Steven Weinberg Wants More Robots, And No ISS
Even as NASA was putting out the
call for its next crop of astronaut applicants this week, a Nobel
Prize-winning particle physicist was slamming manned space flight
in general as "... having produced nothing of scientific
value."
Ouch.
Those remarks came from Professor Steven Weinberg (below) of the
University of Texas at Austin, co-recipient of the 1979 Nobel Prize
for Physics, at a workshop in Baltimore. And he was just getting
started.
"NASA's budget is increasing, with the increase being driven by
what I see on the part of the president and the administrators of
NASA as an infantile fixation on putting people into space, which
has little or no scientific value," Weinberg said, according to an
industry report cited by Fox News.
"I think the public imagination gets very rapidly bored with the
sight of humans in space knocking golf balls around," Weinberg
continued -- referring to a publicity stunt last November, in which
cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin hit a golf ball during a
spacewalk from the International Space Station.
Despite the potential lack of marketing opportunities (see
above,) the physicist clearly believes robots are the way to
go.
"On the other hand, [the public] was fascinated by the kinds of
things done by rovers on Mars," Weinberg said. "I think our
political leaders underestimate the intelligence of the public in
thinking they won't be fascinated by real scientific discoveries. I
think enormous sums are wasted on manned spaceflight that
continually crowd out science missions."
Weinberg readily admits to having a chip on his shoulder. The
scientist admits he's still ticked off at Congress for cancelling
one of his favorite projects, the Superconducting Super Collider.
He believes the project was killed, in part, to fund the ISS...
which he calls "an orbital turkey."
"No important science has come out of it," he continued. "I
could almost say no science has come out of it. And I would go
beyond that and say that the whole manned spaceflight program,
which is so enormously expensive, has produced nothing of
scientific value."
Weinstein strongly believes the risk -- and cost -- in sending
human astronauts into the heavens is not worth the payoff.
"Human beings don't serve any useful function in space," he
said. "They radiate heat, they're very expensive to keep alive, and
unlike robotic missions they have a natural desire to come back, so
that anything involving human beings is enormously expensive."