Comments on: A “reinvigorated” subcommittee http://www.spacepolitics.com/2005/04/21/a-reinvigorated-subcommittee/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=a-reinvigorated-subcommittee Because sometimes the most important orbit is the Beltway... Wed, 17 Sep 2014 13:35:41 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.0.38 By: Greg Kuperberg http://www.spacepolitics.com/2005/04/21/a-reinvigorated-subcommittee/#comment-2766 Tue, 26 Apr 2005 19:01:28 +0000 http://www.districtofbaseball.com/spacepolitics/?p=520#comment-2766 Especially given that it is supposed to be a sign of things to come, the ISS research hearing was just awful. It was two hours of deep denial and excruciating nonsense. They didn’t acknowledge the view of most scientists that “microgravity is of microimportance”, as Nicolas Bloembergen put it to Congress. They didn’t acknowledge that research on the health effects of weightlessness are “voodoo science”, as an internal NASA report put it. They didn’t even develop the theory that the space station isn’t really about research, but actually has some other goal such as “exploration”.

What they mainly did was let a few NASA officials put on a dog and pony show about the great research on the space station. Or rather, tried to, because even in this staged hearing they couldn’t say much for it. They brought out the one about doing ultrasounds on the space station with telemedicine; and did you know that a player on the Detroit Red Wings had a telemedical ultrasound done on him too? So there you have it: If not for the space station, athletic doctors would never have figured out that you can combine ultrasound machines with streaming video.

Later Hutchison floated the idea of making the space station a national laboratory like Los Alamos and Brookhaven. Which makes about as much sense as making the People’s Park in Berkeley a national park.

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