Mars: One Way

[it]

The ISS has had some of the most disappointing scientific discoveries of the century. Like finding that chicken hatched in space are born normal.

I had high hopes for this when I was a kid, but seems they did not pan out: No problems forming a skeleton, no embryo-like legless chicken or difficulties breathing, just... Normal freaking chicken. Screw you nature.

[tw]

Originally Posted by traceur

The ISS has had some of the most disappointing scientific discoveries of the century.

We had two choices - each for $8 billion. A Super Collider in TX or the ISS. As more politicians become less knowledgeable, more emotional and more driven by rhetoric, then glory was in an ISS. So people who advance science had to go to France and Switzerland to perform science.

The LHA is not as powerful as the Super Collider would have been. But one of the great discoveries occurred there - Higgs Bosom. Meanwhile the ISS can do no science until a fourth person is deployed. By that time, the US no longer had any vehicles to carry men into space - due to myopic and extremists rhetoric that pushed Orion, Ares, and Constellation - all examples of bad science.

An $8 billion ISS has cost more than $80 billion. In part, because its purpose was glory - an emotion; not science.

When I was growing up, a transistor was clearly the future for everyone. As the car, light bulb, and electric motor was the future for everyone in 1900. Today, everyone's future is in quantum physics. When a Tevatron in Fermilab in IL closed in 2011, the US no longer had any major quantum science machines. The contempt for science has grown that large. Stanford Linear accelerator is only used for other low power experiments. So who will see the jobs generated by fundamental science (invention)? The transistor developed in 1948 created massive jobs in the 1970s and 1990s because America was driven by science - not profits.

Today, great sources of innovation (and wealth, jobs, power, etc) such as the RCA Sarnoff Labs, HP labs, Xerox Palo Alto Research, Bendix labs, and of course the most famous Bell Labs were sold off for profits. Because what creates jobs and profits does not appear on spread sheets for ... well how many decades did it take for transistors, lasers, communication satellites, fiber optic communication, Shannon's communication theory (that make digital communication possible), PCM, C programming language, etc to finally create jobs and products? According to business school graduates, those were all costs - not profitable.

It is not foolishly spending money on ISS or Mission Accomplished that created problems. It is what got quashed and driven out of America that resulted from directing our resources towards emotional (extremists) and much less productive activities. At the expense of what actually made America great.

ISS is simply another example - created at the expense of the Super Collider.

Well the ISS does one useful experiement. AMS was canceled when extremists canceled much science to redirect funds to Mission Accomplished. The AMS, that could have been carried by most unmanned science vehicles, was finally mounted outside of the ISS.