Space Station: What For? -- Schwartz

(David Polewka) wrote:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/05/sc...ce/05stat.html
Destination Is the Space Station,
but Many Experts Ask What For

By JOHN SCHWARTZ
Published: December 5, 2006

Once again, the shuttle Discovery is about to blast into space.
And once again, it will dock with the International Space
Station, and astronauts will continue the process of building
the half-completed orbiting laboratory in a mission full of
daunting challenges.

But the majesty of the first nighttime liftoff in more than four
years, now scheduled for Thursday just before 9:36 p.m.
Eastern time, will not dispel a question that has long been
the subject of sharp debate among experts: What is the
space station for?

Nothing really, It's a test on how many
mirrors does it take for Q.M cranks to
break before they see the light
of really valuable asteroids to mine round Jupiter,



In 1998, when its first components were launched as a
replacement for the Mir, a worn-out Soviet-era relic, the
station was billed as a manned science lab of nearly
unlimited potential, with promises of advances in areas
like pharmaceuticals thanks to the ultrapure crystals that
could be grown in a microgravity environment.

It was to be finished by 2004, and it was to cost about
$40 billion, shared by 16 nations, including the United
States, Canada, Russia and the European Union.

Those goals are barely recognizable now. As the Columbia
catastrophe forced a two-and-a-half-year delay in con-
struction missions by the shuttle fleet, and as cost overruns
and changing presidential administrations forced NASA to
rethink its entire science mission, the station's price tag
has ballooned to $100 billion and the completion date
has moved to 2010.

And questions about the station's scientific value have
grown sharper than ever. David J. Goldston, the depar-
ting chief of staff for the House Science Committee,
said in an interview that the National Aeronautics and
Space Administration now seemed more motivated
by the need to satisfy its commitments to international
partners than by any compelling scientific objectives.

"I've never heard anyone say, 'We have to do this be-
cause it's important for the future of the U.S. space
program or science,' " Mr. Goldston said.

NASA is now focused heavily on building a new gener-
ation of space vehicles for exploring the Moon and
Mars; yesterday it announced plans to establish an
international base camp on the Moon by 2024.

But officials insist that today's space system is a crucial
element of building tomorrow's. In particular, they say,
the station is essential for researching the potential
effects of prolonged weightlessness on astronauts: a
round trip to Mars, as envisioned by President Bush
in his long-term goals for human spaceflight, would
take at least two years.

But the agency has also sharply cut back plans for
scientific experiments. Plans to take equipment like a
10-ton centrifuge module, which was developed by
the Japanese space agency and which could spin to
produce artificial gravity for experiments on small
animals, have been canceled.

The budget crunch for the program is so pronounced
that this year, the station program manager, Michael
T. Suffredini, looked into having all NASA science
experiments aboard the station shut down during the
2007 fiscal year. (He has since backed away from
that idea.)

Along with tight budgets, NASA faces an even tighter
deadline: completing the station by 2010, when the
agency is planning to retire the shuttle fleet. The next
generation of vehicles will not be ready before 2014,
leaving the world dependent on the Russian and
European space programs, and potentially on entre-
preneurs partly financed by NASA, for access to the
station.

The notion of a completed station with such limited
access, and potentially limited utility, led Senator
Barbara A. Mikulski, Democrat of Maryland, to ask
NASA's administrator, Michael D. Griffin, in April,
"Is this going to be a techno-whoops?"

Mr. Griffin responded, "I certainly hope not," and ex-
plained that the need to complete the station and to
develop tomorrow's space fleet has meant making
choices about how best to use the station during the
construction process.

Science work in orbit had to be narrowed, he testified,
with a tight focus on conducting scientific work that can
help the space agency keep astronauts healthy on long
missions to the Moon and Mars.

"NASA cannot do everything that our many constituen-
cies would like us to do within our $16.8 billion budget,"
he said.

The risks of space travel are anything but tamed.
Maintaining the station and its equipment is a
continuing challenge. Maintaining astronauts' health
may be an even greater one. Experts say that in zero
gravity they suffer from osteoporosis at a rate 10 times
that of postmenopausal women.

On a trip to Mars, 40 percent of them would lose more
than half of the bone mineral in their hips, according to
James A. Pawelczyk, an assistant professor of physiol-
ogy and kinesiology at Pennsylvania State University
and a former astronaut. The returning spacefarers
would have hips as delicate as eggshells.

Muscle mass also declines, and efforts to prevent the
process have not been very successful, said Julie
Robinson, the acting manager of science projects for
the station program.

"Over all, we can say we've made progress, but we're
not where we need to be for exploration missions," she
said. Outside experts have had reservations about the
shift. In a report this year, the National Research Council
said the space agency lacked a strong plan for scientific
research or for use of the space station "in support of the
exploration missions."

NASA has not formally responded, but Dr. Robinson
said the science was gearing up along the lines
suggested by the report.

The increasing emphasis on the next step has left many
experts worried that the orbiting laboratory is being treated
like an albatross, to be cast aside as quickly as possible.
"Low-earth orbit" - the station orbits some 220 miles
above the Earth - "should not be abandoned in favor of
going to the Moon and Mars," said Jeff M. Bingham, the
staff director for the Senate Commerce subcommittee
on science and space. "We're sort of saying, not too fast."

Current law requires that 15 percent of the station's science
budget still be devoted to the hard science research that
was originally acclaimed in the 1990s. The legislation also
officially declares the station a national laboratory, a move
intended to open the station more broadly to research and
financing from outside agencies and businesses.

In defense of the station's potential, Mr. Bingham points out
that it is just half finished and has half the six-member crew
that the fully completed station is designed to support. "It's
not a space station that is or should be expected to be
producing anything of any significance by now," he said.

But scientists hoping to conduct research in the microgravity
environment of the station say the new focus on the Moon
and Mars has done great damage to their field.

"Since 1990, NASA has spent literally billions of dollars
building up a world-class microgravity program that has
been basically squandered," said Peter W. Voorhees, a
professor of engineering at Northwestern University.
"There's a perfect example of snatching defeat from the
jaws of victory."

NASA officials have talked of a return to the science focus
once the next generation of vehicles is available to get
projects up to the completed station, Dr. Voorhees said,
but he added: "The problem with this is the science com-
munity is not like a water faucet you can turn off and on
at will. If you turn it off now, it will be extraordinarily difficult
to turn it on again down the line."

Important scientific work will be done in space, said John M.
Logsdon, director of the Space Policy Institute at George
Washington University. But it may be conducted by inter-
national partners after the United States has shifted its
focus to the Moon.

"It would be ironic," Mr. Logsdon said, "if research break-
throughs came through the work of our partners, rather
than research that we've chosen to forgo."

The station's principal role, suggested John E. Pike, the
director of GlobalSecurity.org, a group that monitors
military and scientific programs, may be as "an insurance
policy, to retain a toehold in orbit, in space - to keep the
program going until we can figure out a new reason for
doing it."

The worst case, he said, would be a variant of the "techno-
whoops" hypothesis: a national failure of will that would
leave the Moon initiative stalled and the science program
mothballed. "Maybe we'll find out that spaceflight turned
out to be a historical aberration, like zeppelins," he said,
adding:

"That would be the end of the frontier. I just don't want to
go there."
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