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."

FMI: www.ph.utexas.edu/~weintech/weinberg.html, www.nasa.gov