No, VASIMR doesn't "need" ISS. However, there are benefits to putting it on ISS as opposed to launching it as a free flyer.
The main benefit is cheaper cost. If VASIMR were a free flyer, it would need massive solar arrays to gather enough power, but ISS already has those. Plus, VASIMR can be launched on a rocket that is already scheduled for the ISS - so it doesn't need to pay for its own dedicated launch vehicle, again reducing cost.
That is one of the main benefits of ISS - experiments can be flown on it and just "plug in" to its resources, instead of having to bring all those resources with them, which reduces the cost to the investigator.
You could have a cheaply convertible service module or an unmanned complex for that. You don't need a $100 billion ISS.
No, we've already spent $100 billion whether it turns out to be useful or not. Also, if people only spent money on research they thought would be useful, we might all still be moving around on horse & cart right now. I'm pretty sure people thought that Thomas Edison was wasting his time with "all the electron rubbish". You can never know if something will turn out to be useful or not - that's how research works.
Yes you can. Sorry, but it's true. There are plenty of things that are just totally useless and there are plenty of things that hold
some promise, even if that promise is very slight.
You don't just go around aimlessly testing stuff for trivia. Especially not for $100 billion.
That "small market" is the only thing that is making commercial space a reality right now. If ISS went away, so would NASA's reason to fund commercial space. With seed money and their main market gone, commercial space would find it pretty difficult to even get off the ground.
You don't need a space station to have commercial space. Of course, tell that to the pork-focused politicians who believe that nothing needs to make sense once you move beyond Earth orbit...
Once again, you fail to understand ISS. It's true that all the Earth observation instruments on ISS could be unmanned free-flyers. But to do that they would all need their own power, propulsion, and data downlink capabilities. Plus their own dedicated launch vehicles. This would increase their cost - so it's cheaper just to put the instrument alone on ISS, and use all its resources.
Cheaper than the whole thing together? Yeah, I seriously doubt it. You have reduced individual costs, yes. But you can then hide the cost of the whole program.
There are plenty of Earth observation satellites that needed their own power and manuvering ability, and their own launch vehicles. Yet they are more important than the ISS is and they have cost less.
If you are really obsessed about having a centralised platform, you could even have an unmanned platform in space with its own power, propulsion, and mounting points, that multiple payloads could be attached to. It does not need to be manned.
Umm, trust me, there is a need. This week, the NRC (National Research Council) released a report saying that NASA doesn't have anywhere near enough knowledge to conduct a BEO mission. That's because there are so many things (radiation shielding, advanced closed-loop bio-regenerative life support, autonomous crew planning & operation, human/robotic interfaces) that we need to perfect before we can go BEO. Ground testing is not sufficient for this - they tested the ISS life support systems on the ground, and they worked fine. In space - not so well. All this stuff that we need to learn about is why we need ISS.
Yeah! Because things just
magically stop working in space, of course.
Where is the ISS testing crew reaction to and shielding from the BEO radiation environment? It is in LEO, underneath the Earth's magnetosphere. And where is it testing autonomous crew planning, when the crew can contact Houston or Moscow easily?
And are these 'human-robotic interfaces' really that essential for BEO exploration? Some people may think so, but that does not make it a requirement. It isn't necessary, just useful.
You don't need the ISS for testing these things. You could instead devise a transfer habitat module, that you would eventually want to use to go to Mars, for example. You would launch it into LEO, put a crew onboard, and test it there. Once you gained that knowledge, you could then do the same at a lunar lagrange point, and then eventually with a manned Mars flyby. That way you're able to evolve your capability directly, instead of bog everything down with a gigantic, costly space station. And you would be able to solve all the big unanswered (and unknown) issues as well.
If you think NASA doesn't have a vision, I suggest you go and read about the ISECG (International Space Exploration Coordination Group) meeting that occurred this week.
If NASA has a vision, it is going to be pretty painful for them to execute it. The ISS was not a vision of progress, it was an old vision that no longer made sense because the infrastructure that would support it (shuttle) failed and no longer made sense.
In short, There are not 9 planets. There are 8. Or if you are stupid, 10 or 13 or 14.
Why is that stupid? Using a different definition is not necessarily stupid, after all the IAU thought Pluto was a planet once... are they stupid?
I still have a feeling that the "neighborhood clearing" requirement was just a way to prevent the solar system from having a long list of 'planets' present, most of which would be small, unimpressive and generally boring.
Neighborhood clearing gets into other issues, when you consider things that you don't currently see in our solar system. Like planetary companions forming at lagrange points. The giant impact hypothesis states that a planet formed at one of our lagrange points- it would have been a considerable percentage of the Earth's mass. Therefore Earth would not have "cleared its neighborhood" and would not be a "planet".