you? You don’t just say, “Well, let’s attach electrodes to your head, and give ya a zap.”

I can think of several things that could be studied with this… aside from the properties of the special material itself. I can imagine a lot of info to gained about tracking such a small object (radar, lasers, whatever), both from space and the ground. The behavior of such a small, light object in the space, atmosphere interface, attempts at mathematical predictions of its landing site, etc. etc.

Seems like at least as good an idea as RFID tagging every fookin farm animal in the land.

The ISS has elements from many nations, I couldn’t tell you who provided what, but I do know the whole point of it is to provide a platform for anyone who wants to experiment with a place to do so. So this particular experiment has nothing to do with NASA, not the space station itself

I love what NASA was supposed to be, but not what it has become.

I know that 15-17 billion dollars is chump change for some of you high-rollers, but is there better ways of spending it? And yes, I know the US spends way more on weapons…that is bad, too. Can we all agree to that?

As for elevators to the moon…yeah, great idea. Let’s spending billions of dollars so we can go to another moon or planet so we can continue our degradation of environment. Why bother spending that money to fix the problems we’ve started here.

1) What would happen if one was to have sex with an inflatable doll in the space station?
2) Do hamburgers taste better in space?
3) What happens to a one-pound ball of snot if it were to be thrown out of the space station?
4) What would happen if we were to throw a kitten out into space?
5) How difficult would it be to photocopy your arse in a zero-gravity environment?

Come on, folks! I’m a moron, so help me with my list. Let’s see if we can get to one hundred suggestions and then email it to the Japanese scientists.

Also, for the record, #5 Idle Tuesday is a moron. Thank you, that will be all.