“The space station is fully the disaster everyone predicted long before it was built. Its total science output is perhaps 0.001 that of the Hubble, while costing perhaps 1000 times as much, for a round 1E6 productivity ratio. Does anyone have any better estimates than my guesses?”

I know a bit about the ISS. Your percentage estimate 0.001, is an anecdotal opinion; your opinion that ISS is a “disaster” is also only an opinion.

It is more probably the case that an astronomer places a greater scientific value on Hubble’s output, but a different scientist will place a greater value on the ISS info on the medical effects of zero gee on a human body.

It is more of an issue that one scientist likes chocolate ice cream and the other likes vanilla.

I’m a regular poster on nasaspaceflight.com, and the QC issues noted here have come up in the following thread:

http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=31636.0

Getting back to the topic, thanks to all of you for teaching me more about QC.

On the other hand the very steep degradation of their chips fidelity with temperature increase IMHO clearly indicate that quantum processes (at least tunneling) clearly underlay the machines performance to a significant extend.

However, the rules are only so different. The allowed maps for amplitudes are much more like the allowed maps for distributions, then they are like the free-for-all of allowed calculations on a stored list of numbers.