HOUSTON - In August, NASA's Curiosity rover is set to arrive on the surface of Mars, where, if all goes well, it will begin a wide range of scientific tests. Such missions provide a great deal of scientific data, but the general public is most excited about the prospect of sending humans to Mars, which NASA hopes to accomplish by 2030. As costs soar and budget battles intensify, however, some notable critics in the scientific community are questioning the whole idea of putting humans in space.
Experiments run continually on the International Space Station and the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope provides dazzling images of deep space, adding to our knowledge of the universe. But University of Texas professor Steven Weinberg, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1979, says humans in space have accomplished little.
“When you have a facility that involves people, like the International Space Station, which is an order of magnitude more expensive than these unmanned observatories, no important science comes out of that,” Weinberg said.