Space development requires a huge amount of funds, and it is essential to gain the understanding of the public. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) must overhaul its research system and regain the trust that has been damaged.
This piece is a sobering example of how the trust and support of an entire country’s public of an agency/institution can be undermined by a spate of research misconduct scandals. The moral here is that institutions need to regard deteriorations in research culture as being an institutional risk. The investment in resourcing reflective practice in the responsible design, conduct and reporting of research results needs to be regarded as an area to make a strategic allocation of resources.
The experiment was conducted between 2016 and 2017. It involved 40 people being confined to a closed facility for two weeks with stress levels examined through blood tests and interviews to ascertain the mental state of the participants.
However, when it was discovered that blood samples taken from the participants had been mistakenly mixed up, an investigation team was set up to probe the matter. It was subsequently discovered that the results of interviews had been rewritten and that the team had falsified the report to make it seem as though three researchers had interviewed the participants, when only two researchers had done so. This can be said to be a clear case of research misconduct.
