Research Feynman Famously Criticized the Space Shuttle Program for Not Delivering Any Value to Science. Did Things Improve in That Regard Since the 1980s Space Exploration Stack Exchange

research - Feynman famously criticized the Space Shuttle program for not delivering any value to science. Did things improve in that regard since the 1980s? - Space Exploration Stack Exchange #

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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 …

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.