Nobel Laureate Disses NASA's Manned Spaceflight

Steven Weinberg, a co-recipient of the 1970 Nobel Prize in physics, stated his thoughts on NASA's manned spaceflight program and the International Space Station. Weinberg believes that neither have produced anything of scientific value, and that the idea of humans in space is just an incredibly expensive publicity stunt. He praises NASA's robotic missions such as the Mars Exploration Rovers, but sees little value in humans in space."'Human beings don't serve any useful function in space,' Weinberg told SPACE.com. '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.'" While NASA's budget is currently increasing, Weinberg believes that the increases are coming from the desire of the president and administrators of NASA to put humans into space, when the funds should really be allocated towards missions with more scientific value.

http://www.space.com/news/070918_weinberg_critique.html