Space Pork

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With the public cool to the pricey project, sentiment grew to pull the plug on it. But history stepped in. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, U.S. spending on cold war weaponry began to dry up, threatening to push the defense industry into a recession. A way was needed to help keep aerospace contractors busy without relying on the Pentagon, and the space station was just the thing. In 1993, President Clinton ordered NASA to come up with a slimmed-down station that could include Russia as a cost-sharing partner. Even in a Congress raised on pork, such seeming make-work did not go down easily. In June 1993, Roemer introduced an amendment to cut off station funding. The measure failed, but only by a whisker, 216 to 215. In a partisan Congress, a one-vote margin is a tenuous thing, and in order to widen the gap, NASA turned to a time-tested budgetary strategy, spreading the wealth.

ISS supporters had not failed to notice that as close as the 1993 vote was, the delegations from Alabama, Florida and Texas were almost unanimous in their support, since it was in their states that much station work would be done. As early as 1992, NASA lobbyists had been descending on Washington with cheery charts and maps making the point that as the project grew, the money would seep out in countless directions. BUSINESS GETTING BUCK$, one map read, promising a "procurement constituency" of 40 states. After the 1993 vote, this hard sell only increased. "NASA approached this the way a defense project is approached," says Mehl. "I don't think pork necessarily changes minds. It's just an insurance policy."

If so, it's a policy that's paying off. The space station's prime contractor is Boeing, with offices in Seattle, Houston and Huntsville, Ala. In recent years, however, NASA has distributed the goodies to 67 other prime contractors and 35 major subcontractors in 22 states. Much of the most important work is being done on the home turf of some of Washington's key lawmakers. Boeing's Huntington Beach, Calif., facility, for example, is located in the district of Republican Dana Rohrabacher, chairman of the Space and Aeronautics subcommittee. The Alabama district of Democrat Robert Cramer Jr., of the VA, HUD and Independent Agencies subcommittee, is home to the Marshall Space Flight Center. Whether scattering space-station work this way has changed individual lawmakers' minds is impossible to say, but Congress has clearly grown to like the project. In 1994, the station's one-vote funding margin grew to a comfortable 278 to 155. In 1999, it was a landslide 337 to 92.

NASA administrator Daniel Goldin bristles at the idea that there is any cunning behind the selection of ISS contractors, insisting that the choices are dictated by economic realities--and his point has merit. With a project as big as the station, there's no such thing as one-stop shopping, and NASA must go where the companies are. "Under this administrator," Goldin says, "we actually streamlined the program."