Partners wanted to run research lab in space

摘要

Few births involve as much labour as that of the International Space Station (ISS). After 34 shuttle flights, 24 Soyuz missions, 43 visits by unmanned capsules, and well over US$100 billion invested by the United States, Russia, Japan, Canada and Europe, the station is now nearing completion. The final bits of hardware, including the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, a long-delayed cosmic-ray experiment, will arrive as early as February 2011, on the last space-shuttle flight currently budgeted for. Now, decades after the station was first proposed and more than a dozen years after construction began, NASA must find a way to make its part of the effort -by far the largest - worthwhile.