What's especially interesting is that NASA totally rejects this same "we should throw good money after bad" argument when it comes to its unmanned space projects. Over $580 million has already been spent over the last decade on the Gravity Probe B satellite to test Einstein's theory of general relativity. The satellite is virtually complete, and scheduled for launch later this year.

But the satellite has now run into still another in a long series of technical problems, which will add another $36 million to its cost -- and NASA is now very seriously studying whether GP-B should be canceled, even at this very late date, simply because it now thinks that the science return from it may no longer be worth the remaining $104 million needed to complete and launch it.

If it had used this same reasoning -- or anything remotely near it -- on its manned program, both the Station and the Shuttle would have been canceled long ago.

What's keeping the Station and the Shuttle going at this point?

Firstly, the value of the two programs as pure pork.

To quote Sen. Bumpers: "What really keeps the Station alive is the politics and the deep pockets and influence of aerospace contractors on Capitol Hill. The Station represents a textbook case of corporate welfare. NASA and its contractors have torn a page from the Pentagon's play-book and scattered Station contracts across 46 states. That ploy increases costs, but it also increases the number of senators with a stake in keeping the project alive."

And, as Glenn Easterbrook observed after Columbia's destruction: "Aerospace contractors love the fact that the Shuttle launches cost so much...Keeping prices up was a higher priority than having a sensible launch system... In return for failure [after the Challenger disaster], the Shuttle program got a big budget increase...'Reforms' were left up to the very old-boy network that had created the problem in the first place and that benefited from continuing high costs. Concerned foremost with budget politics, Congress too did its best to whitewash. Large manned spaceflight centers that depend on the Shuttle are in Texas, Ohio, Florida and Alabama. Congressional delegations from these states fought frantically against a [cheaper] Shuttle replacement.

"The result was years of generous funding for constituents -- and now another tragedy. The tough questions that have gone unasked about the Shuttle have also gone unasked about the Station, which generates billions in budget allocations for California, Texas, Ohio, Florida and other states...So far as I can tell, to Congress the mission of the Shuttle is not to fly to orbit but to deliver pork to constituents.

"That members of Congress aren't calling for cancellation of the program seems a kind of ultimate cynicism: Who cares if it blows up or accomplishes anything commensurate with cost? All we care about is getting the money," wrote Easterbrook.

And the fates of the Shuttle and Station are now stuck together like Siamese twins: cancellation of either one means cancellation of the other -- and the instant and traumatic end of fully 40% of NASA's $15 billion annual funding make it much harder for Congress to cancel either one of them.

However, a bigger factor at this point may be classic "political inertia" -- the simple fact that publicly confessing that you made an error of this magnitude is the kiss of death for any elected politician or appointed government bureaucrat.

Quoting former Microsoft chief technology officer Nathan Myhrvold: "How can you change direction without at least an implicit mea culpa that the Shuttle was a bad idea? And once you go there, it is only a short distance from saying (or implying), 'Yup, that great crew did die in vain.' Now, that is one hell of a lot of crow to eat. What person -- whether in Congress, the White House, or elsewhere -- wants to stand up and say THAT to Congress and the American public?"

Planetary geologist Jeffrey Bell of the University of Hawaii puts it more brutally: "Admitting that Shuttle [and Station] is a failure would discredit all the people who told the Big Lie."

Finally, to quote former NASA historian Alex Roland: "In the same way that the Shuttle was [deliberately] intended to get so much cost in it that you couldn't cancel it, the Station has now reached that critical mass. And added to that, NASA intentionally added foreign partners, not only to share the cost, which was already over budget, but to make it politically invulnerable. That is, it would be difficult for Congress to cancel the Station because so many other foreign partners were involved in it."

Those foreign partners in Europe and Japan are indeed now raising hell at any whisper of a suggestion that the Station should be canceled -- because such a cancellation would force them to admit to their own voters that they had made a serious mistake.

Finally, it should be noted that -- after former Administrator Dan Goldin was forced to resign because he could no longer conceal the fact that his plan to reduce the Station's costs by involving Russia in the program had been a total failure -- the Bush Administration had tremendous trouble finding any replacement for him, to the point that they even tried to hire a headhunter for the purpose.

Every candidate they approached who actually had any decent reputation for understanding science and technology hastily shied away from the post, precisely because they DID have such knowledge -- they regarded taking on the directorship of NASA at this point as the equivalent of parachuting onto the bridge of the Titanic.

Thus Bush was finally forced to select as NASA's head O'Keefe -- an accountant who has virtually no scientific or technical background, and who can thus be easily led by the career NASA bureaucrats he relies on for scientific and engineering advice into swallowing their arguments in favor of continuing the manned space program (and other expensive new NASA initiatives, such as nuclear propulsion for deep space probes) even when those arguments include glaring factual errors.

For all these reasons, to quote Roland: "For better or for worse, we probably are stuck with [the Station], and we'll have to find some way to make use of what we've done."

But if we are so stuck, how can we possibly finish building and running the Station -- for whatever trickle of benefit we get out of it -- without continuing to fly the Shuttle despite its innate and uncorrectable dangers, and thus endangering future crews until that highly probable moment when we lose a third crew (and maybe a fourth one)?

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