Brownback was reciting a NASA supplied list of experiments that had been done aboard the station as proof of its value. He said some made sense, such as having the crew write a journal. But he didn't react with enthusiasm to the notion of testing toys in space.
The Expedition Five crew, during July 2002, videotaped themselves playing with yo-yos, gyroscopes, soccer balls and a miniature hockey game as part of an educational outreach project intended to inspire students to study science, engineering and math.
"Is this cost and risk -- and the risk is far more valuable and important to me than the cost; the cost is significant, but the risk of human life -- is it worth the scientific knowledge we are gaining out of the space station?" the senator asked.
The answer depended on who was testifying on Capitol Hill during a busy day for NASA in which three hearings were convened to examine issues surrounding the future of the nation's space agency.
"The research is not wrong, it is just not very important," Robert Park, information director for the American Physical Society, told Brownback and Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), who flew in space aboard Columbia during a 1986 mission.
"No field of science has been significantly affected by research carried out at great cost on the shuttle or on (the late Russian space station) Mir. Much of it has never even been published in leading peer-review journals," Park said.
Park's comments did not go unchallenged.
James Pawelczyk countered that he performed "cutting edge science" himself when he flew as a shuttle payload specialist during the 1998 Neurolab mission.
Pawelczyk describe how changes in budgeting and the way NASA works with scientists to more quickly prepare experiments for launch are helping to improve the quantity and quality of science research being conducted aboard the ISS.
"The overall message in my view is positive. The seeds of a science-driven culture are being sown at every level of this agency," Pawelczyk said.
NASA spaceflight chief William Readdy also touted the benefits of the station as a home for research into how the human body is affected by lengthy stays in space -- necessary knowledge before missions to Mars lasting as long as two years can be done.
"It comes down to being able to sustain the human body for a trip of that duration," Readdy said. "The long duration effects simply aren't known and we need long duration exposure on board a research platform like the International Space Station in order to understand this."
In response to that discussion, Park cited a paper recently made public in which a NASA life sciences adviser, Lawrence Kuznetz, severely criticizes the ISS medical research.
The goal of studying the detrimental effects of spaceflight on the astronauts is to develop countermeasures that would help them survive lengthy trips in space. Such countermeasures might also benefit people on Earth, with bone loss leading to new treatments of osteoporosis often given as an example by NASA.
But according to Park and Kuznetz, the space agency is engaging in "wishful science" and that NASA would have to "get lucky" if any actual countermeasures to spaceflight could be developed before the station ends its life and is sent on a suicide dive into the ocean.
Attempting to offer an objective voice, the science subcommittee invited Allen Li, the director of acquisition and sourcing management for the General Accounting Office, to give an assessment of science aboard the space station.
Given the grounding of the space shuttle fleet following the Feb. 1 loss of Columbia and NASA's inability to ferry large amounts of cargo to and from the outpost, Li said the space station is now in "survival mode."
Among Li's complaints:
- NASA is unable to resolve known safety concerns at the station, such as bringing new meteoroid shielding that needs to be installed on the Russian Zvezda service module.
- Station assembly is at a standstill, with hardware backing up on the ground and the expectation that the outpost will reach the so-called "core complete" status in 2006.
- Research is limited, with only seven large racks of science experiments installed out of 20 that are planned. And while opportunities to bring new supplies up to the station promises to get better, especially with the introduction of a new European cargo carrier in late 2004, the ability to bring science samples home remains limited.
- Total space station costs will be driven much higher because of the Columbia tragedy, but NASA can't say by how much until 2005 when the 2006 budget is submitted. And to be fair, Li said, those costs must include those related to shuttle operations and development of the Orbital Space Plane.
- Accounting for NASA's shuttle- and station-related expenses, and being able to clearly tell the two apart, should be a priority for the agency's bean counters from this point forward, Nelson told Readdy, extracting a promise from the NASA manager to make it so.
NASA has lumped all their money into a single human spaceflight budget, making it easier for the agency to manage its funds -- perhaps poorly -- but also making it more difficult for Congress to track the spending, Nelson said.
"What happened was that money got pulled out of the space shuttle and the safety upgrades in the past, over a period of 12 years going back to the early 90s, to cover the losses and overruns of the space station," Nelson said.
The one-time shuttle astronaut made it clear that he sees the space station as an important stepping stone of research for going to Mars some day. A decision to send humans to the Red Planet must first come from the president, he said.
"We all know it's going to take a president to make this decision, and until a president does it and puts the juice behind it, it's not going to happen," said Nelson, who is a native of Florida's Space Coast. "But I don't want a future president, or this president for that matter, to use the space station as an excuse that we're not going to go to Mars."
"If it takes us 20 years we need to start tomorrow."
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