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Life and Physical Sciences Research for a New Era of Space Exploration: An Interim Report, NRC
"In response to requests from Congress, NASA asked the National Research Council to undertake a decadal survey of life and physical sciences in microgravity. Developed in consultation with members of the life and physical sciences communities, the guiding principle for the study is to set an agenda for research for the next decade that will allow the use of the space environment to solve complex problems in life and physical sciences so as to deliver both new knowledge and practical benefits for humankind as we become a spacefaring people."
Research in the life and physical sciences in the microgravity environment is important but I hope that they don't make the mistake of trying to hang the justification for the whole program on it as they have done in the past. The payoffs for this kind of work can be great, but predicting which particular line of research will result in the payoff is next to impossible.
I thought that the original shuttle/station plans came out of the planning for a mission to Mars, the thinking being that you needed the station for the Mars mission and the shuttle to service the station. Since nobody in the immediate post-Apollo administrations were willing to talk about Mars, the justification for the shuttle and station were based around the research that could be done in microgravity. With the exception of the life sciences work that directly impacts crew health for a long duration mission, that kind of research has always seemed to me to be a good secondary payload for an exploration program rather than the justification for the program itself.