Beasusoleil
okay, I agree that the shuttle was helpful in repairing Hubble (which
has been productive scientifically). But relaunching a repaired
Hubble would have been safer and cost a lot less than the Shuttle
program.
In my post I did acknowledge that many papers have appeared from
the shuttle program. But they are generally trivial, in house
journals with little or no citation impact.
For example on Pubmed today there are 849 papers from the Shuttle
trips. None of these are in the big life science journals (such as
Nature, Science, Cell, New England Journal of Medicine, Lancet or
journals of similar caliber). Instead they are in obscure journals
with titles such as "the effects of microgravity on cell wall
metabolism" and "the effects of microgravity on the mouse immune
system". These are data-dredging exercises which do no address
fundamental questions. I just now trawled through the abstracts of
the most recent 100 of these papers, and the only feeling I am left
with is how pointless most of this "research" is. If the billions spent
on manned space programs had been invested in the NIH, the
scientific product would have been dramatically better.
I know I may get some hostile reaction to this (and I appreciate the
courteousness of your email). However I mean no disrespect to the
crew who died so tragically yesterday. But we don't serve them
well by suspending our critical faculties. If the shuttle program
ends now, there will be no effect at all on scientific progress (in fact
it would be be helpful, because earmarked funds could be
rediverted into real science).
Luke