“would anyone of you the willing to live on a moon base? I would…”

Elon Musk wants to retire on Mars, but instead of waiting for the government to get there, he created a company to provide the transportation he thinks will be needed for the settlement of Mars.

If this were a competition, who do you think would get there first, you or Musk?

“Science “states” nothing. Scientists make hypotheses. On a long enough timeline, the *vast majority* of scientific hypotheses turn out to be incorrect or at best incomplete. The sum total of all scientific Laws known to date would fit on a single sheet of paper.”

How ironic that you are using an unproven hypothesis to state that the “*vast majority* of scientific hypotheses turn out to be incorrect or at best incomplete”.

Science “states” nothing. Scientists make hypotheses. On a long enough timeline, the *vast majority* of scientific hypotheses turn out to be incorrect or at best incomplete. The sum total of all scientific Laws known to date would fit on a single sheet of paper.

Climate science is so new that the predictive models rest on shakier ground than Ptolemy. Stop pretending there is any predictive power there.

The external uses that were trumpetted (like protein crystallization) were always more rationalization than reality. And at this point, I think they’ve fallen into the category of outright falsehood. From the point of view of external value, the ISS is a boondoggle.

“Needless to say, it doesn’t cost $100 B to do this, and it didn’t cost $100 B to discover this.”

Keep in mind the justification for the ISS wasn’t to do protein crystallization – that just happened to be one of the experiments that they thought would have important applications. That was their supposition, and now they have more information about it.

But the real value of the ISS is in learning how to live AND work in space, both to figure out if there is a way to monetize zero-G (the protein crystallization work for instance), and to find the solutions to the problems of keeping humans alive and healthy as we expand our presence into space (by exploration initially).

I think some people think a National Laboratory is like a McDonald’s restaurant, where once the construction is complete all you have to do is open the doors and you get the results you want. Science results are not predictable, which is why it costs so much money sometimes to test out ideas.

But since getting to space and staying there long-term was the hardest and most expensive part of doing tests in space, now the ISS is the right facility to answer the many questions we have. Some of those answers will come back as negative, some we’ll compare with similar tests done on Earth and find that they are not worth doing in space, and some we will get positive results with hints of what we should try next.

You can follow what experiments have been done, and some of the results, here.

Yes, the importance of microgravity has been vastly overstated.

BTW, it has recently been shown that simple changes in configuration can completely eliminate convection during protein crystallization down here on the ground. Just grow the crystals at the top of the container, not the bottom, and the less dense depletion zone is at the top, suppressing convection.

Needless to say, it doesn’t cost $100 B to do this, and it didn’t cost $100 B to discover this.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/12/121221113949.htm

Except it is. The whole space program is for goodness sake.

But you go on trying to say station is not. And we’ll keep smiling.

Thinking that the SLS is geo-political at all is pretty ludicrous, since there is no need for it here in the U.S. Unless DCSCA thinks we’ll be selling rides on it to China or Russia… LOL