Gravity experiments? Easier to do accurately in lower gravity environments, like away from the Earth? And we just so happen to have a nearly permanent laboratory in orbit, which was built and is maintained at tremendous taxpayer expense?
I thought this would be obvious from TFA. I should have been more explicit.
> And we just so happen to have a nearly permanent laboratory in orbit, which was built and is maintained at tremendous taxpayer expense?
Resources are finite, and even though they're not fungible, which current ISS experiment would you replace for this?
Also: https://link.aps.org/accepted/10.1103/PhysRevD.100.062003
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LISA Pathfinder (LPF) [10] was a drag-free interfer- ometer located at the first Lagrange point in space be- tween the Earth and Sun. It measured the differential acceleration between two gold-platinum test masses sus- pended in drag free control. By the end of its lifetime, it had surpassed both its requirements and those of its full scale model LISA [11]. Given the success of the mission, and in coordination with other system tests, a handful of days near the end of the mission extension were allocated to performing a dedicated big G experiment for the first time in space. However, because Pathfinder was not de- signed to perform this sort of measurement, it was known that systematics such as absolute distances would limit the results to no better than 1 % relative uncertainty.
I thought this would be obvious from TFA. I should have been more explicit.