It takes several years to get an experiment onto the space shuttle, and during that time your experiment is carefully planned and meticulously designed. Because of that, you don't play a lot of 'what ifs' once your experiment is in space. You don't have the luxury to try a lot of different experiments to come up with the best science. It's more cost-effective, and it's probably the most efficient use of time to try many experiments like these on Earth first. Paulaitis' research focuses on polymers, and outer space promises to be a fertile new environment for creating them.
Polymers are very large molecules consisting of long, interconnected chains of smaller molecules.
These macromolecules are the basis for many important materials, including plastics, synthetic fibers and coatings. These chains then react with more monomers to form longer chains, and eventually the polymer. Invariably, the large polymer molecules will not mix with the much smaller monomer molecules, and the polymer separates or precipitates to form another distinct liquid or solid phase. This precipitation or phase separation slows down or completely stops the polymerization process. But scientists often want the polymerization process to continue, so that a particular polymeric material is produced.