Uncertain Science in Orbit

Is it worth it?

Over the last four decades, more than 400 humans have been hurled into space. The push has cost hundreds of billions of dollars and 21 lives. The effort at various times has been driven by national pride, Cold War competition and, at its most basic, a deep sense of wonder about what lies beyond our earthly horizons.

Since the giddy days of the Apollo missions, when the world watched transfixed as astronauts took the first steps on the moon, space has seemed our birthright and the next logical step in our destiny.

NASA has long recognized the risks involved in space exploration, along with the benefits. “If everything were to move along without a hitch, I would be suspicious that we are not being bold enough, not fulfilling our mandate to push the envelope,” NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe said last year.

But for all the effort and sacrifice, the results have been a wildly mixed bag, ranging from the sublime to the trivial. Ironically, the three products most associated with astronauts -- Tang, Velcro and Teflon -- were not developed for the space program. But manned spaceflight has brought such useful items as CAT scans, smoke detectors and cordless drills. Astronauts brought back the first rocks from the moon and repaired the once-blurred vision of the Hubble Space Telescope so astronomers could see almost to the beginnings of time.

At the same time, millions of dollars have been spent discovering that snail embryos develop nicely in microgravity, tomato seeds germinate slightly faster and female fruit flies live longer than males. Heaps of bacteria, yeast, worms, stick insects, slime mold and Japanese carp have been lofted into the void for a seemingly endless string of modest experiments -- some of which could have easily been done on Earth, if they were worth doing at all.

Perhaps the most crucial discoveries through 40 years of manned spaceflight argue strongly against the enterprise itself. Humans -- fragile creatures in the harsh world of high radiation, near-zero gravity, and hazardous launches and reentries -- seem poorly suited for a life in space.

The deaths of Columbia’s seven astronauts have driven home this vulnerability and reawakened a debate that has ebbed and flowed since the first human, Russian Yuri Gagarin, entered space in 1961. Are robots better suited to explore space, a task they can handle at a fraction of the cost?

For some scientists, the cost of launching humans into space far outweighs any scientific or commercial benefit -- the major justifications that NASA has used to promote its shuttle and space station projects.

These critics say a large number of experiments done in space by astronauts could have been performed more cheaply on Earth with more conclusive results and far less risk.

“The astronauts aboard Challenger died bringing up a satellite and carrying along a teacher -- two mundane activities that are not our purpose in space,” said Louis Friedman, executive director of the Planetary Society, a Pasadena space exploration group co-founded by the late astronomer Carl Sagan.

Robert Park, a University of Maryland physicist, said few shuttle experiments have been worthy of publication in leading scientific journals. In fact, many of the experiments are devised not by scientists, but by children.

“Nothing more than science-fair experiments,” Park said.

Since the Apollo program, born of the race to beat the Russians to the moon, NASA has struggled to find a clear course for its manned space program. Sending a human to Mars was too costly; unmanned probes left astronauts unemployed.

The agency conceived in the 1970s a plan to develop a space station and build a fleet of shuttles to ferry parts and crew for its construction. The project, estimated to cost $100 billion by the time it is completed in 2008, has been one of the most expensive engineering projects in history.

With no human trip to Mars, the station was no longer able to serve as a platform for travel to distant planets. Conducting scientific experiments became the justification for spending at least $5 billion a year on the orbiting facility and its fleet of shuttles. NASA planners thought using astronauts was critical to keeping the public -- and Congress -- interested in the program.

“We go into space to do things we can’t do on the ground,” John Charles, the chief scientist for the experiments aboard the ill-fated Columbia said shortly before the shuttle lifted off. “Access to hard vacuums, access to the radiation environment of space, access to microgravity. That’s why we’re there.”

Space experiments have indeed yielded a bounty of knowledge, primarily in how the human body responds when deprived of gravity, the ever-present force that has helped shape our long evolution.

In the name of science, orbiting astronauts have offered up blood and urine and endured temperature probes in their body cavities. They’ve been strapped onto beds and tilted upside down, played virtual-reality games and caught balls, lain in suction devices and slipped on ice-cold gloves.

In space, chests expand. Fluid redistributes in the body, thinning the ankles, bulging the neck veins, erasing wrinkles and forcing the kidneys to work overtime. Faces of astronauts get rounder because of the fluid movement, which also causes runny noses, persistent sinus congestion and fainting fits upon return to Earth.

The long-term effects of zero gravity are far more serious. During a four- to six-month stay in space, astronauts can lose 30% of their bone density and 10% of their muscle mass, and can experience radiation doses about equal to eight chest X-rays a day.

“If we’re ever going to send humans out beyond Earth orbit on distant missions, we need to know how to fix these things,” said Bruce Murray, former director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and co-founder of the Planetary Society. “When you land on Mars, there’s not going to be an ambulance waiting for you.”

Not all of the findings have been about our bodies. Columbia carried 80 experiments typical of shuttle science, including the creation of the weakest flames ever made, the effects of dust storms on climate, the behavior of spiders in microgravity and the weird electrical features of thunderstorms called elves and sprites. Much of the data was downloaded to Earth before the shuttle disintegrated.

“I think there’s some high-quality, absolutely top-quality science in the program,” said Martin Glicksman, professor of materials science and engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., whose experiments on metal crystals have flown on shuttle missions.

And then there are the potential commercial spinoffs. Some space technology is already commonplace. In the course of designing a safer space capsule, smoke detectors were created. Trash compactors, cordless drills and water purifiers were other byproducts.

Companies have looked hopefully at the prospect of creating a new generation of products in microgravity: nearly perfect crystals that could speed electronics, precision drugs and ultra-thin films that could be used to create bionic eyes. Ceramics fired up in ovens on the international space station, free of the disruptive forces of convection, could be used for new bone implants. Early discussions of the space station promised cures for cancer.

Many of these payoffs remain distant possibilities. Some of the projects have already been eclipsed by work on Earth. More recent shuttle experiments, such as a Coors Brewing Co.-sponsored attempt to brew beer on the shuttle and the creation of a new Shiseido perfume using the space-altered fragrance of a miniature rose are not enough, critics say, to justify a continuous human presence in space.

“The spinoff argument is a total joke,” said Rick N. Tumlinson, president of the Space Frontier Foundation, a private group dedicated to the human settlement of space. “Trying to justify the space program on the basis of fruit juice and clothes fasteners is absurd.” Trying to justify it with science, he said, is equally problematic. The basic problem, it turns out, is that it is not easy to do science in space.

First there is cost. Each shuttle mission costs about $450 million, an amount that makes studying the swimming of jellyfish or growing moss hard to justify. Cost concerns have whittled the size of the space station down from a seven-person lab to one housing only three, just enough to keep it running with a few hours left over for research.

“Planned crew reductions have had a devastating impact on the capacity to do science,” said Sandra Graham, a member of the Space Studies Board at the National Research Council in Washington.

Construction delays have left the station underpowered, without specially designed laboratory modules and without a gravity-creating centrifuge that was meant to compare microgravity conditions with those on Earth. Without this, scientists can’t know for sure if gravity conditions -- or other things such as gases, radiation or the trauma of a launch -- are responsible for effects detected in orbit.

In 1998, the American Society for Cell Biology reviewed the life science research slated for the space station, calling it “costly,” and “inefficient” and saying the station is “the most expensive and inflexible research laboratory ever built.”

“If you want to do the program for other reasons, such as excitement, or inspiring youth about adventure, fine,” said Ursula Goodenough, professor of biology at Washington University in St. Louis and former president of the society. “But if you want to do science, the place to do it is here.”

The report was particularly critical of research into the crystallization of proteins in space. This, some scientists had proposed, might yield especially pure crystals, undistorted by the tug of gravity. That would enable scientists to determine the complex structure of proteins, a key to creating new drugs.

Experiment after experiment, however, has failed to show that proteins crystallize any better in orbit than they do on Earth, said Park, the University of Maryland physicist. “The only thing different was that they were a thousand times more expensive to make,” he said.

The strange quirks of space and the distance from the scientists who actually analyze the experiments and could troubleshoot them make it easier for orbiting experiments to go astray or be misconstrued.

For instance, studies aboard the Russian space station Mir indicated that plants didn’t grow well in space, said Elliot Meyerowitz, a Caltech biologist who has analyzed space science. But microgravity turned out to have nothing to do with it. Later investigations showed the plants were stunted by ethylene gas released into the spacecraft.

Humans themselves distort experiments as they bump, jolt and thud their way through the station. These motions are so disruptive that NASA scientists placed accelerometers aboard the station to detect them. There is no way to prevent the vibrations except by replacing astronauts with less-clumsy robots.

That is precisely what NASA should do, say critics of human spaceflight and even many who support seeing humans in space.

“We should leave all jobs not worth the risk to the robots,” said Friedman of the Planetary Society. Humans, he said, should not be conducting routine experiments but should be exploring the unknown and extending the reach of humanity into the cosmos.

It is precisely because astronauts have spent so many years doing the mundane work of robots that human spaceflight has lost its glamour, Friedman and Tumlinson say. Unless a shuttle flight ends in disaster, they say, most people aren’t even aware that one of the orbiters is flying. They know even less about the science aboard.

In contrast, the public was fascinated by a little robot called Sojourner that drove itself around Mars during the summer of 1997. The mission’s Web site received 566 million hits during the Martian jaunt, 47 million of them on a single day.

It has been unmanned telescopes such as Hubble and Chandra, not astronauts, that have made the most astonishing astronomical discoveries of the last decade. As for the pictures astronauts take from orbit, Earth-observing satellites can provide more continuous, higher-resolution images.

These points will come under the glaring lens of Congress as the discussion moves away from what caused the Columbia disaster to what it will cost to return the shuttle into space. It will not be cheap. Safety concerns are likely to require either a total upgrade of the three remaining shuttles or the development of a new vehicle.

Some fear the discussion and close examination of the costs involved may weaken the public’s appetite for human spaceflight.

“The grand goals are incredibly worth it, but we’ve been going about it the wrong way for so long that those goals are now in question,” Tumlinson said.

It somehow seems impossible that humans should forever be bound to this sphere of rock and water. But the debate that Columbia’s loss has resurrected is whether it is just too early and too expensive to send and keep humans in space.

“This debate will be very welcome,” Friedman said. “These are not trivial decisions.”

Eugene Cernan, the second American to walk in space, suggests that there is no perfect time to take these first, uncertain steps. But he argued that they cannot be delayed.

“We don’t have a choice,” the former NASA astronaut said. “Curiosity is the essence of human existence and there is no greater unknown than the universe around us.”

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Space technology benefits

Research from space missions -- many of them manned -- has yielded inventions and advances that touch many areas of human life, according to NASA. Here is a partial list.

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Computer Technology

- Semiconductor cubing

- Air-quality monitor

- Virtual reality

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Cnsumer/Home/Recreation

- Scratch-resistant lens

- Ribbed swimsuit

- Portable cooler/warmer

- Sports training

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Environmental and Resource Management

- Solar energy

- Weather forecasting aid

- Forest management

- Fire-resistant material

- Radiation insulation

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Health and Medicine

- Breast cancer detection

- Laser angioplasty

- Human tissue stimulator

- Programmable pacemaker

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Industrial Productivity/Manufacturing Technology

- Micro-laser

- Engine lubricant

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Public Safety

- Emergency rescue cutter

- Personal storm-warning system

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Transportation

- Improved aircraft engine

- Energy storage system

- New wing design for corporate jets

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Source: NASA - Researched by Times reporter Vicki Gallay

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Times staff writer Peter Pae and Times researcher Vicki Gallay contributed to this report.