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In his 1988 book “What Do You Care What Other People Think?” Feynman wrote the following:

In the newspaper I used to read about shuttles going up and down all the time but it bothered me a little bit that I never saw in any scientific journal any results of anything that had ever come out of the experiments on the shuttle that were supposed to be so important. So I wasn't paying very much attention to it.

Has NASA been able to improve this since the 1980s? Do we now have a lot of important papers that rely on experiments conducted in space? Astronauts on the ISS (and other missions) spend thousands of man-hours running various experiments but I'm curious if there's a way to see the most impactful papers that came out of these efforts?

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    $\begingroup$ You can browse publications resulting from ISS National Lab sponsored research here: issnationallab.org/publications It's by no means a comprehensive list of all research performed on the ISS though. $\endgroup$
    – Doresoom
    Commented Aug 5 at 20:43
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    $\begingroup$ "I never saw in any scientific journal..." Even in Feynman's day there were a lot of journals, and we have to remember that journals came out once or twice a month as thick printed paperbacks that would sit in stacks in long rows (one stack per journal) and once a year they would go to the bindery, where they would be physically sewn together into hard-cover books. To physically review ALL of Caltech's physics library's journals every month would be a full-time job. I think Feynman would have focused on at most a dozen journals covering very specific fields of Physics only. $\endgroup$
    – uhoh
    Commented Aug 5 at 23:46
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    $\begingroup$ "I wasn't paying very much attention to it" != "no value to science" --- I think the premise of this question hinges on precisely that assumption. I feel like we are missing a lot of context from the book. $\endgroup$
    – Greg Burghardt
    Commented Aug 6 at 13:08
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    $\begingroup$ @GregBurghardt: indeed. Feymann's quote there could be taken to mean, "I wasn't paying any attention to it, because all the research papers coming out of it were unrelated to particle physics and therefore I didn't see them". I expect he probably meant something in between this, and what the questioner interprets it to mean. $\endgroup$
    – Steve Jessop
    Commented Aug 6 at 13:17
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    $\begingroup$ @SteveJessop I don't think that's very fair. Feynman was a polymath. While his professional research was on particle physics, he was interested in almost everything. $\endgroup$
    – Barmar
    Commented Aug 6 at 14:41

3 Answers 3

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Sadly Feynman died in 1988, and therefore did not live to see the Shuttle used to launch the Hubble Space Telescope in 1990, or correct its optics in 1993. Then he surely would have seen scientific papers resulting from Hubble, unless he very meticulously went out of his way to avoid them!

Of course in a world without the Shuttle (or any human space program), it would still be possible to launch a space telescope. And launch a second one when the first one failed. After all, the James Webb Space Telescope was launched by the Ariane 5, an uncrewed space launch vehicle. But in the real world, the contribution of the Shuttle to scientific papers has surpassed the "zero" which Feynman appears to be claiming in 1988.

Whether experiments done aboard the Shuttle have produced more publications (that would pique Feynman's interest) since 1988 than they did before, I don't know. But the Shuttle program can at least be said to have contributed to some rather important research (just like all the other tools used to deliver Hubble). Feynman might still claim that any launch mechanism is no more nor less important to scientific research than the automobile: most people in particle physics don't need to know how anything is delivered to CERN, either.

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    $\begingroup$ That's what I was thinking -- even if everything actually done aboard the shuttle was scientifically worthless, which I don't buy, you have to also count everything the shuttle took up and brought back, which is a huge amount of value. It's like saying a truck is worthless for manufacturing because nothing is actually produced in the truck. $\endgroup$
    – Darth Pseudonym
    Commented Aug 6 at 16:02
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    $\begingroup$ @DarthPseudonym: I think it's more likely that Feynman had a finely tuned hype-detector, and the most significant criticism in the quote is, "that were supposed to be so important". I would not be at all surprised if Feynman thought NASA was over-selling the value of watching spiders spin webs while weightless, and that sort of thing. He's explaining why the shuttle wasn't on his radar, that's about all. $\endgroup$
    – Steve Jessop
    Commented Aug 6 at 16:07
  • $\begingroup$ We could add to this that the value of a human endeavor is not necessarily measured in the number of journal articles produced. At the very least, engineering innovations can be tied to the shuttle program, and we can't easily measure the political or social values of maintaining such a space program. $\endgroup$
    – Todd Wilcox
    Commented Aug 6 at 16:24
  • $\begingroup$ @ToddWilcox right but I wonder if it would be more efficient to just have the astronauts focus purely on mechanical work like helping deploy satellites/sensors and not try to do any "science". $\endgroup$
    – JonathanReez
    Commented Aug 7 at 20:10
  • $\begingroup$ The shuttle was a colossal waste of money and lives, that never delivered any of the promised savings to be derived from reuse. Much more science could have been accomplished by other means. $\endgroup$
    – jwdonahue
    Commented Aug 16 at 16:42
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Paper by William Bianco and Eric Schmidt Knowing What We Are Getting: Evaluating Scientific Research on the International Space Station starts with the very quote by R. Feynman you quoted as well.

Their conclusion mentions "Thus, to judge ISS research a failure because it has not yet produced break through results is to ignore the nature of normal science; by this standard, virtually all research would be judged a failure."

The paper reacts to repeated claims that the scientific output of the ISS has not been enough for the costs of the project. For example:
Critics doubt value of International Space Station science (2014)

Or more recent
‘It only makes the news when the toilets stop working’: has the 25-year-old International Space Station been a waste of space? (Guardian 2023)

The question of whether the ISS has been scientifically successful is certainly a topic of debate, and there is no definitive conclusion to this.

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    $\begingroup$ Apparently a common complaint over the years is that the process for getting scientific experiments onto ISS is very cumbersome, takes too long, and a lot of researchers eventually give up and don't even try. NASA tried to solve this by outsourcing the management of the ISS National Lab to the non-profit organization CASIS (Center for the Advancement of Science in Space) in 2011. Keith Cowing, founder of the NASA Watch website, has for many years documented the inefficiencies of CASIS as well as activities that can have the appearance of being self-serving to CASIS more than the national lab. $\endgroup$
    – Steve Pemberton
    Commented Aug 6 at 16:26
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    $\begingroup$ @StevePemberton A major issue is that the supposed advantage is the ISS allows hands-on crew time, to make experiments more robust when things go wrong. However, the time and expense of training crews, safety considerations, the game of telephone with Mission Control, and most importantly, the very limited crew time you do get really cancels this out. The Shuttle found flying an actual scientist involved fixed a lot of this, but Challenger severely dampened, Columbia ended this, and hasn't been revived with the ISS trend for long-duration $\endgroup$
    – user71659
    Commented Aug 7 at 16:42
  • $\begingroup$ @user71659 - Perhaps a glimmer of hope can be seen in the Axiom flights where the commercial astronauts (what they call themselves and I’m okay with it) carried out experiments that were taken up on the flights. And a couple of the Virgin Galactic suborbital flights had an experiment and someone onboard to monitor it. Seemingly miniscule, but it does provide a glimpse of an eventual commercial infrastructure for on-orbit science. $\endgroup$
    – Steve Pemberton
    Commented Aug 8 at 5:15
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While I'm not sure if anyone is maintaining a list of links to papers related to research done on the ISS, the ISSRDC conference (the 2024 conference took place in Boston from July 30 to August 1) is a good place to start looking for research that might be of interest to you. The sessions are on YouTube. If you find a presentation that looks interesting, the odds are good that the presenter will mention where the presented research was published. For example...

enter image description here

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