Dale Bumpers: “Mr. President, first of all, let me remind my colleagues of how this all started. This is a classic case of a space…”

“Mr. President, first of all, let me remind my colleagues of how this all started. This is a classic case of a space station looking for justification. This chart shows where we started years ago, with a crew size of eight and a cost of $8 billion. Here are the capabilities we were told that the space station would have. First of all, it would be a staging base to go on to Mars with. Carl Sagan said that was a justification for it. He didn't think much of its research potential. But as a staging base to Mars, he thought it was a great idea. A manufacturing facility--make gallium arsenide crystals, I suppose; space-based observatory; a transportation node; a servicing facility, to service shuttles or whoever might come up to visit the space station; assembly facility--I don't know what they were going to assemble; a storage facility. One by one, every single one of those missions was eliminated as a justification for the space station. We have one remaining, and that is a research laboratory. So that is the reason you hear about how we are going to cure AIDS, cancer, and all these magnificent things that will happen in medical research in the space station--because that is the last only justification anybody can dream up.”