The new issue of Physics World is out, and features a bunch of Sputnik-anniversary stories. Among them is a long piece on science on the International Space Station:
Exponentially over budget, plagued by technical glitches and some seven years behind schedule, critics have always found the International Space Station (ISS) to be an easy target. Since NASA first began discussing the station's forerunner some 25 years ago, many astrophysicists and planetary scientists have viewed the ISS as an orbiting "white elephant" siphoning funds from more scientifically adventurous space missions.
But that would be to ignore the importance of having a permanently manned space station. While the ISS's interlocking modules, external trusses and solar arrays hardly resemble Arthur C Clarke's majestic rotating wheel in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the station is a product of humankind's quest for both a better life here on Earth and an innate sense of wanderlust. Born a quarter of a century after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the ISS grew out of an amalgam of designs from previously planned but unexecuted space stations. These include the US Space Station Freedom, Russia's Mir-2 and the stand-alone Columbus research module of the European Space Agency (ESA).
Today, as a joint project of the US, Russian, Euro orbits at an altitude of between 370-460 km in the same direction as Earth's rotation. It provides a unique environment in which to study nature in low gravity -- from the flow of fluids to the growth of crystal. Moreover, the ISS is proving to be a "research springboard" from which humankind can launch itself further out into the solar system. That is, if more down-to-earth factors such as money and international politics do not get in the way.
You can kind of guess the slant of the article...
There's nothing all that new here-- all the usual stuff about fluid flow, crystal growth, and learning more about the effects of space flight on human physiology. I don't find it terribly convincing-- the underlying argument is a little too circular: "We need to maintain a manned presence in space because it gives us critical data about maintaining a manned presence in space." The article is, however, a pretty good summary of the science case for keeping the ISS, if you find yourself looking for such a thing.
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They said it, alright. "We need to keep the white elephant because white elephants are good and sacred and show how important we are!!!!!"
Which misses the point - the space station is not about science, it is about having a manned presence in space - which was, and last I checked still is, a US national goal - in and of itself.
It can be argued that having people in space is not good, or irrelevant, or not now, or that it ought to be a means, not an end; but as is, having people in space is an end.
The purpose of being in space is to be in space.
That's it. It's done!
A pet peeve of mine... for the Brobdingnagian cost of the Lilliputian science being done at the ISS, we could send out an armada of robotic craft with a huge payoff. Even the spinoffs in robotics would be economically worthwhile.
The information the robots send or bring back would be the springboard for private exploration.
The most important reason for keeping the ISS manned is to keep it from falling to earth. For those of you who don't remember Skylab (clearly the authors of the article you quoted did not, since it was conspicuous by its absence in the list of what gave rise to the ISS), the uncontrolled reentry of that (much smaller) space station was a huge deal.
And, given the decision to shut down the Shuttle before a replacement is ready, it is worth remembering that the reason Skylab deorbited was that we had no way to get up there to boost its orbit. The shuttle (replacing Saturn/Apollo) was supposed to be ready soon after the last Apollo orbital mission, but it was years late. The same could happen to ISS if/when we can't get up there to reboost its orbit.
PS - We wore conical aluminum foil hats when Skylab came down and it did not hit us, so that might work with ISS as well.
I can't believe they're still touting the old 'fluid flow' and 'crystal growth' memes. And of course the ever popular 'having people in space allows us to research people in space'. I dig the poetic aspect, but fer heavens sakes, robots do a hell of a lot more science for a tiny fraction of the bucks.
It seems like way back in the early days of the ISS project, you'd hear all about these great experiments which could be performed in zero-g but which without the ISS would be impossible. And then in the mid-days of the ISS project, it seems all you'd hear about is how some detachable science-experiment-performing module or other that had been slated for the ISS was being canceled for lack of funds.
Now I wonder, is there some amount of money which, if we added it to the amount we're spending on the ISS, there would suddenly be a point to having an ISS again? Say, if we brought back one of those detachable modules that got axed? Or would there be no productive point to doing so, except just as make-work to make the ISS seem worthwhile?
I'd start with the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS02) experiment.
See, for technical details:
arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0308487
For popular exposition:
The antimatter mission - satellite will search for antimatter in the universe
Discover, April, 1996 by Gary Taubes
IN THE SUMMER OF 1984, Michael Salamon and Steve Ahlen went looking for antimatter in the cosmos the old-fashioned, low-budget way. Salamon, who was then at the University of California at Berkeley, and Ahlen, who was at Indiana University, bootlegged some spare cash from a previous experiment and used it to wire up an antimatter detector-a superconducting magnet and some elaborate electronics. They rigged die contraption to sit on a shelflike structure hanging from a high-altitude balloon. The balloon was capable of rising up to 130,000 feet, where it would be above the bulk of the atmosphere and could capture unimpeded the cosmic rays that rain continuously from the heavens. After a few years building the detector and then a month of 18-hour days readying the equipment for its mission, Salamon and Ahlen launched the balloon from Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, on August 13, 1987. It rose to its heavenly altitude above the stratosphere, floated serenely for 12 hours, and then, like a dying duck, plummeted to Earth in the Canadian wilderness.
"When we finally found it," says Salamon, "it took a hell of a time to get it out. We had to bulldoze some of the forest so a helicopter could get in and fly the payload out. But then the helicopter couldn't pick it up, because the payload had impaled itself on the trunks of trees it had knocked down. We had to disassemble the support structure." It then took Salamon and Ahlen three months to analyze the data, which came up empty in any case. They had detected no sign of cosmic antimatter. That didn't mean it wasn't there, only that their experiment wasn't sensitive enough to find it.... [truncated]
"Among them is a long piece on science on the International Space Station:"
There's no link to the article; just to this blog.
I'm amused that no one discussing the article above apparently found it necessary to read the article.
I found it here, though.