Perhaps the most controversial aspect of the Space Station project has been its cost and the project's opponents and proponents frequently cite various figures to back up their claims. Here is a quick summary of what the project has cost so far.

President Reagan originally requested a space station that would have cost no more than $8 billion at 1984 economic conditions. This was the total development cost -- the cost of launching, assembling and operating the facility was not included so the budget only stretched to 1991, i.e. the year before launching the first station module into orbit. NASA was able to stay within budget (the first launch did slip by a year although the resulting cost increase only was $300 million) until 1987, when the agency reported the new "Dual Keel" design would cost more than $16 billion at 1984 economic conditions. President Reagan then approved a scaled-down "Phase 1" Space Station that would have cost $12.2 billion in 1988-94. Congress, however, still wasn't willing to allocate sufficient funding and the project again started to slip while the total cost kept rising. The 1991 redesign reduced the total cost to 1st launch back to $11.2 billion (1984 dollars). Again, the project's peak funding requirements turned out to be unacceptably high and President Clinton ordered another redesign in 1993 after the launch date had slipped to March 1996. The new International Space Station's first module was finally launched in November 1998. ISS had cost about $15 billion since President Reagan approved the program. This, then, is the "true" cost as defined in 1984.

The total cost will of course be much higher. In real year dollars, more than $35 billion will probably have been spent on ISS by the time the last module is launched in 2006. However, it is worth keeping in mind that the previous (far less capable-) Space Station Freedom design also would have cost an estimated $35 billion through March 2001, when the station's assembly sequence was to be completed. So the existing ISS design has more capabilities and costs less in the near term than Freedom, although the project has been stretched to save money.

WHAT WENT WRONG?

Politically, NASA must farm out the project to a zillion congressional districts and foreign nations to keep the project funded. That way, at least the political prestige, money & jobs resulting from the Space Station contracts will flow into as many districts as possible. Nothing wrong with this, of course, but both the Shuttle & Station design solutions have ended up being dictated by political concerns. Management and overhead costs end up being very high for this reason, and the situation is made worse because there isn't political enough support in Congress for a stable budget or multiyear funding. Until about 1994, Congress wouldn't "leave the project alone" because of frequent cost overruns, instead insisting on frequent changes and micromanagement which further increased the cost of the Space Station. As a result, the Station quickly evolved into a very large and complex system that constantly was on the verge of exceeding its budget (funding, weight, power etc.) since there wasn't enough resources to have decent design and funding margins like the Apollo lunar program had. The 1971-72 Space Shuttle was very similar in this respect. In fact, the Shuttle and Station were so ambitious, even all the money in the world might not have been enough to build a system that could meet all the objectives.

This lead to a trend towards single large multiuser programs in the 1970s and 80s. Before the Space Station, the Shuttle had to be the only US launch vehicle to justify its existence and because the United Station could afford no other launchers. The Station also evolved into a large multiuser platform. Lack of funding plus development delays and cost overruns meant many payloads gradually fall by the wayside. The Shuttle's orbital power module, reusable upper stage OTV "Space Tug" and other upgrades envisioned in the 1970s were never built. Instead, the space tug was postponed until the Space Station was approved but again, the OTV, Orbital Maneuvering Vehicle and free-flying platforms were cut to save money. At this point, in 1991-93, the Space Station project began to suffer from an identity crisis: what, exactly, was the project's main mission and goal? "It's about jobs on Earth!", according to NASA's PR material for the new International Space Station in late 1993. Even if the Shuttle and Station won't do most of the tasks envisioned for them back in 1972 and 1984, billions have already been invested in them and tens of thousands of jobs are tied to these projects. The Station has survived for years because NASA has tied its institutional survival to it. Try to untangle the mess, the argument goes, and the entire space program will fall apart because all the eggs are in the same basket.

Milestones in American/European manned spaceflight, 1980-2000. Compare this graph (and the accompanying budget below) to the timelines presented at the end of this page...

Today, it appears the huge cost of the Space Shuttle (STS) and Space Station (ISS) programs will prevent NASA from doing any other manned space projects such as lunar or Mars missions. The U.S. space budget has been fairly constant since the mid-1970s and is not expected to change in the foreseeable future. NASA is now spending about $3 billion a year on Space Shuttle operations plus another $2 billion+ on developing & building the final Space Station modules. When ISS becomes fully operational in 2006, the annual budget will shrink by a paltry $0.5-1 billion at most. In contrast, the 1986 National Commission on Space and 1989 Space Exploration Initiative reports estimated that NASA budget would have to increase by a factor of three or four to pay for a lunar or Mars exploration and colonization program.

Unless we learn to do human space exploration "on the cheap", the International Space Station will represent the end of manned spaceflight. There will be no successor to ISS, since the costs will be deemed too great.