WASHINGTON -- When President Reagan first proposed it, the International Space Station was supposed to cost $8 billion.
Through the years, that number climbed like a rocket, even though the station design shrank in size and scope. At one point, the General Accounting Office, Congress' investigative arm, estimated the bill for the orbiting research platform and the shuttle flights to support it was approaching $100 billion.
Today, the Bush administration says the end of the station's construction is in sight and only $6.6 billion more is needed to get there.
"Just take what you spent through (2002) and you add it to $6.6 (billion), and that's your number," NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe told reporters during a breakfast meeting recently at agency headquarters.
So what's the total cost to taxpayers?
"Let me get back to you on that," said the agency's comptroller, Steve Isakowitz, seated next to O'Keefe at the same meeting.
A spokesman, reached later for clarification, said NASA now projects it will have spent $24 billion to build the station, $1 billion below the cost cap Congress imposed two years ago.
However, a tally of the known appropriations Congress approved for the station from 1994 through 2002 added to the Bush administration's projected $6.6 billion in spending through 2007 results in a sum of $25.9 billion, nearly $2 billion more than NASA now claims. Even Allen Li, a respected GAO analyst who devoted years to the space station's elusive budget trail, isn't sure yet.
"I can't tell you," Li said. "My team is looking at this now. We won't have anything public until spring."
One important factor in calculating the project's total cost, excluding shuttle launches to ferry people and materials to the orbiting research center, is the $11.2 billion spent from 1984 through 1993 on President Reagan's Space Station Freedom concept.
In 1993, the Clinton administration canceled Freedom, approved a new station design, brought Russia into the project as a full partner, and told Congress it would cost $17.4 billion to build a permanent home for a team of six to seven astronauts and cosmonauts in low-Earth orbit.
The original $11.2 billion was just sort of swept under the rug.
"What's sad about the space station is that it kind of set the standard on lax accountability and huge cost overruns even before there was an Enron," said retiring Rep. Tim Roemer, D-Ind., whose annual fight to cancel the project came within a single vote of victory in 1993.
In recent years, the pro-station votes mounted and Roemer resigned himself to the quixotic pursuit of slaying the beast he mockingly dubbed the "International Sucking Sound . . . groping for tax dollars all over the world to pay for inefficiencies, overruns and bloating."
Longtime observers welcomed O'Keefe's efforts to improve NASA program management but remained frustrated at the question mark still hovering over the space station project.
"I applaud Mr. O'Keefe for the work he has done to rein in expenditures and get some real accounting under way at NASA," said Rick Tumlinson, president of Space Frontier Foundation. "Of course, taxpayers deserve to know the real costs, not the fudged costs. This program has been pitched for almost two decades. If we're to be able to judge the value of what we get out of the program, we need to be able to judge it against the costs."
Published under license from FLORIDA TODAY. Copyright © 2002 FLORIDA TODAY. No portion of this material may be reproduced in any way without the written consent of FLORIDA TODAY.
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