Experiments in Space and Malaysia Bodoh

The Website starsacademy.com (http://www.starsacademy.com/) provides an opportunity for students around the world to send proposals for experiments to be conducted in space.

This gives opportunity for students worldwide to design actual experiments directly with scientist, engineers and participate directly in the implementation and experiment hypithesis.
Some of the notable experiments include, reproduced here from the website :

- From Australia, Glen Waverly Secondary School. Students design a spider experiment to determine if the spider will build a different web in space compared to Earth. The hypotheris is that the webs metabolic makeup will be impacted. The objective is to determine how spiders will adapt to life in microgravity.

- From China. Jingshan School, Beijing. Observe and experiment and characterize the effects of space flight on the development of silkworm eggs, larvae, pupae and adults during a 16-day space shuttle flight. Upon their return, the silkworms and the silk produced in space will be examined and compared to equivalent organisms and silk grown under identical environmental conditions on the ground.

In 2005, Members of the Electro-Physics Branch at the NASA Glenn Research Center and students from Hathaway Brown School conducted a 4-year experiment on polymers and how well different polymers can withstand the harsh environment of space.

On a more scientific note, NASA engineers are developing a space station experiment to help engineers design smoke detectors that are sensitive enough to catch fires early. The hypothesis is that smoke particles form differently in microgravity than they do on the ground. Fire in space can be devastating.

These examples cited above are verifiable from NASA's website.

Malaysian astronauts will be conducting the following experiments in space which "no one has done before".
- They will play "batu seremban" or "five stones" and spin traditional Malay tops in space.
- they would do batik printing and making teh tarik

Pray please inform the Malaysian public what the hypothesis of these experiments are for. What are we measuring ? Do please inform us, even it's the trajectory of a milky tea in microgravity and to determine if if complies with Newton's First Law of Motion.

If it does, then what ?

It seems again, Malaysia and her half-baked politicians, policy makers and official have done it again with it's utterly blind homage to form over function.

We are the laughing stock of the world and will continue to be.

Malaysians, look around you, look at your rural schools, visit the squalid rural medical facilities, deplorable social programs for the elderly and underpriviledge, count the number of public libraries we have, read about our contaminated water system, check out our crime rate and hear the plight of our underpaid police officers, visit our schools and see our teachers and children who teach and learn in sweltering humid tropical heat.
Then come back and rethink why our Government is conducting experiments on batu seremban in space.