AGU adopts, reconfirms positions: Space station

Abstract

The following is AGU's position statement on the Space Station and creationism, adopted and reaffirmed by the Council on May 26, 1994.A healthy and effective space program is of critical importance to many fields of geophysics. The Space Station defined in the President's fiscal year 1995 budget is designed to maintain human presence in space and to allow microgravity and life sciences studies. Although this version of the station is supposed to be less costly than the original Space Station Freedom, the American Geophysical Union (AGU) remains deeply concerned that the high cost of implementing the current station design will detrimentally affect NASA's science programs: Mission to Planet Earth, those in the space sciences, and others. The impact within NASA is already evident in that there are no resources identified for new space science missions in the projected budgets for future years. The situation threatens the viability of a balanced national space program. AGU is also concerned that the high costs of the station may detrimentally impact geophysical science programs of other agencies.