CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- NASA might be scrambling to absorb an anticipated $4 billion International Space Station cost overrun, but an astronaut visiting the outpost said Tuesday that it's important to complete the complex as originally envisioned.
As it stands, the projected cost overrun has prompted NASA to stop work on a U.S. dormitory module and an emergency lifeboat, both of which are required to expand station staffing from the current level of three to six or seven.
The agency, meanwhile, says that at least six crew members eventually will be needed to maintain the station and conduct a robust scientific research program aboard the outpost.
And veteran astronaut Steve Lindsey -- commander of the visiting shuttle Atlantis -- said that the establishment of full research capabilities aboard the station would pay huge future dividends.
"I kind of look at the space station as an investment in our future that will pay off," Lindsey told SPACE.com's Andrew Chaikin in a space-to-ground interview. "I guarantee it."
Launched last Thursday along with a crew of four other astronauts, Lindsey guided Atlantis to a flawless docking at the international outpost a day later.
Since then, station flight engineer Susan Helms has led Lindsey on tours of the station's U.S. Destiny laboratory, where a suite of 18 research experiments already are under way."And that's with three people and major assembly going on," Lindsey said. "Imagine what she could do with six (or) seven people on the station."
Those experiments primarily deal with gauging the amount of cosmic radiation that astronauts are exposed to in space -- a key not only to future station operations but also to preparing for lengthy voyages to the Moon, Mars or beyond.
Medical experiments aimed at developing countermeasures to the potentially debilitating effect of long stays in weightlessness also are being carried out.
And Helms and her two colleagues -- outpost commander Yuri Usachev and fellow flight engineer Jim Voss -- are conducting "space farming" experiments aimed at growing plants and food crops on space stations, interplanetary spaceships or perhaps space colonies.
An array of other experiments are aimed at developing new drugs to treat human disease, and while no one can say for certain whether the research will be successful, Lindsey said it's still important to pursue them.
"Typically in research, you try can try 1,000 different things and 999 of them fail. But that one success might be the one thing out there, or the unexpected discovery that you make, that makes it worth taking the chance on all those 999 failures," he said.
"Space gives us a unique place to try things that we can't do on Earth. We have an orbiting laboratory with all kinds of capability now to do that kind of science, and if we can get (the station) fully populated and get all this science going, who knows what is going to happen," he added.
"But I can guarantee you it's going to pay off for us."
Lindsey and his shuttle crewmates passed the midway point Tuesday in a mission to mount, activate and inaugurate a new $164 million airlock at the station.
He and his crew -- which includes astronauts Charles Hobaugh, Janet Kavandi, Michael Gernhardt and James Reilly -- plan to depart the station Saturday and then land back here at Kennedy Space Center on July 23.
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