Who Needs This?

If Russian cosmonauts aboard the soon-to-be-launched International Space Station find themselves running short of borscht, there will be a very good reason: the technicians on the ground ate it all. The Russian space agency has been running on fumes since the end of the cold war, but never more so than in the past few years. Employees at the Baikonur space center in Kazakhstan often go unpaid and sometimes slip away at the end of their shifts taking pilfered electrical components with them. Some of those employees, less interested in fencing stolen goods than simply eating a decent meal, have even broken into provisions intended for cosmonauts and made off with as many cans of borscht--and as many rations of vodka--as they could carry.

There's something darkly comical in watching the once feared Russian space agency reduced to such pratfalls, and there was a time when U.S. officials might have enjoyed the show. But Washington is not laughing, and with good reason. On Nov. 20, the first piece of the 16-nation, NASA-led International Space Station is set to be launched from Baikonur--marking the start of an eight-year construction project that ranks as the greatest peacetime engineering job in history--and a bankrupt Russia is only one of the problems it faces.

The station is three or five or 12 times over budget, depending on who's counting the fiscal beans, and while everything from rubles to yen to pounds is supposedly bankrolling the work, it's American dollars that are really keeping it going. The project is also 14 years behind schedule and will probably slip further before construction on the 360-ft.-long, 460-ton skyliner is done. Worst of all, once the ISS gets into orbit, there are very real concerns about whether it will have anything truly useful to do.

Barring a catastrophe, there is little likelihood that the space station won't fly. Too much money has been spent and too much metal has been cut for it to be scrapped now. But however much work the ISS eventually does, the lessons it yields will probably be less scientific than bureaucratic--lessons about how, and how not, to get a project like this done. "Most of the functions of the space station have disappeared," says Alex Roland, chairman of the department of history at Duke University and a former NASA historian. "NASA is mortgaging its future for the next 20 years."

The International Space Station wasn't always so complex a beast. The idea of a permanent U.S. orbital platform was first proposed by Ronald Reagan in his State of the Union address in January 1984. For all the station's great size, Reagan envisioned it as a fairly fat-free piece of engineering: a lean, $8 billion cluster of modules that could be manufactured on the ground, be assembled in space and go into service by 1992. Orbiting Earth 200 miles up, it would serve as a flying laboratory for inventing new materials and conducting pharmaceutical work. More important, it would help scientists study the physical effects of extended periods of weightlessness, a necessary prelude to interplanetary missions. "Our principal goal," says Daniel Goldin, NASA's current administrator, "is getting to Mars."