(Jay Masino) writes:

AES/newspost wrote:
Little to completely negligible meaningful science actually done with or
on the shuttle;

That's a matter of opinion. There's are dozens, if not hundreds of small
experiments that are carried out on every shuttle mission that the public
doesn't neccessarily know about. I'm sure those scientists feel that
their work is worthwhile, and I suspect that the scientific community in
general does too.

"The truth is, [the Columbia flight] had finally been launched as much
to clear the books as to add to human knowledge, and it had gone
nowhere except into low Earth orbit...performing a string of
experiments, many of which, like the shuttle program itself, seemed to
suffer from something of make-work character--the examination of dust
in the Middle East (by the Israeli, of course); the ever popular ozone
study; experiments designed by schoolchildren in six countries to
observe the effect of weightlessness on spiders, silkworms, and other
creatures; an exercise in 'astroculture' involving the extraction of
essential oils from rose and rice flowers, which was said to hold
promise for new perfumes; and so forth. No doubt some good science
was done too--particularly pertaining to space flight itself--though
none of it was so urgent that it could not have been performed later,
under better circumstances, in the under-booked International Space
Station...[The astronauts] were also team players, by intense
selection, and nothing if not wise to the game. From orbit one of
them had radioed, 'The science we're doing here is great, and it's
fantastic. It's leading-edge.'

"Columbia's Last Flight" by William Langewiesche, The Atlantic
Monthly, November 2003.