Vacationers Welcome

Science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke envisioned 2001 as a year in which tourists would be vacationing in an elegant, spoked-wheel-shaped space station. In fact, this has been a bad year for the much more modest International Space Station, which President Ronald Reagan approved in 1984.

The crisis began in February when President Bush, trying to bring the station’s soaring costs back to Earth, proposed cutting its crew from seven to three. It makes good sense to reduce the project’s estimated completion costs, which have rocketed from $8 billion in 1984 to more than $95 billion today. But slashing the number of astronauts onboard would cut crew time devoted to science, the station’s supposed mission, by 90%.

Here are three better cost-cutting measures: (1) Allow space tourists to pay top dollar for a visit. (2) Open bidding on space station components to private contractors worldwide--and tough luck if those contracts don’t bring pork to a legislator’s district. (3) Ask the aerospace, engineering and biotechnology industries to subsidize the research that they are now pressing NASA to conduct onboard.

From a purely scientific standpoint, the idea of building a human home in space might have been best left to fantasy. After all, the $297-million Mars Odyssey spacecraft, scheduled to orbit the Red Planet next month, is likely to gather more useful scientific data than space station astronauts ever will. But now that NASA’s space station odyssey is nearing completion, Congress should at least ensure that it reaps some scientific return for the American taxpayer’s astronomical investment. Besides, we humans are romantic. We want that space vacation.