Space Strategery

Commander Codpiece's vision for space co-ordinates the same great balancing act going to the Moon, Mars, and the ethane oceans of Titan that we're used to seeing here at home.

...But the budget for space station research has been cut dramatically over the past year, and is due to be slashed even more deeply next year. Starting with Sunday's scheduled launch of the space shuttle Atlantis, NASA is turning its attention to flying up hardware rather than doing science.

Some observers say that NASA now sees the orbital outpost as a $100 billion white elephant to be finished, then quickly left behind in America's new push to the moon, Mars and beyond.

Those observers, who include scientists as well as policy experts, say NASA is acting as if the station was an obligation rather than an opportunity.

"It's almost as if the space station is an albatross," said Keith Cowing, who worked on the initial designs for the space station in the 1990s while at NASA and now monitors the agency through his Web site, NASA Watch. "It's almost like NASA has corporate attention-deficit disorder."

"The numbers show continuing decline for the research part of NASA," said Kei Koizumi, director of the R&D Budget and Policy Program at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. "There's not much on the plus side for science."

Is the space station really worth all that money, and all that risk to astronauts' lives?

Even NASA admits that the station isn’t fully living up to the promise right now, due to cost overruns, construction delays and the repercussions of the 2003 Columbia tragedy. The agency has had to shift hundreds of millions of dollars from space station research to its new moon effort, initiated in 2004. And there are plenty of blank spaces in its plan to use the space station after 2010, when NASA is due to finish construction and retire the space shuttle fleet...

...The science that's due to be done in the years ahead will focus on how humans can handle the health effects of microgravity, radiation exposure and other aspects of the space environment.

For decades, researchers have known that astronauts tend to lose bone mass and muscle tone in space, that they don't sleep as well and that their immune systems may be compromised. Until scientists learn how to counter those effects, humans won't be able to take on the longer-duration missions envisioned in NASA's exploration blueprint. So NASA is shifting its research agenda to figure out what it will take for astronauts to travel safely to the moon and Mars.

"What we are doing is using an occupational health model, where we have standards that we have to maintain," Walz explained. "We have to maintain the health of the astronauts to these standards..."

Now, it seems more than a little bit oddball that while they're interested in occupational and environmental health in space, down here:

...The reactionary campaign against knowledge and information is reaching frightening new heights.

The Environmental Protection Agency has been ordered by the White House to "shut down [its] libraries, end public access to research materials and box up unique collections on the assumption that Congress will not reverse President Bush’s proposed budget reductions." Fifteen states will lose library service immediately, the rest will follow, and the public is to be turned away as soon as possible.

Unsurprisingly, EPA scientists are protesting, saying that the lack of access to data will impair their research and scientific capabilities. The Administration says its plan is to "centralize" control of all data; EPA scientists say the real goal is to "suppress information on environmental and public health-related topics." The Administration is not yet burning books, but they are getting very close.

They're not much fonder of telling the truth -- the whole truth -- over at the Defense Department. The Department has refused to complete congressionally ordered studies of the potential security threat to radar systems from wind turbines. Until it finishes that study, Defense is blocking all new wind turbines that might help reduce our dependence on what the President calls our "addiction" to oil and natural gas "often from insecure places."

The Sierra Club sued and demanded that Defense finish the study. (Of course, if wind turbines actually were a threat to our air defense systems, you would think that the Department of Defense would be rushing to prove it and make us safer by dealing with the thousands that already exist.)

But Defense has refused to respond to the Club's motion. Now, Defense has informed us that it will miss the 60-day deadline for that response and will need an additional five weeks to answer the complaint. In other words, the Department claims that it needs more than three months to tell a Court why it cannot finish what was supposed to be a six-month study. This is giving stonewalling a whole new meaning.

Nor will the Department of Defense tell us how many wind projects it has stopped, even though it has issued "don't proceed" orders to each one, so the information is obviously available. According to media reports, at least 15 wind farm proposals in the Midwest alone have already been shut down. The list of stalled projects includes one outside of Bloomington, Illinois, that would have been the nation's largest source of wind energy -- generating enough electricity to power 120,000 homes in the Chicago area...

Billions to finish a space station that won't be used for science, except maybe to examine the effects of microgravity on human guinea pigs. Because astronauts going to Mars might be away for a couple of years and not so easy to examine. Now that fits with their desire to end environmental research and halt work on alternative energy sources perfectly!