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“Doubts Linger About Space Station’s Science Potential”
Orlando Sentinal
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/space/os-space-station-science-20120414,0,72\06720.story

: After more than 12 years and at least $100 billion in construction
: costs, NASA leaders say the International Space Station finally is
: ready to bloom into the robust orbiting laboratory that agency
: leaders envisioned more than two decades ago.

: “The ISS has now entered its intensive research phase,” said Bill
: Gerstenmaier, head of NASA operations and human exploration, in
: recent testimony to Congress in defense of the roughly $1.5 billion
: the agency spends annually on the outpost.

: But doubts linger.

: More than a quarter of the space that NASA has designated for
: experiments sits empty. Much of the research done aboard the
: station deals with living and working in space — with marginal
: application back on Earth. And the nonprofit group that NASA chose
: to lure more research to the outpost has been plagued by internal
: strife and recently lost its director.

: And more broadly, questions remain about whether NASA can develop
: U.S. capability to send experiments up and bring them back to Earth
: — and whether, in fact, the station can live up to the promises
: that were used to justify its creation.

: “Now that NASA has finished ISS construction, I hope the incredible
: potential of ISS is not squandered,” said U.S. Rep. Ralph Hall,
: R-Texas, chair of the House science committee.

: This “incredible potential” is what NASA used to justify the
: decision to build a space station, which has been in the works
: since the Reagan administration.

: “When we finish, ISS will be a premier, world-class laboratory in
: low-Earth orbit that promises to yield insights, science, and
: information, the likes of which we cannot fully comprehend as we
: stand here at the beginning,” said then-NASA chief Dan Goldin
: during a 2001 congressional hearing.

: In the decade following, NASA and its international partners used
: the space shuttle and other vehicles to assemble the station,
: complete with several on-board laboratories lined with science
: “racks.” These racks, each about as big as a telephone booth,
: provide a home for dozens of experiments and can stream data and
: video to researchers back on Earth.

: But then — as now — some questioned the station’s future as a
: center of science. They note much of the research done aboard the
: station deals with surviving the space environment, from studies of
: spaceflight’s effect on human muscles to developing improved smoke
: detectors for human spacecraft.

: Privately, some NASA officials worry the outpost could feed into
: the agency’s reputation as a “self-licking ice-cream cone” in that
: space-based experiments help NASA keep doing space-based
: experiments.

: Others note that station research — there have been about
: 500 American experiments and 800 international ones — has produced
: comparatively little scientific literature. Thomson Reuters Web of
: Science, which tracks such publications, has identified about
: 3,000 scientific articles that have resulted from station research.

: By comparison, a 2001 satellite that cost about $150 million
: — NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe — has generated more
: than three times as many papers; many scientists used the probe’s
: analysis of temperature differences in space to theorize about the
: origin and structure of the universe.

: “If you wanted to grade space-station science, it would be an
: incomplete right now,” said Jeff Foust, editor of The Space Review,
: a popular online magazine.

: He said critics could make the argument that money spent on the
: station might be better invested in other missions. For example,
: the budget-busting James Webb Space Telescope, seen as successor to
: the Hubble telescope, still is only a fraction of the station’s
: cost at nearly $9 billion.

: But, Foust said, “there is a rationale for the ISS that goes beyond
: simply science” — promoting partnerships and better relations among
: space-faring nations, including Russia.

: NASA officials, however, say research is just beginning and already
: there have been advances.

: Scientists at Johnson Space Center have taken advantage of the
: station’s lack of gravity to develop “micro-balloons” the size of
: red blood cells that can carry drugs to cancer tumors. And the
: European Space Agency is looking to help doctors better diagnose
: asthma by using an air-monitoring device developed for astronauts.

: “It’s the tip of the iceberg,” said Marybeth Edeen, NASA manager of
: the station’s national laboratory.