WHAT'S NEW Friday, January 23, 2004

WHAT'S NEW   Robert L. Park   Friday, 23 Jan 04   Washington, DC

1. SPACE PRIORITIES: GUESS WHAT PROGRAM NASA DECIDED TO ABANDON?
President Bush directed NASA to reallocate $11B of its resources
over the next five years to a program to send humans back to the
moon and on to Mars.  It should be a no-brainer.  They've got
this humongous, leaky, space turkey called the International
Space Station.  ISS was supposed to keep eight astronauts busy
doing bogus science experiments, like finding out if the scent of
a rose is different when it blooms in zero gravity (WN 7 Feb 04). 
With the ISS crew down to two, they're too busy trying to stay
alive to do even bogus science.  But the President says we have a
commitment to finish building the ISS before we can scrap it.  So
instead, Sean O'Keefe announced the termination of maintenance on
the Hubble Space Telescope, thus dooming it to an early death.  

2. REPROGRAMMING ISS: LONG-TERM EFFECT OF SPACE TRAVEL ON HUMANS.
There isn't much you can do with a space station.  The President
says it will become a space-medicine laboratory to prepare for
the return of humans to the moon and on to Mars.  Hmmm, that's
exactly what his father wanted to use the station for (WN 12 Jul
91).  The ISS is inside Earth's magnetosphere, so it can't study
space-radiation effects, which is the real show stopper.  That
leaves osteoporosis.  Let's see: it will take at least 12 years
to complete our commitment to the ISS.  Calcium loss is monitored
by a daily urine analysis, typically requiring about 30ml.  For a
full 8 person crew that adds up to more than one thousand liters. 
Awesome, we're talking $10M just to launch the water into orbit
that will then be processed into urine.  We have already been
analyzing urine samples collected in space for over 30 years. 

3. NUCLEAR WEAPONS: LOTS OF "BEWARE-OF-DOG" SIGNS - BUT FEW DOGS.
"The first liar," they say in Texas, "hasn't got a chance."  All
around the world, petty tyrants keep their hands under the table
and try to look like they're holding a weapon.  Sig Hecker, the
former head of Los Alamos Lab who visited North Korea's nuclear
facilities (WN 16 Jan 04), briefed a Senate Committee Wednesday. 
He is unconvinced that they have the bomb. Curiously, North Korea
denies it has a uranium enrichment program as the U.S. charges. 
Instead, they claim to have extracted plutonium from spent fuel
rods, but nothing is known of its isotopic composition, if indeed
it is plutonium.  A Pu bomb is far more difficult to build than a
U bomb and there is nothing to indicate they can do it.  But even
as North Korea brandishes weapons it doesn't have, Libya, which
had only recently declared it had a nuclear program, has now
announced its program is being dismantled in an effort to have
sanctions lifted from the 1988 downing of Pan Am Flight 103 over
Scotland.  The chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency,
who toured the Libyan sites, says there wasn't much to dismantle. 
Libya, it now appears, was nowhere near large-scale enrichment.

THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND.  
Opinions are the author's and not necessarily shared by the
University of Maryland, but they should be.
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