Word: stationed
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...This laboratory module costs $1.4 billion. Will we get our money's worth? Not right away. Destiny was designed to carry 13 refrigerator-sized science stations, called racks, each holding several experiments, but they'll be going up one or two at a time over the next several years. Altogether, the module and its science gear would have been too heavy to launch. The current space-station crew led by Bill Shepherd, the American commander, and Yuri Gidzeno and Sergei Krikalev, his Russian crewmates, will use the extra space for storage...
...There really isn't any important science under way on the station now, but that's because this first crew arrived in November with little life support, no way to cook their food and a toilet that wouldn't flush. They've been working overtime just to make the place livable and science has not been a priority. NASA hopes to have 30 or so experiments under way a year from now and about 120 researchers are waiting their turn. The space agency is only now starting to consider proposals that will find their way onto the station...
...that when the station pays off with big discoveries? Even then, it's hard to say what the public should expect. NASA's Mars probes, and its orbiting observatories like the Hubble Space Telescope and Chandra X-Ray Observatory, have clearly defined missions, something the ISS lacks. Astronauts can study the long-term effects of weightlessness on their own bones and muscle, as they have since the 1970s, but it's hard to say what benefit will be derived back on Earth. In fact, the first important science study done onboard will try to determine whether the station is even...
...Despite the best efforts of NASA's engineers, there's a chance that the minor adjustments the station makes to keep a stable orbit, or the pounding astronauts give their treadmill, or even someone slamming a hatch too hard, could jar the complex enough to disrupt some experiments that depend on weightlessness...
...Roger Crouch, NASA's chief space-station scientist, uses the example of a space-shuttle study that looked at neonatal brain development in mice. It showed some significant acceleration in brain growth in weightlessness, but the shuttle could stay aloft for only two weeks, and it takes about 21 days for a mouse brain to develop. "Did it mean they were going to have more connections and bigger brains, or were they going to have bigger brains but cells that wouldn't talk to each other? You really don't know the significance of this snippet...