91av

DEBATE over the worth of the International Space Station is set to heat up, as its crew prepare to expand scientific research.

Some scientists have dismissed the ISS as a waste of money, arguing that it has produced few important advances. Its defenders counter that during the station’s assembly phase there have been too few crew members aboard to do much science.

Now the crew has grown to its full capacity of six for the first time, following a Soyuz flight that delivered three new members on 29 May. “It’s a real milestone,” says , a space policy analyst at American University in Washington DC.

McCurdy hopes that the larger crew might make scientific breakthroughs. Even if they don’t, the ISS is proving useful in other ways, he says, for example in testing and improving life-support systems that would be needed on long-duration missions to the moon or Mars.

However, , a physicist at the University of Maryland in College Park, does not think this justifies the cost. “If the only thing we’re using people for is to get more people up there, that’s kind of circular,” he says.

“If the only thing we’re using people for is to get more people up there, that’s kind of circular”

“If I was in charge, we would be gradually winding that part of the space programme down” in favour of robotic space missions like the Hubble Space Telescope, he adds. Park does, however, rate one experiment scheduled for launch next year: a cosmic ray detector that could aid the search for dark matter, called the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer.

Despite his more optimistic view of the ISS, McCurdy says NASA should have stuck to the smaller, less ambitious version originally proposed in the 1980s, before the outpost became an international project. “If we’d spent 10 years doing the space station as originally anticipated and moved on, we’d be back on the moon by now.”