Also jshore, final thing for now, as a scientist can you honestly argue what is more valid of a science than another?
Is it more scientifically justifiable (as that Physicist tries to claim), to send a probe to Mars but not a Human?
Why then, did we ever bother to leave the Earth? Or better, to leave the shores of our native lands in search of new lands? Or better, why did our ancestors even bother to leave the comfort and safety of Africa’s forrested regions to the much harsher and colder North?
Indeed, I think this physicist is reducing his credibility, by trying to say that Manned Space Flight is not Scientifically Justifiable, and yet, I am sure that this physicist reads by a light bulb and not by the light of a candle or if he wants to be a purist the light of the Sun.
Science in of itself is not justifiable. We have only made our lives more complicated and more dangerous because of Science.
While a few benefits such as medicine has come of it, the Egyptians were able to live to be 90 years of age without modern technology and modern medicine. They used simple herbs and remedies and “magic”.
No, if you ask me, in my opinion, Manned Space Flight is the only justification for other Science.
We are explorers jshore.
The ultimate exploration shall be that of Space if only for colonization and not for science.
It is my opinion, that without manned exploration of Space, we might as well be content in living in a thatched hut and farming using simple herbs and tricks to save ourselves from disease and wounds.
Because if we do not put this science to use, then why are we doing it in the first place?
And what is the use of Science, but to get us off of this Earth?
What more use but that is there? Can you tell me with any honesty, what is more usefull than exploring this vast universe, than colonizing it.
Can you? That is a challenge I put forth to you.
For if you fail to truly prove that there is a use to Science other than that, I will have to say that anyone who is a promoter of Human expansion into Space, is a promoter of all Sciences.
Because after all, Space Exploration requires the knowledge learned from all fields of Science.
needs refuting. We are talking about an award which is considered, bar none, the highest award in the hard sciences. There are a maximum of 9 given out each year for the hard sciences: up to three apiece in Chemistry, Physiology/Medicine, and Physics. Nobel laureates are revered people in the hard sciences (except for a few notable exceptions coughMulliscough), and they are most certainly not given out a dime a dozen.
I can analyze some of the signees. They include people like David Baltimore (considered a complete genius, discovered reverse transcriptase), Paul Berg (invented recombinant DNA technology), Richard Smalley (buckminsterfullerenes), Harold Varmus (former head of the NIH and discoverer of the Ras viral oncogene), E.O. Wilson (father of sociobiology), Paul Ehrlich (preeminent population biologist), Paul Fischbach (neuroscientist), Roger Guillemin (discovered thyroid hormone axis), Eric Kandel (possibly greatest neuroscientist alive right now), Matthew Meselson (as in Meselson and Stahl, the experiment which showed that DNA replicated semiconservatively). These are the names which I recognize off of the top of my head. And I’m only a senior grad student.
The spaceflight stuff isn’t even part of the report. I don’t know why it has become the dominant part of this thread (not that I am not enjoying reading it). Certainly, the amount of science you get out of manned spaceflight pales in comparison to that coming from unmanned probes and satellites. I don’t ever recall seeing Nature or Science quality research coming from the ISS or the Shuttle (or the Russians or anyone else). I see stuff from orbiting observatories and unmanned probes in every issue, though. And I read these journals every week. There is no argument that science would be worse served by shunting money from these programs into manned spaceflight. And that is what Bush is doing.
The main issues of the report come from climate change. You may think it is debatable, but I’m gonna hazard a guess here and say that you don’t have the expertise of most of the world’s experts. It isn’t your job to assess all of the research out there and come to a conclusion on policy. OTOH, that is precisely the job of the EPA. And on numerous occasions, when the EPA tried to show that anthropic climate change was certainly a concern, that greenhouse gases were almost certainly a huge problem, it was censored by the White House. This is, according to the report, unprecedented.
There are other issues similar to this. The White House took out sections relating to proper condom usage off of the CDC website and replaced it with stuff on abstinence. They interfered in CDC studies on the efficacy of abstinence-only programs to make the programs seem like they were working – they told the CDC not to follow rates of pregnancy of teens undergoing abstinence-only education, just their attitudes and attendance. They removed all records of other CDC sex ed programs from the CDC website. They pushed a scientifically invalid link between abortion and breast cancer, also on the CDC web page.
They suppressed findings that airborne bacteria downstream of farms was hazardous. They misrepresented aluminum tubes found in Iraq to make them seem like they could be used for centrifuges, even though all scientific opinion said that they weren’t appropriate. The findings go on – pushing to make the Endangered Species Act weaker, altering Missouri River management, etc. The list is very long. We aren’t talking about scientific controversies here. They are pretty much settled in the scientific communities; only in activist communities where they deny the science are they still an issue.
When xenophon41 made the above observation, I thought it was quite insightful. Now that I have read The Broken Column’s post, I realize that it is nothing short of brilliant:
So, all Bush is doing is choosing the science which agrees with him and ignoring the rest. but what’s wrong with that?
I’ll tell you what is wrong with that…It is not the way science knowledge works and it is a prescription for going back to the dark ages! How are we going to arrive at any truth in this way? Don’t believe in evolution? Hey, there are plenty of PhD scientists out there who have written treatises on creation science. Don’t believe in general relativity? I’m sure you can find stuff arguing the other way on that too.
It may be true that all scientific knowledge is provisional but that doesn’t mean that at any point in time we don’t have a very strong idea about what is true and what is not true. And, one of the raisons-d’etre for organizations like the National Academy of Sciences (and the IPCC) is to summarize the current state of the peer-reviewed science on a subject exactly so we actually get somewhere rather than saying, “Well, there is plenty of science out there…and scientists…that support the ‘creation science’ view.”
While everyone may attempt to play a little at the margins and spin things in their direction, what Bush has done goes well beyond that. There’s an outcry by scientists in very respected positions and even criticism by members of former Republican Administrations! And it is just post-modern mumbo-jumbo again to dismiss this by saying that everyone has their own biases!
You ask for evidence of what Bush has done that is beyond the pale, well, read the UCS report or the editorial I linked to. It seems fairly clear to me you haven’t. Pages 26 - 28 quote lots of people saying that Bush has gone way beyond what other administrations have done. Here’s a few quotes:
It seems pathetic to me that the level of discourse in this administration has decended to the point where the only way that it’s supporters can defend it is to argue this postmodernist garbage about how everything is unknowable and everyone is entitled to chose the science (and intelligence) that supports their views and reject everything else.
The Broken Column, As far as the spaceflight stuff goes, that is really off-topic and well-covered in another thread. I think I can do no better than repeat edwino’s paragraph on this for emphasis:
You have to understand the amount of money that has gone into manned spaceflight and how that money could otherwise be invested. That same amount of money invested in real science yields literally shelves of knowledge (i.e., peer-reviewed science published in the literature). And, you expect me to be convinced by a few links you provided that we ought to be throwing 10s of billions of dollars into a mission to get us back onto the moon and then to Mars?!?
I just comment on a few other things…
Well, there may come a time when we decide to do that but I think that is a premature dream at best. (And a welfare program for the aerospace defense industry.) A better dream in the short term would be to just work on not irretrievably fucking up this planet first. We don’t seem to be making that much progress on this one, particularly since Bush has been in office.
“Pushed back in its funding more and more…”? I’m not expert on the ISS but I believe that the problem has been that its pricetag has continued to go up and up. It hasn’t had its funding cut. It is just that it has kept demanding more. And, noone has made a compelling case for the importance of the science that can be done on it, as Park points out. (I suggest you read what he has to say.)
It’s no surprise that a list of Nobel laureates might come out against Bush - they’re mostly of a left-wing persuation, and are predisposed to opposing him.
For instance, Bush just announced the best thing to happen to NASA in a long time, along with pretty substantial budget increases, and he’s being pilloried for it by the likes of Dr. Park, because the plan doesn’t give him exactly what he wants. Places like this board and Slashdot are full of wailing leftists opposing the new space vision.
But where were all these people when Clinton was decimating NASA at a time of budget surpluses and general prosperity? Under Clinton, NASA saw budget cuts almost every year. Under Bush, NASA has gotten budget increases. But Bush is the bad guy, right?
As for the new program, it’s a gross simplification to say that it trades off robotic exploration for manned spaceflight. In fact, robotic exploration gets a funding INCREASE. Programs like the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter and NASA’s Origins program (Hubble, the James Webb Telescope, Terrestrial Planet Finder, The Spitzer space telescope, The Space Interferometry Telescope,etc) are all big parts of the new vision. How many of you critics have even looked at NASA’s new budget or read the vision statements?
A more accurate description of the new program is, “NASA is going to stop doing what commercial space companies can do, such as trucking people and cargo into low earth orbit, and focus on science and exploration.” That includes a new manned crew vehicle, new robotic missions, new telescopes, etc.
The Hubble wasn’t a victim of Bush’s plan. The Hubble servicing mission was cancelled because NASA decided that it simply couldn’t do it while staying within the guidelines of the Columbia accident commission. NASA has been told that the shuttle cannot fly unless there is a way to inspect the thermal protection system for damage, and a contingency plan for getting the crew home in case there is damage. NASA has no capability for inspecting the TPS that closely - the shuttle Canadarm can’t reach, and neither can the astronauts. And in any event, if they found damage there’s nothing they could do about it. So, the only way NASA could fly them to Hubble would be to have a second shuttle on standby.
Plus, the second shuttle accident caused them to re-evaluate their estimates for shuttle safety, and it was decided based on that that it was just too risky to send people to Hubble. There are only three orbiters left, and if they lost one on a Hubble mission none of them might ever fly again. That would also mean the end of the ISS, a 100 billion dollar investment.
So you put all the risk factors together, and you look at what you’ll gain by going to Hubble (a few more years of life for a telescope that is being increasingly competed with by terrestrial telescopes and upper-atmosphere research vehicles, plus the new Spitzer telescope), and you look at what you have to lose and how much it will cost, and you make a decision. The decision was that HSM-4 would not be flown. It had nothing to do with the new space initiative.
Oh, right…So, it’s just all a bunch of leftists now opposing this. Park may have strong opinions and he may not be right on all of them but I think it is ridiculous to accuse him of playing politics here. He has not been afraid to take on sacred cows more associated with the left than the right (the danger of EMF from power lines, the virtues of alternative medicine [especially blasting Senator Harkin for his support of the NIH Office of Alternative Medicine). Park truly calls it like he sees it.
And, where was Park during the Clinton Administration? My links show you where he was. He was testifying before Congress on what a freakin’ waste of money the ISS is and how the shuttles were another sinkhole and that the future was in robotic missions. In other words, he was in exactly the same place he is now.
All I can say about the above is that it is freakin’ depressing to see how much money was thrown down that sinkhole. Geez, what sort of science might we have done for 100 billion dollars!?! Please tell me that was at least the total international investment and that our portion was much less. If we can’t do the ISS for less than 100 billion, what the hell is the Mars Mission going to cost!?!
As for the rest of your post, I really don’t want to get into arguments about what is and is not the best space policy. The point is that whether Bush’s space policy is poor or mediocre or fuckin’ brilliant doesn’t erase the fact that his administration is abusing and distorting science in the service of its own political ideology. The only reason we got off on this was that The Broken Column wanted to use Bush’s space program to argue he was doing great things for science (and, further, that this somehow excused everything else he was doing…After all, you gotta love that Stalin; He made the trains run on time!)
Of course, far be it from us to doubt your opinion, in comparison to the opinion of a distinquished panel of scientists commissioned by NASA. [is a short news article from August 2003 in Science (which you may not have access to without a subscription). Here are some quotes:
[Note that even that fifth service mission is now canceled, let alone the 6th. So, the Hubble isn’t even expected to make it to 2010.]
And, here is merely the most recent piece of exciting science to emerge from the Hubble (just over a week ago): [url=http://www.spacedaily.com/2004/040216053058.7cdi9ygl.html]Hubble telescope catches glimpse of an unknown galaxy](]Here[/url).
I tell you, The Broken Column, I was thinking you might get some things right just by luck. But, I guess you are an unlucky guy.
I agree with you 100% about the Shuttle and ISS - and so does President Bush, which is why he defunding BOTH of them. If you think those are sinkholes, why would you oppose doing away with them and moving the funding into new technology, science, and exploration?
I know Park’s point of view. He thinks robots are the answer to everything. In my opinion, his thinking is myopic. As a scientist, he thinks the only purpose of the space program is to do science. It’s not. Science is a big part of it, but it’s also to expand the boundaries of humanity, to give us a frontier to explore, to inspire our children, and to teach us how to live and work in space. So you need a balanced mission for NASA - robotic exploration where it makes sense, and human exploration where it makes sense.
Have you read the proposals? Have you studied the budget? Have you looked at the details of what gets funded and what doesn’t? I have. And I’m telling you, calling this a program that takes funding from science and puts it into manned exploration is simply WRONG. Space science gets a funding boost.
For instance, here’s the ‘vision’ for exploration:
Notice the emphasis on science? On robotic exploration?
Here’s the ‘mission statement’, along with my comments after each section:
A big part of this is the ‘Origins’ program, which will get a funding boost. Programs like SETI may fall under this at some point. Basically, this is saying, “let’s stop fooling around with high school experiments in LEO, and get out and answer the really big questions.” We’re going to send life-finder probes to Jupiter and Mars within 10 years. We’re going to build interferometry arrays in space that can analyze atmospheres of earthlike planets orbiting other stars. Most of this section is pure science, and very little human spaceflight.
Many have said that this just ‘a Mars program’. It’s not. Mars is only one possible destination. Long before we get to Mars, the Jupiter Icy Moons orbiter will give us a ton of hard data about the moons of Jupiter. And the 2009 Mars Exploration Laboratory will travel hundreds of kilometers on Mars with a full science lab aboard, looking for life. The results of those expeditions will shape what comes after. Maybe we’ll go to Mars, maybe to Jupiter, or maybe both will be seen as a waste of time if we find nothing of interest.
Humans AND robots. Employing each where they make most sense. Robots will always pave the way, and humans will only go when the limits of robotic exploration have been reached.
No ‘flags and footprints’ missions this time. This vision is for an incremental return to space, with each step being sustainable. Not a one-shot stunt. This has been a prime criticism of NASA for a long time, dating back to the era when the funding for programs like the X-20 Dyna-Soar were cut and diverted into one-shot capsule design. NASA’s new vision is for a program that is continuous and ongoing indefinitely. If we go back to the moon, we’ll keep going back. Each mission and technology will build on lessons learned.
This makes total sense. Baby steps are the order of the day. We’re pretty good at getting to LEO and back - now it’s time to open the envelope.
This is a very important statement, because one of the faults of NASA in the past is that it has planned new launch systems that could not work until significant breakthroughs in engineering were made. So these programs were always set in the indefinite future, and became victim to scope creep, budget overruns, and eventual cancellation. The new vision says that NASA has to start with technology we have today. And the restructuring within NASA has already begun. There will be no long ‘feasibility’ period which politicians love because it allows them to make grandiose statements without having to follow up with actual funding. Instead, NASA has already begun restructuring itself to the point where by the time the next president takes office, whoever it is, the direction will have been set. Then NASA will be forced to come through, and will have to stay focused.
SS: *It’s no surprise that a list of Nobel laureates might come out against Bush - they’re mostly of a left-wing persuation, and are predisposed to opposing him. *
That doesn’t explain why these same scientists, most of whom have been working in the field for several decades, weren’t complaining on this scale about anti-science policy in the administrations of other conservatives, such as Reagan and GHW Bush. Moreover, according to the OP’s links, the scientists’ statement is supported by Russell Train, EPA director under Nixon and Ford. I don’t think you can get away with dismissing this as just a left-wing Bush-bashing exercise.
jshore:After all, you gotta love that Stalin; He made the trains run on time!
Um, wasn’t it Mussolini rather than Stalin they used to say that about? I never heard of anybody making the Russian trains run on time.
Sam Stone
I do want to try and get off the spaceflight thing, but I have to address your post. As you are aware, we are fighting a war on terror and we have a spiraling deficit. To me, the whole Moon/Mars push smells to high heaven of bread and circuses. Here we have Bush proposing hundreds of billions of dollars of new programs when there is no evidence that NASA is capable of getting a person into low earth orbit with a failure rate of under 1%. In some ways, it resembles the push for National Missile Defense, where the administration pours money into the wrong places to accomplish a goal which is scientifically unproven and of dubious ultimate use.
Read this Gregg Easterbrook blog entry to know exactly how I feel.
jshore: Bush’s new plan requires the shuttle to be retired in 2010. That’s the one factor in the equation to cancel HSM-4 that can be attributed to the Bush initiave, because once the decision is made to retire the shuttle, the timetable has to move up for finishing ISS, which refocuses remaining missions on that goal. So yes, that was one factor in the decision to cancel HSM-4.
But, that assumes that absent the new initiative the Shuttle would continue to fly past 2010, and that’s a pretty iffy proposition after the Columbia Accident Investigation Board made its recommendations, one of which was that the shuttle would have to be completely recertified if it flew past 2010. And that would have been a huge undertaking.
So absent Bush’s vision, a possible if not likely scenario is that the Shuttle would still be retired, and HSM-4 cancelled, and the lack of a reasonable alternative would simply cause the government to cut NASA’s funding. In fact, that was going to happen. Until the new Bush plan came out, NASA was projecting the loss of over a billion dollars a year in funding within five years, and probably more thereafter.
As for that other hijack on NASA, it doesn’t seem to be much on topic. Space missions consist of a lot of dollars spent on engineering to wring out a little hard science. Make the mission manned and the engineering costs (pardon the pun) skyrocket with little change to the hard science that can be accomplished.
There are lots of reasons to do manned space exploration (one of them is “because we can”), but hard science is way down on the list.
Not to take things on too much more of a tangent, but when yo look at things such as the CN tower in Toronto and ask “why was it built”, you’ll get the answer “for TV and Radio transmitters”. While it is certainly used for that, you could put together a simple transmission tower at the same height for 1/1000 of the cost. You couldn’t make it into a tourist attraction, but it would serve the stated purpose. The real reason is likely “because we can”.
If this thread’s title was “Is Bush’s Administration Anti-Exploration?” I would, based on the Moon/Mars inititative, say no. But the Moon/Mars initiative has little to do with how this administration treats science. There is very little actual science in the proposals the adminsitration has made – cut NASA and the aerospace companies a check and let them deal with the stuff. The exact same arguments could be made that Bush isn’t anti-science because he is pouring money into R&D for new military systems and a new National Missile Defense. None of these things deal with how the administration misuses and manipulates scientific data to justify pigheaded (IMHO) policy.
It just remains to be seen if these numbers will actually be put into a budget (I don’t know if they are in the current budget) or just die away after the popularity bounce fades. Kind of like that $15 billion initiative to fight AIDS in Africa. Let me just ask (nonsarcastically) if anyone knows what became of that program?
edwino: Easterbrook is full of it. Rand Simberg does a pretty good job at dissecting him.
If Bush’s plan were ‘full of it’, it wouldn’t be on a fast track to NASA restructuring. It would have been like all the grand visions of the Clinton era - long on ‘study’, and short on execution. There were lots of ways to set this program up to be a potemkin initiative if he was looking for mere grandstanding. This plan will either happen, or there will be a very public failure of huge dimensions.
NASA started losing competance at the time it lost its focus and became a space management agency instead of a space exploration agency. NASA thrives when it has a mission. That’s the wholle point to this initiative - to give NASA some focus.
Sam Stone:
----- It’s no surprise that a list of Nobel laureates might come out against Bush - they’re mostly of a left-wing persuasion, and are predisposed to opposing him.
Well you could have stated that better methinks (I trust there are right-wing Nobel scientists) - but you are correct to have some suspicion.
However, there are scientists who have worked in Republican Administrations who are concerned about this administration’s propensity to cook evidence:
From here. ““I am concerned that the scientific advice coming into this administration seems to me very narrow,” said Dr. Drell, who has advised the government on issues of national security for some 40 years and has served in Democratic and Republican administrations, including those of Presidents Nixon and Lyndon B. Johnson. “The input from individuals whose views are not in the main line of their policy don’t seem to be sought or welcomed,” he said.”
Now, I admit that I am predisposed to believe these stories, judging on the Bush admin’s ideological approach to other issues and bizarre treatment of their mid-level analysts.
At the same time, my ears twitch when I hear reports that the Bush administration replaces members from the Center for Disease Control with researchers who have financial ties to the lead industry. (I hasten to add that I am sympathetic to having industry-attached researchers on a panel setting lead standards. It’s the elimination of CDC people from the board that raises concerns. (My cite is NPR, though I also googled to here))
Alas, this was not the only example mentioned in the report.
Magnification was never Hubble’s strength. Its advantages related to the fact that it floated above the earth’s atmosphere, which distorted observations made from the ground. Now admittedly, there’s been a lot of impressive work done with adaptive optics over the past 20 years or so.
Nonetheless, there are a number of scientists who reportedly will miss Hubble’s unique strengths, including those who study dark energy: “Dr. Riess said he disagreed with the decision to stop the Hubble, which would halt the research for years to come. He pointed out that the remarkable clarity of the work depended on the Advanced Camera for Surveys, which spacewalking astronauts installed in Hubble two years ago.”
So, no, the refurbished Hubble is hardly outdated.
Astronomy is not my core competence. However, any evaluation of the Hubble Space telescope is remiss if it ignores the preceding.
Weren’t there safety issues as well? I remember reading in another thread that the shutle was going to have difficulty flying to Hubble even if it did survive past 2010. They needed to fly it to ISS or near there to provide for emergency scenarios.
BTW, jshore it seems you are trying to have it both ways here. If manned space flight is not as worthy as robotics, then Hubble is doomed anyway. I think it is unfair that you complain that we are concentrating on manned flight and that this will endanger the Hubble. Isn’t the main reason for retiring Hubble that manned missions to it are no longer supported?