News & Views item

SPACE: THE ONLY THING IN NASA THAT STILL GOES UP IS THE COST.
NASA head Michael Griffin told his science advisory committee this week that he could not keep the commitment he made a year ago not to shift money from science to human space flight. I wasn't on the committee, but I tried to imagine how it might have gone if I had been.

Bob Park

Mike Griffin

MG: The problem is the ISS.

RP: What problem?

MG: We have to finish it by 2010.

RP: Why is that a problem?

MG: Because the shuttle doesn't work.

RP: If we fix the shuttle and finish the ISS, what do we do next?

MG: We drop the ISS in the ocean.

RP: Why don't we do that now?

MG: Because we must honor our commitment to our ISS partners first.

RP: But what about your commitment to space science?

MG: That will have to wait until we get back from Mars.

RP: We're going to Mars?

MG: When we get back from the moon.

RP: We're going to the moon?

MG: Just as soon as we build a new spacecraft.

RP: What's holding that up?

MG: The problem is the ISS.

Robert L. Park is a professor of physics and former chair of the Department of Physics at the University of Maryland. He divides his time between the University and the Washington, DC office of the American Physical Society, which he opened in 1982. Author of more than a hundred technical papers on the structure and properties of single-crystal surfaces, Professor Park now devotes himself to helping the public distinguish genuine scientific advances from foolish and fraudulent claims. A frequent guest on news programs, he posts a provocative and widely-read weekly column on the internet, and is the author of Voodoo Science: the Road from Foolishness to Fraud.