re: #204 danarchy

It isn’t about financial benefit, it is opportunity cost. It is a what if question so we can never really know, but if you had just given the money to NASA and let them decide how to spend it I don’t think the ISS is what would have won. The ISS was a diplomatic/political thing as much as a scientific endeavor.

The ISS is the child of “Space Station Alpha,” which itself was the child of Skylab and other 60s-era proposals for permanent space labs. And “Alpha” itself was NASA giving the Shuttle something to do, as the long list of compromises made to get that off the ground had turned the “reusable orbital U-haul” into a bloated white elephant that they were struggling to justify by the Carter era when programs like Pioneer, Voyager, and Viking were sending back reams of data for a lot less investment. Honestly, if Carter has been reelected or Mondale had been elected, odds are the SST would have been shit-canned after Columbia.