In Tom Wolfe's account of the early days of the US space programme, The Right Stuff, he describes how astronaut Scott Carpenter almost ran out of fuel on a test flight: "Carpenter's flight agenda had been loaded with Larry Lightbulb experiments. The scientists, lowest men in the NASA pecking order up to now, had been given their heads on this flight...Carpenter had taken all this Mad Professor stuff seriously, and that was what led to his problems." The conclusion among the astronauts, writes Wolfe, was that "all this science nonsense could wait".
Almost 40 years later, as the International Space Station takes shape, history is repeating itself. Of course, the space station has never been a scientific mission – its main purpose has always been to develop new technologies for space exploration, and latterly (and ironically given their history of competition in space) the United States has used it as a way of maintaining good relations with Russia. But science has often been used to justify the station, despite widespread opposition from the US’s leading scientific societies. As a weary Claude Canizares, former chair of the space studies advisory board of the National Academy of Sciences, said last year: “For better or worse, this mission is now underway.”
The space-station science programme covers five areas: the life, earth and space sciences; microgravity and engineering. Within microgravity there will be research on materials, fluids, combustion, crystals and other areas including fundamental physics. Fundamental physics, in turn, will encompass three sub-fields: low-temperature and condensed-matter physics; laser cooling and atomic physics; and gravitational and relativistic physics. Although some particle astrophysics experiments are planned – such as a search for dark matter and antimatter – there seems remarkably little potential for astronomy. Indeed, last year the astrophysicist Martin Rees wrote: “A manned station in low orbit is as unsuitable for most high-precision measurements as a ship is for ground-based astronomy.” Rees also bemoaned European involvement in the station.
There is clearly potential for many exciting physics discoveries, but at what cost? Estimates of the total cost of the space station have varied from $17bn to $25bn, while the budget for science related to the station is due to increase from about $300m this year to over $550m in 2004. There can be no doubt that much more new science could be discovered with the same budget on Earth. Of course, all experiments in space – whether on a space station or not, manned or unmanned – are both risky and expensive. However, by moving funds that were intended for science to other parts of the space-station budget, NASA runs the risk of spending a small fortune on science and getting an even smaller return. The lack of investment in pre-space-station science – such as experiments on the space shuttle – could jeopardize NASA’s return on its remaining scientific investments in the station.
The space station has survived too many budget battles in the US congress to be stopped now, and both candidates in this month’s presidential election support it. The best that latter-day Larry Lightbulbs can hope for is that any cost overruns on the space station, which are inevitable, do not encroach on real science budgets.
Three cheers for Stockholm
The Nobel committee for physics is to be congratulated on the choice of this year’s winners. Prizes for the pioneers of integrated circuits, high-speed electronics and semiconductor lasers (the only one of the trio to be predicted by Physics World last month) may have been long overdue, but in a climate where the ability of physics to contribute to wealth creation and economic security is increasingly being doubted, the timing could not be better.
