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Sure, manned space exploration is romantic and exciting, but manned missions to the moon accomplished nothing beyond nationalistic PR that culdn't have been done better by machines, and the ISS has produced no science worthy of its staggering cost. We will inhabit space one day but for now current talk of manned Moon bases and Mars missions are not like trying to run before we can walk, they're like trying to fly before we can stand up. There are two little machines working away on Mars still that would agree with me. Read Bob Park http://www.bobpark.org/ for detailed, expert reasoning.

I'd like the powersaving feature of harnessing the energy of the Aurora Borealis, a fantastic idea by Ted Stevens which sadly remains unimplemented in current OSes.

OK maybe my statement about RED and BLUE states was invalid. I retract that.
But I stand by my other statements.
Read what Bob Parks, a respected UMD physicist, has said about the U.S. space program: http://www.bobpark.org/

SHUTTLE: THE SPACE SHUTTLE DOESN'T WORK IT NEVER DID WORK.
Why is everyone afraid to say so? The real problem isn't foam falling off the fuel tank. The shuttle was sold to Congress as a way to launch things into space more cheaply. On the contrary, it's the most expensive way to reach space ever conceived. The problems we're facing now result from the refusal to acknowledge that reality. Initially, anything that went into space, including commercial and military satellites, was required to be launched from the shuttle. With the total cost of the shuttle program at about $150B, the average cost/flight is about $1.3B. The shuttle was strangling space development before the Challenger disaster. Then it was declared to be a science laboratory, but no field of science has been affected in any way by research that has been conducted on the shuttle or space station. The last scheduled research mission was the final flight of Columbia in 2003. The shuttle's only mission now is to supply the ISS.

THE SCIENCE ADVISOR: IS THERE A WHITE HOUSE SCIENCE ADVISOR?

Actually, no. The President didn't consult his science advisor about intelligent design because he doesn't have one. George W. Bush eliminated the job when he named John Marburger Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy. Previous OSTP directors held both titles, and WN always referred to Marburger as "Science Advisor." We were wrong, but not alone. We Googled "science advisor" and got 597,000 hits on a nonexistent job. As they used to say at Stony Brook when he was president, "this would never have happened if Jack Marburger was alive."

Some simple checks can prevent this sillyness from perpetuating. Bob Park's "What's New" column http://www.bobpark.org/ is an amusing and up to date reference for this kind of thing. Here is what he has to say about the "Integrity Research Institute" (the name alone should have raised a red flag): http://www.searchum.umd.edu/search?q=%22integrity+ research+institute%22&site=&btnG=Search+UM&output= xml_no_dtd&sort=date%3AD%3AL%3Ad1&ie=UTF-8&client= UMCP&oe=UTF-8&proxystylesheet=UMCP

Robert Park and the American Physical Society have long been foes of both the Shuttle and the ISS.

First off, the American Physical Society has no stance for or against the Shuttle and the ISS. They are a professional society for physicists. They occasionally perform studies or issue statements based on areas of their expertise. The only statement about the ISS that I am aware is Statement 91.2 and was released in 1991. Basically it said that the APS feels there is no current credible scientific justification for the proposed ISS and that the scientific value of the ISS has been greatly overstated and can be done better and cheaper on Earth and/or in the shuttle. I think 14 years later it is hard to argue that statement has not proven accurate.

Bob Park writes a weekly one-page commentary work What's News pertaining to physics and general science folly. He is rather opinionated on many subjects and is not shy to state them (it is, after all, an opinion column). He does not speak for the APS any more than a political commentator speaks for any newspaper on the Sunday editorial page. Park's disclaimer at the bottom (at the time the link in question was posted) was:

THE AMERICAN PHYSICAL SOCIETY and THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND
Opinions are the author's and are not necessarily shared by the American Physical Society or the University, but they should be.

The "unique result" statement you criticize is taken from a report by the National Research Council (at NASA's request), which basically states (and Park reiterates) that nothing on protein crystal research has been done that has not been done on Earth. In fact, the exact statement taken from the Executive Summary is:

The task group heard a great deal about experiments to date in NASA 's macromolecular crystallography program. The results so far are inconclusive, and the impact of microgravity crystallization on structural biology as a whole has been extremely limited. At this time, one cannot point to a single case where a space-based crystallization effort was the crucial step in achieving a landmark scientific result. In many of the cases that have so far been listed as successful, the improvements obtained have been incremental rather than fundamental. In addition, the difficulty of mounting simultaneous efforts to produce the best possible crystals both on the ground and in space has limited the ability of researchers to make the comparisons between microgravity and Earth crystals that would be necessary to demonstrate that the microgravity environment can produce superior crystals.

Finding: The results from the collection of experiments performed on microgravity's effect on protein crystal growth are inconclusive. The improvements in crystal quality that have been observed are often only incremental, and the difficulty of producing the appropriate controls limits investigators ' ability to definitively assess if improvements can be reliably credited to the microgravity environment. To date, the impact of microgravity crystallization on structural biology as a whole has been extremely limited.

A more descriptive statement Park made was in a link in the link. They aren't comments to be taken with salt but rather a listing of damning facts regarding selling the ISS for growing protein crystals. There isn't any way to put a good spin on that.

That NRC report statement about protein crystals can be made for just about most of the research attempted on the ISS. You can argue all you want about the political and/or societial reasons for having or not having the ISS, but you cannot just

Robert Park and the American Physical Society have long been foes of both the Shuttle and the ISS.

First off, the American Physical Society has no stance for or against the Shuttle and the ISS. They are a professional society for physicists. They occasionally perform studies or issue statements based on areas of their expertise. The only statement about the ISS that I am aware is Statement 91.2 and was released in 1991. Basically it said that the APS feels there is no current credible scientific justification for the proposed ISS and that the scientific value of the ISS has been greatly overstated and can be done better and cheaper on Earth and/or in the shuttle. I think 14 years later it is hard to argue that statement has not proven accurate.

Bob Park writes a weekly one-page commentary work What's News pertaining to physics and general science folly. He is rather opinionated on many subjects and is not shy to state them (it is, after all, an opinion column). He does not speak for the APS any more than a political commentator speaks for any newspaper on the Sunday editorial page. Park's disclaimer at the bottom (at the time the link in question was posted) was:

THE AMERICAN PHYSICAL SOCIETY and THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND
Opinions are the author's and are not necessarily shared by the American Physical Society or the University, but they should be.

The "unique result" statement you criticize is taken from a report by the National Research Council (at NASA's request), which basically states (and Park reiterates) that nothing on protein crystal research has been done that has not been done on Earth. In fact, the exact statement taken from the Executive Summary is:

The task group heard a great deal about experiments to date in NASA 's macromolecular crystallography program. The results so far are inconclusive, and the impact of microgravity crystallization on structural biology as a whole has been extremely limited. At this time, one cannot point to a single case where a space-based crystallization effort was the crucial step in achieving a landmark scientific result. In many of the cases that have so far been listed as successful, the improvements obtained have been incremental rather than fundamental. In addition, the difficulty of mounting simultaneous efforts to produce the best possible crystals both on the ground and in space has limited the ability of researchers to make the comparisons between microgravity and Earth crystals that would be necessary to demonstrate that the microgravity environment can produce superior crystals.

Finding: The results from the collection of experiments performed on microgravity's effect on protein crystal growth are inconclusive. The improvements in crystal quality that have been observed are often only incremental, and the difficulty of producing the appropriate controls limits investigators ' ability to definitively assess if improvements can be reliably credited to the microgravity environment. To date, the impact of microgravity crystallization on structural biology as a whole has been extremely limited.

A more descriptive statement Park made was in a link in the link. They aren't comments to be taken with salt but rather a listing of damning facts regarding selling the ISS for growing protein crystals. There isn't any way to put a good spin on that.

That NRC report statement about protein crystals can be made for just about most of the research attempted on the ISS. You can argue all you want about the political and/or societial reasons for having or not having the ISS, but you cannot just

Although this article is a couple of years old, the scientific community is not necessarily convinced of microgravity's promise.

For example, take section 2 of the linked article - which criticizes a research program for not producing 'unique results'. Anyone familiar with science knows that non-unique results are as important as unique results.

Although this article is a couple of years old, the scientific community is not necessarily convinced of microgravity's promise.

This is one result that may or may not scale to industrial production.

I'm not closed minded, but I am skeptical.

Thanks for the pointer !
http://www.bobpark.org/WN05/wn050605.html#3

Basically, fusion is obtained using the 1934 Rutherford setup where deuterium ions are accelerated by an electric field towards a deuterium-rich target.
The novelty is how the electric field is obtained: piezo-electricity induced by a temperature change.
This is also the mechanism envisioned for spacecraft propulsion (which has nothing to do with fusion).

Bob Park has a short but good comment on this, now old, news:

http://www.bobpark.org/WN05/wn050605.html