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To: Win Smith who wrote (420)	2/4/2003 12:06:21 PM
From: Win Smith	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 603

Future of the Shuttle Program Is Linked to the Space Station's nytimes.com [ what a mess, part 2. Clip: ] he space agency was authorized to take its "next logical step," building a space station, in 1983. But support was shallow. Scientists disputed NASA's claims of the station's value in most research. Few commercial applications for low-gravity technologies could be identified. Within a decade of fitful development, the American station program came within a single vote in Congress of cancellation. Then, with the cold war over, the administration of President Bill Clinton came to the rescue by negotiating an agreement for the Russians to participate in the construction and operation of an international station. This was seen as a means of giving Russian scientists and engineers something to do, to keep them from selling their services to undesirable governments. At the time, John Pike, director of space policy for the Federation of American Scientists, made a prescient observation. NASA, he wrote, "was in a race against the clock" to complete the station, "or a substantial fraction thereof, prior to the next shuttle accident." Continuing, Mr. Pike predicted that the "presence of some sort of space station in orbit would surely bolster the case for returning the shuttle to flight status after the next accident." Further, he said, the inclusion of Russians and other nations in the project would spread the costs and give the shuttles steady work in the cause of international cooperation. Four shuttle missions this year and in early 2004 were supposed to go a long way toward completing construction of the station's core facility. But the station remained under a cloud for budget overruns and lax management, a chronic problem for more than a decade.