Quail development isn't important to just quail breeders, there are many common features to vertebrate development and Chickens and Quails are just a particularly robust animal for such experiments.
The point is that basic research is important precisely because we don't know what we'll find. There's certainly an argument to be made that a space laboratory is a particularly expensive way to do it at the present time but please don't knock research without any obvious applications.
I
will knock research without any applications whatsoever.
Please inform me on how microgravity research educates us as to how quails develop on Earth, where they are actually useful, and not in space, where they are just interesting trivia.
T.Neo - have you read or seen any of the thousands of research papers coming out of ISS research?
I'd imagine that if they were massively useful or showed promise for being massively useful, they would have recieved more publicity by now.
There are research papers done about many things, it doesn't mean that these things are going to help anyone. Does it make a difference to your life that rudimentary colour patterns were detected in the feathers of a small dinosaur, for example?
I'll also add that 50 years on we are still learning things from Research done on the moon by Apollo astronaunts. Just because you think an experiment is silly and pointless today doesn't mean that it won't still be giving useful data in 50 years as different people analyse the data sets in different ways.
Yet data from the Moon itself is still pretty much useless here on Earth after those 40 years, unless it relates to useful geology in some way. It is just interesting knowledge for some poeple.
I'm talking about important research and technology demonstrations. I've already said what they are and am not going to say it again.
Please don't respond in a way that assumes I do not know what technology you are talking about, because I do. This is technology that is useless to us on Earth. In our real world.
ECLSS? Useless for Earth applications to test it in space. Interaction with robots in space? Yes, in space. Not on the ground. Orbital assembly? You are not orbiting, when you are on the surface of the Earth.
And then you have the issue of technology demonstration that would not necessarily need to use the ISS complex, but that is another matter entirely.
And then there is the concept of unnabbed recoverable vehicles that could be launched into space, do their research, and then be recovered, for a fraction of the cost of the ISS. They might not possess all the capability of the ISS, but they would be a pretty interesting capability in and of themselves.
Sorry, what on Earth (or whatever planet you are on) are you talking about here? The technology existed for what? What does technology have to do with ISS construction delays? And what flaws are you talking about? The ISS is not ineffective, when it comes to a manned space laboratory, ISS is the most capable spacecraft ever designed.
"Capability" only depends on what area you are talking in. The ISS does not have some capabilities, that also do not matter due to what it is supposed to do and where it is supposed to be situated. You can also have a huge amount of capability that you don't need, and is just a waste.
Expendable launch vehicles existed. The ISS could have been launched on those. Propulsion units existed. They could have been used for rendesvous and docking of ISS modules. Small spaceplanes and capsules such as the HL-20 were studied by NASA... they could have partially performed the role of crew rotation. Instead the ISS used the low flight-rate, expensive STS.
Maybe you are right in this case. Maybe the ISS is very useful. Maybe it has shown us how
not to assemble a spacecraft in orbit around the Earth... :shifty: