THE beauty of juggling in space is that nothing ever falls or breaks. Not so back on Earth, where NASA has demonstrated it can only keep two out of three balls in the air at the same time. Faced with the competing demands of fulfilling commitments to the International Space Station (ISS), developing a new vehicle for human space flight and maintaining a robust science programme, NASA’s chief administrator Michael Griffin has chosen to drop science – something he pledged never to do.
This is bad news and Griffin knows it. It means that several science missions are on indefinite hold,…
