According to the plan as stated in the article, China is planning to have its own space station in 2020. By the time ISS is scheduled to retire in 2024 [1], China could very well be the ONLY country who will have space station.
It could be, however I would bet against it as both the US and Russia have plans. The US is looking at the commercial market to deal with LEO while NASA focuses on larger things. I believe that Russia has plans as well but I haven't read about them as much.
Notably, the company Axiom plans on making their potential module be able to function independently after detaching from the ISS. Bigelow also has plans for using their inflatable technology, although they've been working on this for quite a while and I've heard rumors of that the management is dysfunctional so for them to be ready in time for 2024 seems unlikely to me, a layperson.
My guess: 2024 will come and there will be perhaps some commercial space stations or modules attached but they will lengthen the date until ISS decommission at least one time.
NASA may be looking beyond, but the US is still very much focused on leo. The US military and surveillance agencies have plenty of birds. They are constantly launching new stuff. They long ago gave up using men in space, that's NASA's thing, but in terms of rockets and access LEO is still an American focus.
I continue to suggest to folks that with a couple of Falcon 9 payloads one could dock a module to boost it into the Earth-Moon L1 point. At which point station keeping would require minimum fuel.
Delta-v to EML1 from LEO is 3.77 km/sec. Assuming an Isp of 320 sec, you get a mass ratio of about 3.3, which works out to about 75 Falcon payloads, not counting any hardware you need to boost.
If you use ion thrusters, the delta-V becomes larger (7km/sec), but with an Isp of 3000 sec you can do it with only about 4.5 falcons. So this plan could be reasonable.
The real problem seems to be that crewed missions to the ISS probably can't use ion engines, and so take a huge payload hit getting there and back, right?
Also, won't radiation be an issue that far from earth?
Who is we? And by what standard is "plenty" measured?
Less tax revenue will result in less accomplished by government; it's inevitable. Already, important programs are cut in the US and UK. For example, as people were dying the US Congress wouldn't fund Zika virus research, and CDC (or NIH) shifted resources from Ebola research and/or treatment. The US military has clearly stated they cannot defend the country and accomplish their mission with current funding.
People can always claim they can 'trim the fat', etc.; it's just words; a promise of something for nothing, government services without having to pay for them. It's been used by politicians for as long as taxes have existed.
I'd be interested in serious research showing where such inefficiencies exist and what can be done, but the claim by itself isn't substantive.
Having a space station is not important. Having the infrastructure to build and maintain a space station is important.
When the US stopped sending people to the moon it stopped to be capable of sending people past LEO. A space station at least ensures that we can still send people to space.
But we (USA) can't still send people to space. We voluntarily gave up that infrastructure years ago and have no clear, funded plan to restore it.
For manned spaceflight, NASA's top priority should be basic research into breakthrough propulsion technologies. It's pretty clear that we'll never be able to safely send a large number of people anywhere worthwhile using chemical rockets.
We do have a funded plan to restore it. SpaceX and Boeing have contracts to ferry people to the ISS, starting in a year or so. Both of them have constructed serious amounts of hardware, both the capsules and the pads/towers required to launch them.
China is replicating exactly, step by step, the soviet space program, and the next stop is their own MIR. There is a lot of technology to be learnt there about maintaining medium-term live in space and basic science research that could be done.
Well, there definitely is some value in studying the extraterrestrial space medium. Regarding the ISS, just think about its sheer size -- how else can the knowledge about constructing and maintaining such structures be gained? Besides that, a lot of knowledge and experience was gained or confirmed/replicated from previous experiments. So the answer in two words: research & development (with emphasis on the last one).
Who cares? I'd rather have more rover and deep space missions and non-LEO manned missions than the propagandist wins of a floating bucket in LEO. Space stations aren't progress, they're just money wasters with a roadmap that leads literally to nowhere - being burned up in the atmosphere.
I never understood this mentality that when the US is between launchers everyone suddenly has a renewed appreciation for last-gen achievements. We did the LEO psce bucket with the ISS. It leads to nowhere and had questionable space science utility. Its not a stepping stone to anywhere[1]. We're building the SLS and investing in SpaceX, Blue Origin, ATK, Sierra, and ULA to get out of LEO and to have a variety of spacecraft on tap. Nations still stuck in LEO with 60+ old launch systems are going to be left behind and they shouldn't be applauded for it.
A few years of downtime will be forgotten the same way we've forgotten the time between Apollo and the STS. Meanwhile, anti-US biased people will dance during this peroid and project questionable attitudes like the US not being interested in space (No one comes close NASA's achievements, missions, and budget) or how the US is declining because a pig like Soyuz can still fly to LEO.
[1] by the time the ISS was built we had enough know-how to do things like permanent moon bases and other achievements that were within our technical grasp but not within our political one. Its very easy to vote for splitting the bill on a space station with a bunch of other countries. Its a whole other thing to propose risky things like moonbases and to have them funded by Congress. Thankfully with the SLS and SpaceX we're back to doing risky things.
This year, China will have their maiden flight for 2 new rockets CZ-5, CZ-7. Launched a new space station: Tiangong2, is making steady progress in their space program.
Russia is developing Angara-5, a new rocket that made its debut in 2014. Russia upgraded in 2016 its soyuz capsule and is working on a new design crewed vehicle.
Europe started developing its Ariane 6 next gen-launcher, following the success of its current Ariane 5.
Europe also landed on a comet earlier this year.
I am less versed in Japan launch schedules, but they also have a strong program.
During this time, US is developing reusable launchers that land on their launchpad.
Space is a global effort and every country is participating in this exploration. Each has strengths and weakness. For instance, USA can land rockets but cannot send crew in space.
There is no more a 'me versus them' situation in space development. Everyone works somewhat together. Russia sends US astronauts in orbit. US refuels the ISS with Cigna cargo. Antares engines are Russian RD-181. The service of the orion capsule is made in France and Germany. The Chinese spacecraft is derived from Russian Soyuz.
>There is no more a 'me versus them' situation in space development.
There absolutely is and frankly its the only thing that's ever worked - competition. Before it was between nation states and now it will be between corporations, which is going to be much more efficient. We are entering a new age of space travel here where nation states take a backseat to big centrally planned government programs, at least in the US.
16 years of continuous human presence in space is the biggest achievement of the ISS program, along with a lot of knowledge on long duration manned missions. A manned Mars mission would be a complete venture into the unknown if it weren't for the space medicine research done at the ISS.
Losing the ISS will be a step backwards for space exploration.
The guidelines ask us not to complain about downvotes in the first place, but to introduce an absolutely baseless accusation of racism is beyond the pale. Please do not do this.
Seems such a waste to de-orbit these stations (ISS, Tiangong-1, Mir, Skylab) given the cost of getting them into orbit. One day we will have space manufacturing capability, and a couple of hundred tonnes of aluminium scrap would be pretty useful I would have thought.
ISS needs 7 tonnes of fuel each year to stay in orbit, so it would need yearly refueling runs just to keep it were it is (or expensive modifications to get larger tanks, I think it only has enough capacity for a year right now). And if you deorbit it you can be sure it's safely gone, and stop worrying about defects that have it crashing down somewhere random anyways - you certainly don't want to have to go out and fix it.
For a decade or so that might be worth it, but on a more long-term timeline it would be more efficient to just launch what you need when you actually need it.
EDIT: what I didn't think about is that one maybe could push it further out and reduce atmospheric drag and thus fuel needs that way, but I suspect the safety aspect still wins.
The ISS is largely where it is due to a set of messy technical and political compromises: it needed to be in an orbit that both Soyuz and the Space Shuttle could reach. Because they both launched from places that aren't on the equator, all orbits reachable by them would be inclined, so there's only a limited set that both can get to. (Without doing a ruinously expensive plane change manoeuvre.) And of course the higher the orbit, the more fuel you need, which means less payload, so it ended up in quite a low orbit.
Now the shuttle's gone, there's no realistic proposal for delivering heavy components to the station, so it could be reboosted into a higher orbit. You'd end up spending less fuel on stationkeeping, but more fuel on routine deliveries and crew transfers.
I really have no idea whether this would be worthwhile. Anyone?
Extraterrestrial space is an expensive medium, and not only for putting things into. We may want space manufacturing capability but we definitely don't want space junk orbiting around. In the long term, the most important thing for all orbital objects is their safe decommissioning procedure. Keeping the space clean is paramount.
The US should really be looking at cooperating more with China in space. Not wanting to help them with rocket technologies is understandable but there's no reason they shouldn't participate in the international space station or its successor.
There have been security concerns about sharing space technology with China, versus with Japan and Europe. Russia is also not highly trusted, but on the other hand their space technology is regarded as equal to ours, so there's not much security risk to cooperation.
Probably moving forward, China will move into the top tier of space powers alongside Russia, the U.S., Japan, and western Europe, and ahead of India (which has its own program albeit with a lower budget).
At that point, cooperation between China and the West would be mutually beneficial. One thing China brings to the table is a very low cost program; they seem to be able to do launches for one tenth the U.S. budget.
...there's no reason they shouldn't participate in the international space station or its successor.
Just so you know, the Chinese are not on their knees begging for access to the ISS. There're doing fine on their own, and are likely happier with it that way.
Yeah, and as soon as a U.S. Senator makes a floor speech lamenting that "the Chinese are beating us at our own game!", I expect that the pork will start to roll and U.S. Aerospace industry will be thanking the Chinese as well.
I would take even odds against you on that bet. While the US would like to be seen as gearing up to take on China, most policy is driven in the direction of symbolism and a desire to have China step up so the US can step down in international affairs (a much more likely scenario is a renewed emphasis on North Korea as China's most potent regional security threat).
The American space program has been doomed for so long that it's hard to imagine a single speech would turn anyone around.
More generally, this outlook is part of why the TTP is staggeringly unpopular -- developing a soft power base in Asia, independent of China, simply isn't worth sacrificing _anything_, no matter how small, in the eyes of both the American public and it's current major party nominees.
uhhh, well I'm sure the space race didn't help in reducing tensions.. but you know all the proxy wars and thousands of soldiers dieing prolly played a bigger role.
There really shouldn't be an use vs. them with China. That's incredibly toxic thinking (trying to create an new Cold War)
> There really shouldn't be an use vs. them with China.
I never said there should be. All I said is that nationalism and fearmongering did not prevent the first space race from going well, and did not prevent eventual easing of tensions.
An interesting, if somewhat disingenuous perspective. Japan has one person in space, no manned launch capability, Russia has one person in space, with manned launch capability.
I think of the Soyuz system as the "B-52 of space capsules", conceived in the 50's, first flown in the 60's, and kept flying by incremental avionics updates to the present day. Which makes for a well understood system.
In many ways the Chinese system is an offspring the Soyuz system, while great efforts are made to stress it is a completely Chinese design, clearly they have made many design choices which were directly inspired by the Soyuz capsules, from how the solar panels are attached/deployed to the mass fractions allocated to various parts of the system.
I expect that is for the same reason that Boeing's CST looks like a bigger version of Apollo, because Boeing had all of the Apollo data already and it was perhaps easier for them to start from there and tweak rather than take it from the a blank sheet. I find it particularly interesting that SpaceX's Dragon, Blue Origin's New Armstrong, and SNC's Dream Chaser manned capsules are quite a bit different both from each other and previously flown designs.
So what I see is that the US will shortly (as in within 12 - 18 months) have a variety of manned space launch capabilities, some of which will have targeted return to base capability.
The odd duck out here are the Russians as they really don't seem to have a replacement for Soyuz either in the works or anywhere close to being deployed. That surprises me as they certainly have the expertise to build such a system and they will be at a tactical and strategic disadvantage when both the US and China can launch crews with greater on orbit maneuvering options.
> The odd duck out here are the Russians as they really don't seem to have a replacement for Soyuz either in the works or anywhere close to being deployed
Perhaps this is because they don't really see a need for a new vehicle (Soyuz meets mission requirements just fine), let alone the benefit of having partially re-usable rockets?
Partially re-usable rockets require special launch/recovery procedures (ie. a "smart" barge parked in the ocean somewhere, or worse, over land someplace risking the population), a whole lot of R&D, a new untested vehicle, and no guaranteed payoffs (SpaceX's cost reduction and re-usability claims are yet to be proven).
The Soyuz, as you've pointed out, is fairly inexpensive (given it's mission), and is very well understood. From their perspective, it seems, the Soyuz is the ideal craft for the job, and any new build would largely result in a new craft meeting the same mission goals, ie. a waste of time and resources when they already have a vehicle that fills that need.
As of ~2013, Soyuz has about 939 successful launches, 24 failures, for a total of 963 launches[1]. Seems to be a "recipe" one doesn't want to tinker with.
I don't think the Russians see "over land" as a particularly big obstacle. Right now they just drop their spent first stages on land without much guidance. Before launches from Baikonur, they send out soldiers in helicopters to warn the nomads, and otherwise it's pretty much every man for himself. Salvaging the spent stages is apparently a bit of a cottage industry there.
Just a bit of a nitpick, your overall point here is entirely sound.
I don't know about that, at least regarding rocket technology they seem to be ahead and not by a small factor, probably a decade. (they have been upgrading their ICBM's and missile defence systems very aggressively in the last 15 years)
US is basically using the same tech as China ATM for manned launches...the Soyuz spacecraft. An amazing reliable (and relatively cheap!) design from the USSR/Russia.
I'd love to read a good, accessible to laymen longread on the Soyuz program, putting it into perspective alongside contemporaries and the improvements made over time, along with the attendant systems including training etc.
I had a chance to check out a Soyuz training mock-up and one of the Space Shuttle simulators at the Johnson Space Center a few years ago and this was something that really impressed me about the Space Shuttle.
In the Soyuz the crew sits almost with their knees against their chest.[1] The Space Shuttle flight deck basically felt like an airliner, but in space (at least as someone unfamiliar with airliners) [2].
Even in 2010 knowing that the program was being canceled, it was basically how I'd imagine space flight from the future. Although in reality the tiny-metal-can approach seems like it's still the safest and most cost effective way to get back from space.
Don't forget the gentle "welcome back to Earth" kick in the ass that the passengers get a few seconds before landing, as the re-entry speed is still too fast - so the lander fires some solid-fuel landing engines for a "soft" landing.
I would love to have a good read on the Soviet, then Russian, space program. They've been the only ones to do a station to station flight, for instance, or rescue a mute space station.
"Red Star In Orbit" by James E Oberg has been an incredibly good read so far. The one downside to it all is that it was written a decade before the fall of the USSR. So any fascinating tidbits that were revealed during/after the fall are missing. But don't let that dissuade you from the book! I personally like the cold war feel the book has. My favorite thing about the book is that Oberg covers what the Soviets said happened, what the West speculated had happened, and then finally (as best as he can tell from leaks, defectors, etc.) what really happened. Incredibly good read.
I highly recommend "The Story of Space Station Mir" by Harland. It covers the motivating history for MIR, from Almaz through the Saylut series. It's not a comprehensive history of the full Soviet / Russian program, unfortunately. Branching out from its bibliography ought to get you part of the way there.
I know Hacker news likes "Technically Correct - the Best kind of Correct" but in what sense is China 'ahead' here?
It may be obvious but there are plenty more Americans who are back and walking around on planet earth than there are Chinese astronauts who have been put into orbit.
please do not confuse current capability with the sum of achievements. USA has put multiple men on the surface of the Moon. what of it if it doesn't have a man-rated launcher now? SLS is a jobs program that's years from launching. Atlas V? not rated. Delta IV? being phased out and also not rated. Falcon 9? not rated. Antares? not rated. New Glenn? announced last month, hardware doesn't exist. ITS? you know the drill.
tell me in what way the current US capacity of launching men into space is ahead of China's?
USA is strongly profit oriented. There is very little profit in launching man to the space, but it you will look at the number of satellites in the space:
China: 218
US: 1341
http://www.n2yo.com/satellites/?c=&t=country
What does being 'rated' mean in this context, do the Chinese and American entities building spacecraft use uniform criteria for these ratings? Or is it simply what gets built and stamped that way by local varieties?
They use soviet technology on a 1960s era rocket to launch to a single room space station, all using massive government subsidies.
If the US wanted/needed to, they could put a man up tomorrow (seriously just strap a capsule to Antares 203). The only difference is that we are taking time to safely transition to a commercial market for spaceflight.
I'm not trying to knock China, more power to them, but they are definitely not "ahead".
Let's not applaud being stuck in LEO with 50 year old space systems. The US is dedicated to leaving LEO with the SLS and SpaceX, Boeing, and others. There is no roadmap with Soyuz or the ISS. They go nowhere we haven't been to over and over and mocking the US for being between launch systems seems short-sighted and childish.
According to a Chinese source [1] that I just Googled, 2 main reasons:
1. Need enough distance to populated area. This has to take into account of the situation where something goes wrong in soon after the launch, when rocket is still close enough to the ground to cause damages. The launch location that you see is in the middle of the desert, so it is suitable.
2. Need to consider the landing location. The choice of landing location is limited by the launch location. This launch location allows for suitable landing location which are safe and far from populated area.
(2) is a good point, I never thought of that. So, if KSP is giving the right hints here, it seems like the inclination needs to be pretty exact because they don't have any delta-v left to adjust it for the landing. Maybe South China Sea water landings are not considered because of territorial disputes?
Missing the old days that US and USSR competing on space and innovating tons of new technologies for mankind. Now what do we got, Snapchat, Instagram, Uber, Airbnb and we call that innovations?
Massively off topic but I hate the BBC's recent penchant for using the main event as backdrop for a piece to camera. Do other countries have to put up with this ridiculous trend?
It's great that China is excited about space. Hopefully, they get soon excited about Nobel Prizes, and basic research. They could easily double the world's output of research.
China's volume of research output is respectable in many fields. But the humanities work is often dismissed as political by Western and Chinese academics alike, and science has a quality/quantity problem[0] made worse by the rapid proliferation of ranking systems for universities and a "publish or perish" culture[1] that makes elite US institutions look good. There are some groups in my field (phys chem) that we know are doing good work, but most research out of China is automatically dismissed because it's so often not reproducible.
They've been excited for a while: the growth of basic research in China has been skyrocketing for years. (http://www.nature.com/news/science-in-china-1.20120) The upcoming five-year plan includes a huge focus on research, and getting high-profile prizes is definitely a target.
I could be completely off the mark here, but is it wrong in my part to assume that China may not necessarily have the right environment for basic research to flourish? The way you mentioned the "China being excited" translates to "Chinese authorities deciding to push basic research". That will no doubt get human and other resources allocated for it, but is it sufficient?
China, and USSR may not be a fair comparison, but I feel China is much closer to how the USSR functioned, of course with the added opening up of the economy, and probably economic freedom within the country (The two missing pieces that led to bankruptcy of USSR). Now, let me explain the reason why I brought this comparison here. USSR in its day probably matched the west in defence, and to some extent space tech, but did USSR produce any original major basic research breakthroughs? Basic research is not amenable to top-down push and needs an environment where ideas and expressions of those ideas have freedom. Anyway those are passing thoughts I had when I read your comment.
Thanks a lot for the pointers. Many here have already pointed that I am buying too much into the "free market" propaganda; may be I was indeed brainwashed into buying that, but I am trying to open my eyes and learn. AFAICT, there seems to be strong correlation between wealth/prosperity of a nation and the openness of its economy. Are there any counter examples to this?
Coming to back to the original topic, is it fair to say there is no strong correlation between development of science and freedom of thought? Well, it may be true if the state does not repress the ideas being produced under science; I can now see why that might have been the case under USSR, and even in China. Scientific thought being largely apolitical may not have to be repressed by authoritarian regimes.
Any holes in this logic? Sorry for being naive!
I agree about the relation between prosperity and openness of the economy. But the relation to science, especially theoretical work requiring little more than pencil and paper, is less clear. Trivial example: lucrative opportunities in finance might have lured away some of the old USSR's math talent, to the detriment of Soviet mathematics.
The best and worst thing about authoritarian / totalitarian / one-party systems may be their focus. Few people making all the important decisions lead to few things being pursued vigorously. If they happen to be good things, great; you get an Academy of Science or a national space program with plenty of resources and social support. If they happen to be bad things, you get national disasters like Lysenkoism [1], "Deutsche Physik" [2] and the shuttering of Chinese schools and universities during the Cultural Revolution [3].
India is not really open; sure it's a "democracy", but it's really a de-facto feudal state, often with very little private property rights, and a bureaucracy that would put the Vogons to shame. It's not clear if contemporary India is better than contemporary China in any social/economic aspect (other than possibly allowing a free-movement of its people).
Indeed considering that India's literacy rate is bettered by regimes like Myanmar and DPRK, one wonders why India is being played up, when in reality the only real comparison at this point is with other lower-middle income nations in Africa. This is not to say there is prosperity in cities which are essentially brought up to serve English-speaking nations, but to replicate this across the country[1] will likely lead to a further fall in education levels (this obsession[2] gets back to my "feudal" point). Unlike manufacturing in China, India can't ever extend the service economy (other than e-retail) to its own market.
While some may romanticize Modi's plebeian origins [3], it must be inferred from his policies that he remains yet a handmaiden of the feudal powers that put him into power. I have been to (native?) universities in India, and level of ignorance/acceptance of the current situation baffles me to no end. It should be noted that, considering the stiflement of economics in India, a job in the state apparatus is seen often as the entire point of life outside the IT realm.
Don't fall for all the propaganda being spewed from India for self-flattery, and from America for its "Asian pivot". The reality is much more nuanced and murkier.
India's backwardness is the result of decades of socialist policies. Restrictive license permit raj, inefficient and wasteful public delivery system, inflexible labor laws are some of the reasons that have kept India hobbled up.
> did USSR produce any original major basic research breakthroughs?
Yes. If you look through just a college-level algorithms class curriculum, you'll find:
- Leonid Levin, who discovered the concept of NP-completeness in the early 1970s (as did Stephen Cook, independently)
- Georgy Adelson-Velsky and Evgenii Landis, who invented the AVL tree, the first self-balancing binary search tree, in 1962
- Andrey Kolmogorov, who did a bunch of things including Kolmogorov complexity, an important concept in information theory that underlies our understanding of entropy and compression
- Vladimir Levenshtein, another information theorist who gave his name to the concept of Levenshtein distance
All this despite a few decades of suppression of computing science as an un-Marxist "bourgeois pseudoscience".
There were plenty of passionate and talented Soviet researchers - although it also helped to work in a discipline that was promoted, as opposed to repressed by the state.
Maybe. What I'm saying is that there is a correlationm but we can't say there's causation, at least not how the American propaganda states. It is plain simple propaganda as the soviet Russia used to do.
IMO, the problems with scientific research in China have little or nothing to do with state repression and more to do with an overcommodified educational system: too much competition at every step from primary school exams to tenure track positions, too much pressure to get high impact publications every few months, too much administrative bloat and rankings-centered priorities.
In other words, they have the same problems that American researchers complain about on HN all the time, only worse. It's fine to find the quality of Chinese research intolerable, but there should be more awareness that that's where we're headed.
The following wiki page is interesting - the Nobel prize section in particular. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_technology_in_th...
And a counter example: The regime in 1930s-1940s Germany was more repressive and they had a lot of major research breakthroughs.
I wish someone was working on nuclear propulsion technology with Isp of 1000-10000km/s. Chemical rockets are a dead end for space exploration even within the solar system.
It is really amazing what China has accomplished in a short period of time - especially given that the Cultural Revolution sort of threw them back to the stone age.
One interesting observation about what the narrator said at the beginning section of the video:
"It's not something a journalist is normally allowed to experience in this country."
I understand that you do not like certain aspects of my country, but do you really need to squeeze in comments like that when covering a spacecraft launch?
Edit: It was referring to the visit to the "secret launch base", so it is technically a fair statement. Still, the tone bothers me.
A journalist's job is not to give anyone or anything a pass.
You can identify a good publication because everyone, on all sides of an issue, thinks the publication is out to get them. Both the Clinton and Trump camps think that about the NY Times, for example. In a way, a good way, it's true.
Thanks for your thoughtful response. I'm afraid we still don't quite agree (not that agreement is necessary):
>>> "It's not something a journalist is normally allowed to experience in this country."
> My only complain is that sometimes the narrator's personal sentiments get mixed up with the factual reporting.
The statement you quoted doesn't seem personal to me; it's not about the reporter's experience but about the experiences of journalists in general. And it's factual, not opinion or sentiment.
All reporting is subject to opinion. Or as I once heard: editing is art because the editing process makes choices to bring certain facts forward and discard other facts.
The best journalists are aware of that and try to present a neutral story, but it's inevitable. In this case, BBC is a media company and its in their best interests to be able to "experience" more of these types of events.
The NYT functioned as Bush's propaganda arm in the running up to the second Iraq war that has now cost millions of innocent lives. It is not a good publication.
I think it's an important reminder that China's technical achievements occur alongside significant restrictions not found in other countries.
I would hope that foreign press covering news in the United States (my country) would place events in context for their viewers, and be equally fair and factual about it.
[1] http://www.space.com/24208-international-space-station-exten...