There’s a fairly good overview of the current space station situation, with some history, over at the Orlando Sentinel today.

However, the story is a little incomplete and in one case misleading. It discusses the station as though its purpose was always just about science, which is palpable nonsense, though certainly its supporters like to say, and even imagine that it was. It was about jobs, and votes, and international relations, and even national security. (The Russians were brought into it in the ’90s partly in the hopes of keeping their engineers busy, and out of the pay of Saddam, Kim and the Iranian mullahs. It didn’t work all that well.)

Here’s the misleading part.

One potential source of money that NASA has tried to attract — commercial customers — never responded enough to make a major difference.

One would infer from reading this that there was never any commercial interest in using the station. The reality is that there was never any serious NASA interest–they went through the motions out of deference to Congress, but they were never willing to do any of the deals that were brought before them. Just ask Bob Bigelow and others. NASA has put so many constraints on any commercial deals (banning, for instance, advertising of any kind) that it would have been surprising if any deals had been done. But to blame private enterprise for this failure is to rewrite history.

The space station program has been a disaster from its inception, because there has never been any clear understanding of why we were building it. As the Cheshire Cat said, if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there. NASA and the space station seem to have found a cul de sac.