Orbiting hunk of expensive garbage

The ISS (International Space Station) is an orbiting white elephant, sucking up billions upon billions of pounds of public money, and producing absolutely nothing in return. No decent scientific research is undertaken there. It is all akin to a reality TV show. Nice pictures for the news channels, in order to try and secure more funding, to put more people up into Low Earth Orbit, to secure some more nice pictures. An endless cycle of waste.



Three and a half decades ago, Man walked on the Moon. This is 240,000 miles away. A truly huge round trip of about a half a million miles. Stepping out onto an alien world, having got there using less computing power than you'll now find in the average saloon car.

The ISS, on the other hand, is a lump of junk 250 miles up. That's right, a paltry 250 miles. Throwing away money on this, at this stage in humanity's technological evolution, is ridiculous.

All manned space flight to LEO that doesn't return a profit, should be halted completely. Let rich "space tourists" pay their way up there (as has been happening).

Spend the public money that is at present being wasted on manned space light to LEO, on developing new techologies. All of those billions would yield impressive R+D results. Our destiny is among the stars, not a few hundred expensive miles up, in some kind of reality TV show set.

Hubble Deep Field

This is one of the furthest views that humanity has ever achieved - these are among the most distant objects we have ever seen.

This is 1.5 by 1.125 arc minutes of the night's sky, as seen by the Hubble space telescope. For a sense of scale, the Moon's apparent diameter as seen from the Earth is 30 arc minutes, whereas the Moon is 1.3 light-seconds distant, and these galaxies are of the order 10 billion light-years away.

These are fairly new galaxies, created not too long after the Big Bang (of the order 1 billion years after, which is relatively speaking not too long).