Requiem for The Space Station

Once upon a time, a space station seemed like a good idea. Back in 1984, when NASA first proposed to put a permanent house in orbit, it sounded like a logical next step for a nation gaining confidence in its new shuttle, flexing its space legs and preparing to go farther. After all, if we were going to send humans to Mars or back to the moon, the astronauts needed a place to assemble their giant spaceships; if we were going to monitor large-scale changes on earth, scientists needed a platform to watch from; if ultra-pure drugs and crystals produced in zero gravity were going to revolutionize industry, technicians needed a place to make the stuff. The space station was supposed to cost $8 billion and be ready in 1992.

That was then and this is now. In the meantime, Challenger exploded, Hubble blurred, and the prospective space station ballooned to a Tinkertoy-looking assemblage bigger than a football field with a price tag of $38 billion, which would require 3,700 hours a year of dangerous spacewalking to maintain. Recently NASA scaled back the space station, shaving, it said, about $8 billion off the cost, but the General Accounting Office pegged the price of this new space station at $40 billion. The long-term cost, the GAO said, could amount to $118 billion, which puts the station in the same league as the S&L bailout and the Advanced Tactical Fighter.

All this for a space station that does . . . nothing. In the interest of saving money, NASA planners stripped the station of its varied and often contradictory functions. No longer was it to be a truck stop or observation platform or metallurgical factory. The sole stated scientific rationale left for the station was to conduct biological research on weightlessness, but the plans originally omitted a centrifuge, the most important gadget needed to do that work. The National Academy of Sciences concluded that the space station had no scientific use at all. Which left as the main purpose of the station what cynics have suggested it was all along: to be a sort of WPA for the aerospace industry. In May the House Appropriations subcommittee accordingly cut the station from NASA's budget.

Vowing to restore the space station, Administration officials contend that science has never been the whole point of the space station. Rather it is intended to maintain American prestige (would that they felt the same way about health care, say, or the arts). That's the kind of thing we used to hear about the space shuttle when the rest of the space program was being consumed by its development costs.

There has always been a slightly strained air to NASA's pronouncements about the space shuttle, like the comparison of last month's Star Wars mission to a ballet -- this from an agency that has been to the moon and skimmed the rings of Saturn.