Supporters say $60 billion project will provide a unique lab; skeptics say the money would be better spent elsewhere

WASHINGTON, Aug. 21 —  When NASA launches a spacecraft into the cosmos, the mission usually flies with a long laundry list of results the space agency hopes to reap from it. But the $60 billion International Space Station — NASA’s costliest and most daunting venture yet — stands alone as a mission whose mandates cannot be readily determined.

Unlike robot probes

Probes dispatched to study the specific features or climate of another planet, the space station is an open-ended endeavor that NASA hopes will benefit Earth in ways that are impossible to predict. That makes it easy fodder for critics who ask, what’s the point?
       Sixteen years after NASA first started work on the project — with five more years to go before the station is completed — the 16-nation space station looms as one of the largest question marks in the space agency’s history. NASA has not scrutinized, analyzed or redesigned any other mission as much. None has been as technically challenging. Even before the first astronauts take up residence, the debate over the space station is shaping up like this: Is the station a boon for science or a boondoggle for taxpayers?
       “We don’t know what we’ll get up there, but we know some things that we’re looking for,” said Roger Crouch, NASA’s senior scientist for the space station. “A lot of it is basic investigations of physics laws … where you don’t have gravity smearing out the results. If you’re lucky, you’re going to find yourself pushing the envelope and you’re going to find unimagined things … to improve the quality of life on the ground.”

Measuring Mission Success

Crouch said NASA will measure mission success in three areas: crew safety, useful hardware and scientific results that are in line with peer review.
       “As far as breakthroughs or something leading to technology that can be integrated into Joe Sixpack’s life, that could take 10 to 15 years,” he said.
       That sort of wait-and-see philosophy steams critics like Robert Park, a physicist at the University of Maryland and spokesman for the American Physical Society, who argues the space station is draining money from more worthy space missions.
       “You can certainly hope for a breakthrough but it’s improbable,” Park said. “That money invested elsewhere is much more worthwhile. There are great explorations yet to be carried out at Mars or Europa and they won’t be done in our lifetime.

Three modules
       The station now consists of a Russian space tug called Zarya, a Russian command post and living quarters called Zvezda, and an American connecting tunnel called Unity, all orbiting 240 miles (385 kilometers) above Earth. Though the first live-aboard crew is due to arrive in late October for a three-month stay, scientific research won’t begin in earnest until a U.S. laboratory named Destiny arrives on a mid-January launch aboard the space shuttle Atlantis.

If all goes as planned, the station will be finished in 2005 and operate for a decade beyond that. With 100 pieces weighing 1 million pounds (454,000 kilograms), the station will have five and a half times the electrical power of the Russian space station Mir with four and a half times its living space. When it is completed, the ISS will measure 356 feet (108.5 meters) across and 290 feet (88 meters) long — the size of two football fields with a habitable volume of two Boeing 747 jumbo jets.
       Research conducted in six labs — built by the United States, Europe, Japan or Russia — will help assess how the human body reacts to long stays in weightlessness for a possible return to the moon or flights to Mars. Other experiments could lead to better drugs and treatments for cancer or other diseases. Still other studies of Earth from space could help scientists understand long-term changes to Earth’s climate and environment.
       Scientists also will study how flames, fluids and metals react in space and whether tests on certain materials in weightlessness can help improve earthly industrial processes. All these will take time, and for the public to expect quick and substantial results, Crouch said, “is a little like expecting a pinch hitter to hit a home run every time he comes up to the plate.”
       
A new environment
       What the station offers most, he said, is a new environment in which to study the world just as the invention of the microscope in the 16th century opened new doors into scientific research.
       “We’ve never had access to an operating laboratory of this type in space before,” said Mary Musgrave, a plant biologist at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. Her experiments on seed growth have been flown both on Mir and the shuttle’s Spacelab module.
       “The Mir and Spacelab programs provided only a glimpse. The International Space Station offers the opportunity to conduct research 24 hours a day, 365 days a year,” she said.
       Whether that research can produce good science is open to debate. Critics doubt that it can. NASA argues that the nascent station someday will yield plenty of scientific breakthroughs in areas ranging from medicine to engineering. They just can’t say what those might be or when they will come. As supporters see it, that sort of hedging is no different than the expectations for any general research laboratory on Earth.
       “You approach research in space in a similar way that you do on Earth,” said Ron Sega, a former astronaut and now dean of the college of engineering and applied science at the University of Colorado. “Some results are fairly dramatic and come early. Other times, it takes a long time.”
       The earliest results no doubt will come in learning how to operate and live safely aboard large structures in orbit. Long-term investigations, such as understanding how and why certain bodies of water are drying up on Earth, probably won’t be conclusive for years. Breakthroughs, if and when they happen, often are the result of basic research done years before.
       That’s why a learn-as-you-go routine is natural for a mission like the station, said Sega, who flew on the space shuttle in 1994 and 1996.

"You approach working in the station environment in a different way,” he said. “My two flights on the shuttle were short-duration flights of eight to nine days. … Your preparation is very task-oriented. In a longer-duration activity, you train for the skills needed with an eye to adapting. It’s very important that we see this as a laboratory and research work-in-progress, and people should view it in a similar way of doing high-quality research in a university or government lab.”
       As far as demanding instant scientific results, Sega said, “We don’t do that with labs here, we shouldn’t do that there either.”
       But critics contend the station’s biggest problem is that its objectives were never clearly defined from the start. That left it open to design changes they say have compromised its purpose. Outlined by President Ronald Reagan in 1984 as an $8 billion facility that was to be ready by 1990, the station has grown to include 16 nations in a project costing eight times as much as originally planned.
       “Its mission has never been very clear,” said Park of the American Physical Society. “Each administration cooks up a new explanation for it. … By the time it’s obvious nothing’s going to come out of it, we’ll have already spent the money. The space station stands as the single greatest obstacle to exploring space, and that’s kind of sad.”

If nothing else, the station gives NASA something it has not had in almost 20 years of flying the space shuttle — a home in space. But it also commits the nation, and to a lesser degree its international partners, to a course of aiming humans no higher than low Earth orbit.
       Crouch, however, said the sheer number of scientific investigations for the station — 100 to 120 experiments each year — virtually assures that the station will produce rewarding results.
       “We’re going to be doing research with the cream of the crop up there,” he said. “To me, we’ll start getting substantial results in even the first experiments that go up. We’re looking forward to this being a progressive step in our learning.”