The Space Shuttle Discovery is set to launch on yet another mission to the International Space Station and, finally, people are beginning ask why we’re wasting our time on this giant orbiting white elephant:
Once again, the shuttle Discovery is about to blast into space. And once again, it will dock with the International Space Station, and astronauts will continue the process of building the half-completed orbiting laboratory in a mission full of daunting challenges.
But the majesty of the first nighttime liftoff in more than four years, now scheduled for Thursday just before 9:36 p.m. Eastern time, will not dispel a question that has long been the subject of sharp debate among experts: What is the space station for?
In 1998, when its first components were launched as a replacement for the Mir, a worn-out Soviet-era relic, the station was billed as a manned science lab of nearly unlimited potential, with promises of advances in areas like pharmaceuticals thanks to the ultrapure crystals that could be grown in a microgravity environment.
It was to be finished by 2004, and it was to cost about $40 billion, shared by 16 nations, including the United States, Canada, Russia and the European Union.
Those goals are barely recognizable now. As the Columbia catastrophe forced a two-and-a-half-year delay in construction missions by the shuttle fleet, and as cost overruns and changing presidential administrations forced NASA to rethink its entire science mission, the station?s price tag has ballooned to $100 billion and the completion date has moved to 2010.
It’s time to stop orbiting the Earth and start moving beyond it.
