Instead of blogging, I spent the morning eating breakfast and reading What Would Wally Do?: A Dilbert Treasury. You can imagine my confusion when the first article I pulled up on the Internet was "NASA mulls mothballing US space station research":

NASA is considering shutting down all the research programs it conducts aboard the International Space Station for at least a year to fill a projected budget shortfall of up to $100 million, a top station manager said on Thursday.

I hope I am simply over-Dilberted and I'm hallucinating this. Stop all research on the International Space Station to save money? Uh, hello? Why have a space station if you're not going to do research?

Or is that the problem? Do they want to stop the research? The International Space Station is a great place to study the Earth's atmosphere from:

NASA has reportedly eliminated the promise "to understand and protect our home planet" from its mission statement.

That statement was repeatedly cited last winter by NASA climate scientist James Hansen, who said he was being threatened by political appointees for speaking about the dangers posed by greenhouse gas emissions. (source)

What do you do with a space station where no one does research? Maybe they should fund the research by hosting travellers at the space station who wish to join the 250 Mile High Club.1

I think the 250 Mile High Club would make the ISS a popular tourist destination, even more popular than the proposed "Take a Walk in Space" trip.

Initially, I disregarded a recent report, suggesting NASA stop all work on the Crew Exploration Vehicle (also known as "Apollo on Steroids) and the accompanying Crew Launch Vehicle. The idea would be to force private contractors to develop these vehicles for the private space industry and have NASA buy the resultant vehicles from them.

But if they're going to stop all research at the ISS for a year, then NASA, the organization that took humans to the Moon, might be beyond redemption. Government funding of private industry might give us a better shot at developing space.

Either that or perhaps those of us interested in space exploration should start taking language classes in Chineese.


  1. There's a strange omission from the article. Dolphins mate in "zero g" all the time with no problems, although to compensate for the weightlessness in the water, they mate in groups of three. Just when the astronauts and cosmonauts of the ISS thought their researchless jobs couldn't get any worse…. [back]