The new issue of Physics World is out, and features a bunch of Sputnik-anniversary stories. Among them is a long piece on science on the International Space Station:
Exponentially over budget, plagued by technical glitches and some seven years behind schedule, critics have always found the International Space Station (ISS) to be an easy target. Since NASA first began discussing the station’s forerunner some 25 years ago, many astrophysicists and planetary scientists have viewed the ISS as an orbiting “white elephant” siphoning funds from more scientifically adventurous space missions.
But that would be to ignore the importance of having a permanently manned space station. While the ISS’s interlocking modules, external trusses and solar arrays hardly resemble Arthur C Clarke’s majestic rotating wheel in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the station is a product of humankind’s quest for both a better life here on Earth and an innate sense of wanderlust. Born a quarter of a century after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the ISS grew out of an amalgam of designs from previously planned but unexecuted space stations. These include the US Space Station Freedom, Russia’s Mir-2 and the stand-alone Columbus research module of the European Space Agency (ESA).
Today, as a joint project of the US, Russian, Euro orbits at an altitude of between 370-460 km in the same direction as Earth’s rotation. It provides a unique environment in which to study nature in low gravity — from the flow of fluids to the growth of crystal. Moreover, the ISS is proving to be a “research springboard” from which humankind can launch itself further out into the solar system. That is, if more down-to-earth factors such as money and international politics do not get in the way.
You can kind of guess the slant of the article…
There’s nothing all that new here– all the usual stuff about fluid flow, crystal growth, and learning more about the effects of space flight on human physiology. I don’t find it terribly convincing– the underlying argument is a little too circular: “We need to maintain a manned presence in space because it gives us critical data about maintaining a manned presence in space.” The article is, however, a pretty good summary of the science case for keeping the ISS, if you find yourself looking for such a thing.