After undergoing a change in both design and partnership, in 1993 President Clinton approved the plans for the finalized International Space Station on the premise that the station was economically, scientifically, and politically prudent. Advocates for the ISS ambiguously hailed it as the first in a series of steps towards the mission to Mars, though never citing the Station’s specific function in such an expedition. Others argued that NASA and the private sector could use the station for microgravity research and development of new products - an assertion adamantly contested by many in the scientific community. Supporters in Congress lauded the ISS as an ideal public works project that would create jobs and improve the government’s reputation in areas of high unemployment. Clinton, on the other hand, ambitiously viewed it as a means of helping integrate Russia into democratic society.

However, in February of 2004, with budget deficits soaring, President Bush declared that the ISS would be decommissioned and brought back to Earth by 2010. Citing its $50 billion price tag and lack of practical merit, the Bush Administration will decommission the station just a few years after its completion. The space station era of NASA, which painfully spanned four presidencies, will finally come to fruition in 2010. Perhaps a time will come when a space station will be integral to NASA and spaceflight, but at the moment, its only place is in science fiction.

The Space Station’s history has only proven to be one of unfulfilled hopes and expectations. In 1984 NASA proposed the 10-year, $8 billion Space Station program, knowing full well that many congressmen would not have supported a project whose cost exceeded the “scream level” of $9 billion. In order to gain the program’s approval, NASA manipulated its requested federal budget allotment so that it would be a low-balled estimate of strictly the costs of designing and assembling the Space Station. Congress accepted NASA’s pitch, yet by 1993 with “little hardware built and none launched into space,” $10 billion had already been spent on simply researching and designing the Space Station.

The project continued to be plagued throughout the 1990s by delays and rising costs, which were primarily a result of the emphasis Congress had placed on cutting the federal budget deficit throughout the Clinton and Bush administrations. In 1991, Congress mandated that NASA adopt an “incremental concept,” through which funding for the station and the agency was determined and allocated in ninety-day increments. With the Gulf War occupying congressional attention and funding early in the decade, NASA was afforded just enough money to keep ISS afloat but not enough to achieve any goals. Additionally, the uncertainty and financial constraint of the ninety-day budget cap completely prohibited NASA from planning any significant long-term vision.

Compounding the problem, NASA human spaceflight field centers frequently took advantage of the government’s commitment to the space station throughout the program’s lifetime. “NASA field centers viewed the space station as a major source of funding. Every call for new estimates found the centers requesting more funds, which would be spent more for institutional support than for components in space.” By 1999, with only two of the station’s components yet in space, the station’s total cost had swelled to $38 billion.

In addition to the financial complexity of designing and constructing ISS, substantial unforeseen maintenance costs were also discovered. This obstacle reached its highest intensity when a NASA investigating team reported that the station would require 3800 hours of maintenance annually from exposure to radiation and from collisions with floating debris. Considering that the station would be built over a period of several years, the finding was very disconcerting to NASA.

Despite the space station’s pecuniary drain on the government, Reagan and Clinton were able to economically justify its costs in three manners: the program would serve as a public works project and create jobs in regions of high unemployment; private firms could pay to do research and to process special materials on the station; and eventually the entire American module of the ISS could be sold to the private sector. But if the government was really interested in undertaking a public works project as substantial as the ISS, it should have invested more permanent and practical program. A more prudent program would be one such as President Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway System or President Roosevelt’s dam-construction program, both of which have had lasting effects on society and the economy. Moreover, once Russia became a central partner in the ISS, half of the jobs that would have been created in the United States were lost to Russia, and since the Columbia accident in 2002, much of the manufacturing for, and all of the launches to, the ISS have been done from Russia.

But that isn’t the only argument that didn’t pan out for U.S. policymakers. The rationale that the government would recover its costs from private corporations who would pay to do microgravity research and develop materials in space collapsed after Bush declared that the ISS would be completed and returned to earth once the other ISS partners complete their research around 2010. Bush’s declaration therefore prevents private firms from eventually purchasing or leasing the ISS from the government as had been originally proposed.

The purported scientific benefits that the ISS would afford can be nearly entirely discredited. Thomas Donahue, chair of the Space Science Board of the National Academy of Sciences, said of the ISS: “Don’t call it a scientific program. The Board sees no scientific need for this space station during the next twenty years.” Rather, the only significant scientific research that can be done on the space station is essentially limited to studying the effects of long-term spaceflight on the human body and psyche. Perhaps most importantly, though, the decommissioning of the ISS precludes it from ever serving as the grandiose intermediary station to Mars that advocates advertised.

Aside from economic benefits, international political considerations weighed in when deciding to undertake the ISS project. Clinton viewed a partnership with Russia and a multinational coalition with fourteen other nations as vital in the post-Cold War era. However, while the formation of an international coalition has in many ways helped strengthen the relationship between Russia and the United States, it has also caused tensions between the United States and the other ISS partners, who have been particularly unhappy about what Karl Leib, in Space Policy in the 21st Century, called “the unilateral nature of some American policy decisions relating to the ISS.” This partnership with Russia also strained relations between NASA and Congress. By the time the Russian Zvezda, the space station’s third component, was launched in 2000, the entire project had already exceeded its target completion date. More significantly to congressmen, the partnership with Russia meant a loss of thousands of jobs that would have been created in myriad congressional districts.

Clinton’s acceptance of the ISS hinged on the fact that it was economically, scientifically, and politically sensible, and it might have eventually proven to be so. Bush’s decree that the program will come to fruition in 2010, however, assures that the ISS will end as a complete failure. Not only will the economic and scientific goals set forth by the space station program never be realized as originally envisioned, but its political rationale has also suffered major drawbacks. Perhaps the space station was doomed to failure from its inception. It was an idealistic, impractical vision whose futuristic feel tantalized NASA and the government.

For now, at least, the space station will, and should, remain in the future.