Space stations for the United States: An idea whose time has come—and gone?

Abstract While the first space station in American culture was described in an 1869 work of fiction in the Atlantic Monthly, in the twentieth century the idea proliferated through all cultures as the sine qua non enabling technology for space exploration. In the latter part of the 1960s many in the leadership of NASA realized that the kind of resources that had been made available for the sprint to the Moon that was Project Apollo would not be repeated. They turned to advocating the development of major projects that would create for the United States a permanent infrastructure in space, and eventually the capability to leave Earth permanently. This involved as its centerpieces the development of an orbital workshop leading to a space station, and a reusable vehicle to transport people and cargo to and from Earth orbit with a modicum of efficiency. This found realization through the building of the International Space Station (ISS) at the end of the century. But even as ISS became a reality, on February 1, 2003, its role was made tenuous by the loss of the Columbia space shuttle and the grounding of the fleet. On January 14, 2004, moreover, President George W. Bush announced a reorientation of NASA's programs to emphasize a return to the Moon and a human expedition to Mars. In that context, he advocated the retirement of the Space Shuttle by 2010 and the ending of U.S. involvement in ISS before 2020. Suddenly, the space station had become irrelevant to American efforts in space. The history of space stations and their development over time, and what it portends for the future of space policy, is the subject of this essay.