Metaphysically Speaking

June 24, 2008

I’d like to know about dark matter as much as anyone. And it sure would be swell if the United States made good on its word to fly the particle detector known as the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, or AMS, to the International Space Station, especially after it got 16 countries to foot most of the $1.5 billion construction bill.

With great fanfare -- press conferences with the Nobel Prize winner behind the project, etc. -- NASA flew a prototype on the shuttle 10 years ago. The agency agreed to send another AMS to the space station in 2002 or 2003 for a three-year study. Then came the Columbia accident, the decision to retire the shuttles and ultimately a cancellation of AMS’ ride to orbit.

Except that Samuel Ting, the Nobel-holding lead scientist for AMS, wouldn’t take no for an answer. He lobbied Congress. He got his international partners involved. He literally turned it into a federal case. And now, Ting's relentlessness may be about to pay off.

Last week, the House passed a NASA funding bill adding one more flight of the shuttle to deliver AMS to the space station. This week, it's the Senate's turn. On Monday, NASA chief Michael Griffin told a Senate oversight committee it’d run a few hundred million dollars for the extra flight, with one huge caveat: That figure presumes there is no extension of any shuttle equipment contracts. Griffin wouldn’t come straight out and say it, but what he means is that if the AMS flight is added on, there won’t be a shuttle available to mount a rescue mission. Since Columbia, NASA routinely adds the contingency mission to every flight.

That’s not to say that a crew tapped to deliver AMS to the station would be abandoned should the shuttle be too damaged to return to Earth. They could all use the station as a temporary shelter until folks figured out how to get enough Soyuz capsules to the outpost to fly them all back home. Or something along those lines. (At this part of the hearing it was NASA space operations chief Bill Gerstenmaier’s turn at obtuse.)

Griffin came back after the morning proceedings ended to clarify that maintaining the shuttle contracts past their cut-off dates would be prohibitively expensive -- something on the order of $3 billion to $4 billion, which “we don’t need to do to fly the final flight.”

No, all NASA needs to do is tell it straight: If AMS is the last flight, it’ll go without the safety net provided to all previous missions since Columbia. After listening to all the circumfusion, I think I have a clearer picture of dark matter, metaphysically speaking.