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This shelf is over my bed, and holds some of my fondest aerospace models. Far left is an unpainted Willey Ley design for a three stage rocket, with earth orbiter. In the original kit the orbiters wing was a simple delta configuration, that I thought ugly. I cut it down to somethingmore like the Concorde. You may not be able to make out the temporary markings. Using a felt tip pen I scribbled on some WWII vintage German crosses.
Next is the white moon rocket with USAF markings. You won't ever find another of these, because it's scratch built from loose parts. The front end is the nose of a Concorde, and the wings cut from sheet styrene. The engine is from a Saturn V.
Next to that is a cheap Saturn V knock-off that cost me a buck. The payload section is spring loaded and will "launch" off the second stage with a button.
Next is a Lindberg model of a theoretical moon lander. (Another Willey Ley design, I believe.) I've painted it similar to space vehicles of the 60's, adding gold foil here and there, and a lot more arreals. Also an airlock at the top. The original kit dates to the late 50's, but this one is a 60's re-issue.
Next is how the Space Shuttle probably should have been designed. Lindberg made this kit originally in the 50's. Like the lander, this particular example is a re-issue. From the early 80's I think. It came in two varieties -- a civilian and a military. This is the civvy. The first stage is a broad boat shaped airframe with long tapered wings. The orbiter is more like a conventional jet. It would be carried to 100,000 or 200,000 feeet by the first stage, which was manned and would then land like a conventional plane. The orbiter would propel itself the rest of the way into space, and also land like a conventional jet after re-entry.
The Apollo ship isn't a kit, but technically a toy. But what a toy! This wasn't made for no kids to play with! It's chromed and gilded top to bottom. The command capsule opens up to show removable astronauts and fully detailed interior. A section of the service module opens to show interior tanks and apparatus. The two modules separate. Next to it is the lander that's part of the package. It's two modules also separate. You can open up the forward part to put one or two astronauts in their landing stations. The base the LEM is on is part of something else though.
Next is the ridiculous but really cool "Pogo" plane. It was an early attempt at vertical take-off and landing. Two diferent designs were built -- one by Locheed. This is the Convair XF-1. They were basically failures. While they could be taken off and converted to level flight, landing proved to be their undoing. Even with a tilting pilot's seat, looking over your shoulder to land a dangerously hovering aircraft is not a good idea.
Beyond that is a cheap toy replica of the Hubble Space Telescope that you can actually use as a telescope. Then a Revell X-15 kit. The original of this dates to the early 60's, but this one is a re-issue from the 80's.
Next is the white moon rocket with USAF markings. You won't ever find another of these, because it's scratch built from loose parts. The front end is the nose of a Concorde, and the wings cut from sheet styrene. The engine is from a Saturn V.
Next to that is a cheap Saturn V knock-off that cost me a buck. The payload section is spring loaded and will "launch" off the second stage with a button.
Next is a Lindberg model of a theoretical moon lander. (Another Willey Ley design, I believe.) I've painted it similar to space vehicles of the 60's, adding gold foil here and there, and a lot more arreals. Also an airlock at the top. The original kit dates to the late 50's, but this one is a 60's re-issue.
Next is how the Space Shuttle probably should have been designed. Lindberg made this kit originally in the 50's. Like the lander, this particular example is a re-issue. From the early 80's I think. It came in two varieties -- a civilian and a military. This is the civvy. The first stage is a broad boat shaped airframe with long tapered wings. The orbiter is more like a conventional jet. It would be carried to 100,000 or 200,000 feeet by the first stage, which was manned and would then land like a conventional plane. The orbiter would propel itself the rest of the way into space, and also land like a conventional jet after re-entry.
The Apollo ship isn't a kit, but technically a toy. But what a toy! This wasn't made for no kids to play with! It's chromed and gilded top to bottom. The command capsule opens up to show removable astronauts and fully detailed interior. A section of the service module opens to show interior tanks and apparatus. The two modules separate. Next to it is the lander that's part of the package. It's two modules also separate. You can open up the forward part to put one or two astronauts in their landing stations. The base the LEM is on is part of something else though.
Next is the ridiculous but really cool "Pogo" plane. It was an early attempt at vertical take-off and landing. Two diferent designs were built -- one by Locheed. This is the Convair XF-1. They were basically failures. While they could be taken off and converted to level flight, landing proved to be their undoing. Even with a tilting pilot's seat, looking over your shoulder to land a dangerously hovering aircraft is not a good idea.
Beyond that is a cheap toy replica of the Hubble Space Telescope that you can actually use as a telescope. Then a Revell X-15 kit. The original of this dates to the early 60's, but this one is a re-issue from the 80's.
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She's not the only one. Me, I'd scrap 3/4 of the military and put most of the money saved into hiring all the engineers back to develop space vehicles rather than stealth killing machines. But you can't intimidate people into dropping import tariffs or taxes on oil exports with a Mars Rover. So we got a lot of military hardware instead of LMs.
Lovely stuff. The XF-1 and its ilk were amazing testbeds but...Yeah. And the Ley moon lander <3. The good old days, we miss them so. I had textbooks when I was a kid that talked about how we would soon be colonizing the moon, with all those wonderful old images. They also had the whole manganese nodule mining bit which we now know was predominantly Glomar Explorer cover story. XD My childhood science education, via the CIA.
It really is a shame we built the shuttle around a disposable launch platform rather than as a mothership program. Unfortunately, at the time, the mothership concept was getting a lot of internal heat due to an accident involving an SR-71 (Actually M/D-21 built on an early A12 airframe, but who's counting?) collision with its just-launched D-12 drone. It's interesting that all the shuttle mothership concepts back then involved a daughter-on-top plan rather than the drop motif used by the later 'Tagboard' 130s or, even later, by Spaceship One and White Knight.
Someone really should have put someone like Hughes or Kelly Johnson up to the idea of designing a high-enough profile mothership to be able to roll and lift off with something shuttle-sized beneath it.
It really is a shame we built the shuttle around a disposable launch platform rather than as a mothership program. Unfortunately, at the time, the mothership concept was getting a lot of internal heat due to an accident involving an SR-71 (Actually M/D-21 built on an early A12 airframe, but who's counting?) collision with its just-launched D-12 drone. It's interesting that all the shuttle mothership concepts back then involved a daughter-on-top plan rather than the drop motif used by the later 'Tagboard' 130s or, even later, by Spaceship One and White Knight.
Someone really should have put someone like Hughes or Kelly Johnson up to the idea of designing a high-enough profile mothership to be able to roll and lift off with something shuttle-sized beneath it.
I think the X-33 would have solved a lot of problems, had NASA the will to actually try and make the system work. But then, this is what we get for letting Politicians and Bean-Counters get involved with exploration.
I'm just glad they we're in charge of Westward Developement in the U.S. They'd probably still be arguing in Missouri.
I'm just glad they we're in charge of Westward Developement in the U.S. They'd probably still be arguing in Missouri.
One big advantage of bureaucratic control, had it existed in the mid 19th. century, is that if the United States hadn't moved west fast enough, Canada might have a bigger part of it today!
We lost out big time when Oregon territory filled up with American homesteaders. The present day states of Washington and Oregon were British territory in the early 19th. century, and might reasonably have been ceded to Canada in 1867, for Confederaton. But by then it was swarming wit Yankees looking for free land, and we were lucky to hang on to the BC coast. At that, some Americans were demanding the border be set at 54 degrees, 40 minutes, which is the Alasak border, and would have denied Canada any outlet to the Pacific at all.
It isn't that I want to grab more land per se, but unfortunately the bit of Pacific coast we have is all rather like the Alaska panhandle -- more vertical than horizontal. The Fraser River delta where Vancouver lays, is just about the only part of the West Coast we have that isn't a sheer drop into the ocean. The city can't grow much more, so most of us are condemned to lving where there's snow and ice. If we had just Washington State, we'd have about 50 times as much of usable Pacific Northwest as we have now!
We lost out big time when Oregon territory filled up with American homesteaders. The present day states of Washington and Oregon were British territory in the early 19th. century, and might reasonably have been ceded to Canada in 1867, for Confederaton. But by then it was swarming wit Yankees looking for free land, and we were lucky to hang on to the BC coast. At that, some Americans were demanding the border be set at 54 degrees, 40 minutes, which is the Alasak border, and would have denied Canada any outlet to the Pacific at all.
It isn't that I want to grab more land per se, but unfortunately the bit of Pacific coast we have is all rather like the Alaska panhandle -- more vertical than horizontal. The Fraser River delta where Vancouver lays, is just about the only part of the West Coast we have that isn't a sheer drop into the ocean. The city can't grow much more, so most of us are condemned to lving where there's snow and ice. If we had just Washington State, we'd have about 50 times as much of usable Pacific Northwest as we have now!
I've always been astonished at how cheap governments are when it comes the space programs. Considering how important the effort probably is for the long term, we give it as much priority as repainting the flagpoles at the Rosebowl every year. One SF movie would amost pay to launch a Mars Rover. Considering that Nasa's budge it somewhere between $10 and $20 billon a year, you'd think every nation in the G8 could afford a program of exactly the same size as America's. What's $10 billion even to Canada? Nothing much. We're spending that in Afghanistan, shooting up ignorant peasants who mostly want us to go away so the can sell us opium peacefully.
(Ironically, it was the Taliban that outlawed the trade.)
The moon should have a permaent manned scientific station or two, and Mars ought to be swarming with two or three dozen rovers, and flyers at any given time. But we'd rather spend the money on McBurgers, t-shirts with Dale Ernhardt's name on them, and Viagra.
I remember one newspaper column in the early 70's, that made fun of Trekkies who wrote in to complain about coverage of an Apollo launch preempting Star Trek reruns.
(Ironically, it was the Taliban that outlawed the trade.)
The moon should have a permaent manned scientific station or two, and Mars ought to be swarming with two or three dozen rovers, and flyers at any given time. But we'd rather spend the money on McBurgers, t-shirts with Dale Ernhardt's name on them, and Viagra.
I remember one newspaper column in the early 70's, that made fun of Trekkies who wrote in to complain about coverage of an Apollo launch preempting Star Trek reruns.
Very few governments take the long term view, because the population doesn't take the longterm view, and a government that takes the longterm view tends to be at odds with its population. The best examples we have of 'long term planning' in government don't come from the West, but the East...China and the USSR.
It's easy to decree how much you're going to spend on any damn thing at all when you've got your jackboot on the throat of all and sundry and aren't subject to re-election by those people.
It's easy to decree how much you're going to spend on any damn thing at all when you've got your jackboot on the throat of all and sundry and aren't subject to re-election by those people.
I like to think the public in democratic countries might trust their governments more when it comes to long term, absract spending if those same goverments didn't so obviously waste money, and so much wasn't lavished in corporate hand-outs, pork barrel corruption, and outright boondoggles like "starwars".
"Star Wars" actually succeeded, but not in the fashion most folks comprehend.
Aside from the fact that we do have some insanely nifty toys (some of which are deployed to the battlefield and highly effective), the real goal of the big budget eighties military space program was an economic one...Spending the already overdrawn Soviet Union into submission. It worked just fine. That's why what would normally be considered a 'black' program was all over the newspapers, announced by the President, etc.
It was a gauntlet thrown down that our economy could absorb and the Soviet's could not...And that was deliberate. As a military 'high ground' program, they could not ignore it or fail to try to move against it, and they could not afford to equal it.
The terrifying thing about it is, they tried to level the playing field with working systems, and they came very, very close. Closer than we did in some respects:
http://astronautix.com/craft/polyus.htm
There are also a heckuva lot of Soviet 'failed satellite' launches up there, masked cargoes that have never transmitted or maneuvered, mostly launched during the eighties. At one point in the late eighties one of these supposedly maneuvered to and destroyed another, suggesting that some, if not all, of these orbiters may be latent ASATs.
Aside from the fact that we do have some insanely nifty toys (some of which are deployed to the battlefield and highly effective), the real goal of the big budget eighties military space program was an economic one...Spending the already overdrawn Soviet Union into submission. It worked just fine. That's why what would normally be considered a 'black' program was all over the newspapers, announced by the President, etc.
It was a gauntlet thrown down that our economy could absorb and the Soviet's could not...And that was deliberate. As a military 'high ground' program, they could not ignore it or fail to try to move against it, and they could not afford to equal it.
The terrifying thing about it is, they tried to level the playing field with working systems, and they came very, very close. Closer than we did in some respects:
http://astronautix.com/craft/polyus.htm
There are also a heckuva lot of Soviet 'failed satellite' launches up there, masked cargoes that have never transmitted or maneuvered, mostly launched during the eighties. At one point in the late eighties one of these supposedly maneuvered to and destroyed another, suggesting that some, if not all, of these orbiters may be latent ASATs.
I never beleived that for one instant. That's hindsight to justify the overindulgent Republican spending spree of the 80's, and in the long run might well be the foundation of the present economic crisis in the west. If Ronald Reagns deam of unilateral American military dominance of the world broke the Soviet Union, it also seems to have broken the United States.
And there's Russia selling gas and oil at preimum prices, big and bad as ever. They didn't stay broke long.
And there's Russia selling gas and oil at preimum prices, big and bad as ever. They didn't stay broke long.
Hindsight isn't necessary, it was reasonably apparent at the time that something was tremendously weird about the Star Wars program. It was publicized like no other high-tech military program before, or since. We didn't telegraph the B-1B that way, we didn't have press releases and live-on-air presidential discussions about the A-12 until long after it had performed the operational coups required of it, we didn't do that sort of thing back then, and we still don't now, not for the really leading edge national assets. It was publicized that much very specifically as a challenge to the Soviets.
And Russia, just like China, uses investment in the United States as an economic stabilizer. They were on very shaky ground before the current financial crisis, and they're on just as shaky ground now. Yes, they are making some good money from their petroleum sector, but their infrastructure is still falling apart faster than they can rebuild it, their military is still paid only very irregularly, they can't keep most of their ships at sea, nor do their pilots get much flight time because they can't keep that many military aircraft in repair.
And Russia, just like China, uses investment in the United States as an economic stabilizer. They were on very shaky ground before the current financial crisis, and they're on just as shaky ground now. Yes, they are making some good money from their petroleum sector, but their infrastructure is still falling apart faster than they can rebuild it, their military is still paid only very irregularly, they can't keep most of their ships at sea, nor do their pilots get much flight time because they can't keep that many military aircraft in repair.
The Shuttle we have is a kluge of USAF and CIA requirments, with some scientific needs tacked on as an afterthought. In the end, the Air Force and the Spooks decided they didn't really need the Shuttle and NASA was stuck with all sorts of deadweight it was too late to shake out of the design. Really, what NASA needed was something more like the X33 type lifting body, but it ended up with a Hummer-cum-dump-truck instead.
I've seen an SR-71 with one of those probes mounted between the tail-fins. Never mind the piggy-back configuration. With those tail fins close set as they were, and the drone mounted close to the body, it was an accident waiting to happen.
A more sensible approach might have been more like the piggy-back arrangment they used to use to air text the Enterprise shuttle. Keep it well away from the mother-ship. Speed wasn't essential -- just getting the space module as high above most of the atmosphere as possible.
I've seen an SR-71 with one of those probes mounted between the tail-fins. Never mind the piggy-back configuration. With those tail fins close set as they were, and the drone mounted close to the body, it was an accident waiting to happen.
A more sensible approach might have been more like the piggy-back arrangment they used to use to air text the Enterprise shuttle. Keep it well away from the mother-ship. Speed wasn't essential -- just getting the space module as high above most of the atmosphere as possible.
There was no way they could have mounted it further forward on the SR-71, due to that aircraft's mission profile. Almost all of its mass was back where the engines were. Adding that much more mass nearer to the nose would've required redesigning the airframe from the ground up.
Which, arguably, was the correct solution to both of these problems.
A-12A chase-plane footage of M/D-21 collision and resulting disaster:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nt9RnbGvi2M
Which, arguably, was the correct solution to both of these problems.
A-12A chase-plane footage of M/D-21 collision and resulting disaster:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nt9RnbGvi2M
You're probably right about mounting the drone on the SR-71. My suggestion about the piggy-back option was meant for the Shuttle, though, not the Blackbird. I don't see how it could have been made to work for that. Maybe tow the drone at a distance? I can't see that as practical either, if only for the take-off difficulties. Maybe a conformally shaped drone that dropped from the bottom? (If there was any space between the undercarriage doors.) What I saw at the Boeing-Everett museum seemed like the inexpensive way of adding a drone, and its not surprising the results were less than desired.
Perhaps the best solution would have been a pilotless, scaled down verson of the SR-71 that was remotely flown, or programmed to fly itself, the whole way. (The "Hummingbird"?) I suspect Lockheed could have done it, but that would have been another $10 billion not spent on useful things like crumbling highways, elderly people not cared for, illiterate adults, books in public libraries, and dull stuff like that.
Perhaps the best solution would have been a pilotless, scaled down verson of the SR-71 that was remotely flown, or programmed to fly itself, the whole way. (The "Hummingbird"?) I suspect Lockheed could have done it, but that would have been another $10 billion not spent on useful things like crumbling highways, elderly people not cared for, illiterate adults, books in public libraries, and dull stuff like that.
I shudder to think what the instability boundary would do to a towed drone passing through Mach at the end of a flexible, whippy cable. The cable would be a point of instability in a system that has to be almost perfectly stable to avoid overheating or breakup at higher speeds, and a similar problem arises with conformal shapes...When they drop away, the turbulence created is downright scary.
No, I think you were right about the 'shuttle taxi' method using longer pylons the way the 747-carrier does... Although I have heard that thing is a nightmare compared to a conventiona 747.
Me, I still maintain that the easiest and best way to do it is the way it was done for Senior Bowl and for the White-Knight/Spaceship One M/D: dropaway, gravity assisted. The mothership immediately bounces up due to reduced weight and the daughtership, if configured correctly, should shear right through the boundary layer nose first at a slight downward angle. It still creates scads of turbulence, but the turbulence is a high pressure area between the two vessels rather than a low pressure area as with the over-the-wing method used by the MD-21 and the old Willey Ley designs.
Not that I am an aircraft designer or anything. Just somebody who got curious at one point about why high-speed aircraft's wings were shaped the way they were...
No, I think you were right about the 'shuttle taxi' method using longer pylons the way the 747-carrier does... Although I have heard that thing is a nightmare compared to a conventiona 747.
Me, I still maintain that the easiest and best way to do it is the way it was done for Senior Bowl and for the White-Knight/Spaceship One M/D: dropaway, gravity assisted. The mothership immediately bounces up due to reduced weight and the daughtership, if configured correctly, should shear right through the boundary layer nose first at a slight downward angle. It still creates scads of turbulence, but the turbulence is a high pressure area between the two vessels rather than a low pressure area as with the over-the-wing method used by the MD-21 and the old Willey Ley designs.
Not that I am an aircraft designer or anything. Just somebody who got curious at one point about why high-speed aircraft's wings were shaped the way they were...
The space program was castrated a lot longer ago than Challenger.
Basically, a false dichotomy was created in the 60's, between space science and humanitariam goals. People criticised launches as a waste of money that could be better used to feed the poor, educate kids, and cure cancer. Also, the space program was tarred by ex-Nazi scientists like Von Braun, that nobody was ever comfortable with. A more telling point was that it was clear to anyone with half a brain that NASA was a PR front for even more military spending. Would the U.S. or the U.S.S.R. ever have developed moon rockets if the same weren't useful for shooting hydrogen bombs at each other? Probably not.
But it was a false dichotomy. The same humanists that thought space travel was foolishness, didn't criticise the fanatic building of nuclear aircraft carriers, or the development of Mach 3 bombers, or of ballistic missle carrying submarines, even though those programs cost many more times what NASA ever spent in its entire existence. It was only space that was a follish waste of money, somehow.
I guess for most people, abstract science isn't very real. They aren't curious, and don't really care whether the surface of Titan is made of frozen methane or is knee-deep in flamingo feathers. It isn't really there, anyway. Brittney Spears' medicine cabitnet is far more real and interesting.
Another factor in the castration of NASA after the last moon landing was that Nixon was president. Nixon was a hater, and wouldn't let a little thing like abstract knowledge or the long term interest of the country get in the way of his shitting on the corpses of the Kennedies. After taking as much of the credit for the moon landings as he could, he canned Apollo and turned his attention to things that really mattered -- like photo ops with History's most successful mass murder, Mao. Much of congress was only to happy to turn their backs on the moon. The money saved could go into their own pork-barrel projects.
Ultimately, it may have been pork barrel politics that saved NASA. Enough congressmen had enough space program spending in their own states, NASA was never entirely shut down. Space spending was an important aid to defense industry giants like Hughes, Lochheed, Martin-Marietta, Grumman, etc, that they opposed a wholesale abandonment of space.
And ultimately, I think the unmanned program has paid off more handsome dividends than the manned missions to the moon. We will go back to space in person, someday. But evenif the current planned returned to the moon isn't entirely BS, it's only another gesture, like the Apollo landings. There is little of value on the moon, and its too dangerous to learn about it by sending men directly. There may never be any full-time human presence on the moon except for specialized scientific purposes. Mars is more likely to be worth the investment of manned travel -- unfortunately we don't possess the technology to make it a practical or safe undertaking at the moment. But so much has been done with Rovers and orbiters that it boggles the imagination to try to picture how much more can be done this way, before we even think of sending live people.
Basically, a false dichotomy was created in the 60's, between space science and humanitariam goals. People criticised launches as a waste of money that could be better used to feed the poor, educate kids, and cure cancer. Also, the space program was tarred by ex-Nazi scientists like Von Braun, that nobody was ever comfortable with. A more telling point was that it was clear to anyone with half a brain that NASA was a PR front for even more military spending. Would the U.S. or the U.S.S.R. ever have developed moon rockets if the same weren't useful for shooting hydrogen bombs at each other? Probably not.
But it was a false dichotomy. The same humanists that thought space travel was foolishness, didn't criticise the fanatic building of nuclear aircraft carriers, or the development of Mach 3 bombers, or of ballistic missle carrying submarines, even though those programs cost many more times what NASA ever spent in its entire existence. It was only space that was a follish waste of money, somehow.
I guess for most people, abstract science isn't very real. They aren't curious, and don't really care whether the surface of Titan is made of frozen methane or is knee-deep in flamingo feathers. It isn't really there, anyway. Brittney Spears' medicine cabitnet is far more real and interesting.
Another factor in the castration of NASA after the last moon landing was that Nixon was president. Nixon was a hater, and wouldn't let a little thing like abstract knowledge or the long term interest of the country get in the way of his shitting on the corpses of the Kennedies. After taking as much of the credit for the moon landings as he could, he canned Apollo and turned his attention to things that really mattered -- like photo ops with History's most successful mass murder, Mao. Much of congress was only to happy to turn their backs on the moon. The money saved could go into their own pork-barrel projects.
Ultimately, it may have been pork barrel politics that saved NASA. Enough congressmen had enough space program spending in their own states, NASA was never entirely shut down. Space spending was an important aid to defense industry giants like Hughes, Lochheed, Martin-Marietta, Grumman, etc, that they opposed a wholesale abandonment of space.
And ultimately, I think the unmanned program has paid off more handsome dividends than the manned missions to the moon. We will go back to space in person, someday. But evenif the current planned returned to the moon isn't entirely BS, it's only another gesture, like the Apollo landings. There is little of value on the moon, and its too dangerous to learn about it by sending men directly. There may never be any full-time human presence on the moon except for specialized scientific purposes. Mars is more likely to be worth the investment of manned travel -- unfortunately we don't possess the technology to make it a practical or safe undertaking at the moment. But so much has been done with Rovers and orbiters that it boggles the imagination to try to picture how much more can be done this way, before we even think of sending live people.
Maybe I should be more specific with my words. The thing with Challenger was that before that mission, they had 25 missions planned for that year. I can imagine how far we would have gotten if all 25 missions had been completed. That space station would be complete by now at that rate.
I'm actually astonished they ever got the station "finished". For years all we ever saw for the billions spent was computer simulations of what it *would* look like, and I was predicting the simulations were all we ever would see.
While admitedly the station *is* in orbit, I still think its mainly a waste of time and money.
The Earth can be studied in low orbit by unmanned satillites.
Space is better studied by the Hubble or probes like Cassini.
Zero-G doesn't really need to be studied at all. If we sent men into space without some sort of centrifuge then we're far bigger fools than I think we are. Why spend hours every day on a work out station when all you have to do is impart a gentle spin to the ship? A weight on the end of a tether would be enough -- it doesn't have to be a pin-wheel. To my surprise I found some very early references to just that solution. So who needs to know what the human body does in zero-g?
To sum it up, what use is the space station?
It would be different if we had a manned space program and people were going back and forth from the Moon to Earth, or Mars to Earth, but that's not going to happen in the foreseeable future. At best the ISS is a test platform for hardware, but a damned expensive one.
While admitedly the station *is* in orbit, I still think its mainly a waste of time and money.
The Earth can be studied in low orbit by unmanned satillites.
Space is better studied by the Hubble or probes like Cassini.
Zero-G doesn't really need to be studied at all. If we sent men into space without some sort of centrifuge then we're far bigger fools than I think we are. Why spend hours every day on a work out station when all you have to do is impart a gentle spin to the ship? A weight on the end of a tether would be enough -- it doesn't have to be a pin-wheel. To my surprise I found some very early references to just that solution. So who needs to know what the human body does in zero-g?
To sum it up, what use is the space station?
It would be different if we had a manned space program and people were going back and forth from the Moon to Earth, or Mars to Earth, but that's not going to happen in the foreseeable future. At best the ISS is a test platform for hardware, but a damned expensive one.
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