The European Space Agency is hatching plans for a branding campaign aimed at making people more aware of the benefits of spending their hard-earned taxes on the International Space Station (ISS).
The list of products and technologies that have their roots in space research is long, from memory foam to the in-ear thermometer, but in a world struggling to pay the bill from the financial crisis the billions of dollars spent on space exploration are increasingly hard to justify.
The branding plan is an indication that space scientists are concerned about cuts to space agency budgets, and worried that their contribution to economic growth is not fully recognized.
"It frustrates people because we know we have a valuable asset," International Space Station Director at NASA Mark Uhran told Reuters at a conference in Berlin of scientists from the 14 nations backing the project.
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