Oh you poor thang.
How much basic research won’t be done because of all the capital sucked up by this super duper science platform.
Looks to be primarily PHD welfare with a sprinkling of ethnic and cultural diversity to round it out.
The great majority of those experiments have to do with the effect of microgravity on biology (human, ultimately) or on processes (e.g. agricultural; medical) performed in support of human existence in space.
If you don’t put humans in space you don’t need all that data.
Looks like a lot of “fluff” and mission justification to me.
Let’s talk cost effectiveness. ISS is the epitome of a “white elephant”. And it is not actually “in space”... hell, it’s not even in a stable orbit, which is why it needs the rocket boosts to keep it from falling down.
ISS was designed from the ground up to be a contractors’ gravy train. We could have given 1/100th of the money to someone like Burt Rutan and gotten a better product out of the deal.