Castle in the Air

There’s no use belaboring the point. Only the naive or the vested still maintain that there is any good pragmatic reason to spend the tens of billions of dollars it will take to complete what started out in the early 1980s as Freedom and now endures as the International Space Station. Assuming the project survives the vicissitudes of Russian financing, by 2002 the United States and its partners will have sent 460 tons of hardware spanning an area the size of two football fields into a 250-mile-high orbit at a cost of roughly $50 billion. Although the sheer size of the project has spawned many superlatives--the most costly single object ever built, the biggest engineering-construction project since the pyramids--the engineers and scientists from the United States, Canada, France, Japan, Russia, and ten other countries now laboring to bring it to completion must be a melancholy bunch. Is it possible to ...