Dale Bumpers: “It is a tragedy that the space station is what we call a freebie. You can go ahead and vote for this $100 billion…”

“It is a tragedy that the space station is what we call a freebie. You can go ahead and vote for this $100 billion boondoggle which will never provide any cures for any disease, will probably never even be used as a way station to Mars, that is opposed by every physicist in the world and not because it is totally worthless but because the money could be so much more effectively spent on other things. I pointed out this morning, and it is worth pointing out again, the cost of one launch of the space shuttle could pay to allow the National Institutes of Health to approve one out of every three applications for medical research instead of one out of four, just one launch, and there are 83 such launches to support the space station program. And every one of them is calculated to occur within a 5-minute window without a hitch. It is going to cost $94 billion in today's dollars and you assume that every one of those 83 to 90 launches is going to be split perfect. You think about it. Think about the enormity of such a promise.”