Cheaply and effectively than astronauts are

Francis Slakey, Scientific American Presents; 1999 Who Should Explore Space?

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has a difficult task. It must convince U.S. taxpayers that space science is worth $13.6 billion a year. To achieve this goal, the agency conducts an extensive public-relations effort that is similar to the marketing campaigns of America's biggest corporations. NASA has learned a valuable lesson about marketing in the 1990s: to promote its programs, it must provide entertaining visuals and stories with compelling human characters. For this reason, NASA issues a steady stream of press releases and images from its human spaceflight program.

Every launch of the space shuttle is a media event. NASA presents its astronauts as ready-made heroes, even when their accomplishments in space are no longer groundbreaking. Perhaps the best example of NASA's public-relations prowess was the participation of John Glenn, the first American to orbit Earth, in shuttle mission STS-95 last year. Glenn's return to space at the age of 77 made STS-95 the most avidly followed mission since the Apollo moon landings. NASA claimed that Glenn went up for science — he served as a guinea pig in various medical experiments — but it was clear that the main benefit of Glenn's space shuttle ride was publicity, not scientific discovery.

NASA is still conducting grade-A science in space, but it is being done by unmanned probes rather than astronauts. In recent years the Pathfinder rover has scoured the surface of Mars, and the Galileo spacecraft has surveyed Jupiter and its moons. The Hubble Space Telescope and other orbital observatories are bringing back pictures of the early moments of creation. But robots aren't heroes. No one throws a ticker-tape parade for a telescope. Human spaceflight provides the stories that NASA uses to sell its programs to the public. And that's the main reason NASA spends nearly a quarter of its budget to launch the space shuttle about half a dozen times each year.

The space agency has now started building the International Space Station, the long-planned orbiting laboratory. NASA says the station will provide a platform for space research and help determine how people can live and work safely in space. This knowledge could then be used to plan a manned mission to Mars or the construction of a base on the moon. But these justifications for the station are largely myths. Here are the facts, plain as potatoes: The International Space Station is not a platform for cutting-edge science. Unmanned probes can explore Mars and other planets more cheaply and effectively than manned missions can. And a moon colony is not in our destiny.

The Myth of Science

In 1990 the American Physical Society, an organization of 41,000 physicists, reviewed the experiments then planned for the International Space Station. Many of the studies involved examining materials and fluid mechanics in the station's microgravity environment. Other proposed experiments focused on growing protein crystals and cell cultures on the station. The physical society concluded, however, that these experiments would not provide enough useful scientific knowledge to justify building the station. Thirteen other scientific organizations, including the American Chemical Society and the American Crystallographic Association, drew the same conclusion.

Since then, the station has been redesigned and the list of planned experiments has changed, but the research community remains overwhelmingly opposed. To date, at least 20 scientific organizations from around the world have determined that the experiments in their respective fields are a waste of time and money. All these groups have recommended that space science should instead be done through robotic and telescopic missions.

These scientists have various reasons for their disapproval. For researchers in materials science, the station would simply be too unstable a platform. Vibrations caused by the movements of astronauts and machinery would jar sensitive experiments. The same vibrations would make it difficult for astronomers to observe the heavens and for geologists and climatologists to study Earth's surface as well as they could with unmanned satellites. The cloud of gases vented from the station would interfere with any experiments in space nearby that require near-vacuum conditions. And last, the station would orbit only 400 kilometers (250 miles) overhead, traveling through a region of space that has already been studied extensively.