<Roy Bridges, director of the Kennedy Space Center, says the space station is a complicated piece of hardware built by several different nations. Some components are never put together until they get into orbit. Just about everything is custom-made -- there's hardly a screw or bolt anywhere on the station that's off-the-shelf.

Some of this may be necessary but a lot of the customization likely falls into the category of "gold plating". We have had that problem in the military for ages when people drive specifications to the point where the costs skyrocket. So, hardly a screw of bolt anywhere is off-the-shelf? Why? Are they going to try and say that everything on the ISS was so specialized that virtually no off-the-shelf components made anywhere in the world would work? Color me very skeptical on this claim.

Remember the horror stories of the $600 hammers and toilet seats in the military? They came from this same gold plating tendency. Someone would decide that existing parts might be 99% capable of doing the job but that 1% would be a deal breaker. Rather than designing systems to use existing parts, they'll overdesign the system until no existing parts would be acceptable. As a result, everything had to be made in very small production lots, frequently by hand or by specialized machines. The results were that an AN spec bolt that might cost $5 was pushed aside in favor of a specialized part costing hundreds, even thousands of dollars. I've seen it too many times to believe it's always necessary. This is sometimes referred to as the 90-10 rule, where 90% of the costs are driven by 10% of the specifications.

Back in the mid 1980s when the space station was first proposed, I remember hearing engineers automatically discount any ideas that didn't require a lot of expensive new R&D. They weren't as interested in building a space station as they were in keeping the R&D gravy train going as long as possible.

Perhaps one problem were unclear goals for the space station from the beginning. I remember reading articles in the Huntsville Times dating back to the 1970s about multimillion dollar study contracts being let for "space station definition studies." In other words, NASA was spending millions year after year trying to find a reason to justify building a space station. Then, when Reagan gave the go-ahead to build Freedom, it seemed unclear what the actual mission should be for the system. Based on those previous conversations with the engineers, it seems their goal was to spend whatever it took to develop new technology. Actually building and flying the station was secondary.

I would've preferred that the primary goal was to actually build a functioning and practical space station, with the secondary goal of developing new technology whenever necessary. My side lost that argument and the result is the ISS we have today: years late, billions over budget, reduced in scope almost to the point of uselessness, and facing a skeptical public and Congress to throw more money down that rat hole.

Given NASA's dismal track record of managing big budget items, anyone who thinks they're likely to get the money necessary to send people to Mars is kidding themselves.

"Nobody's ever built a space station before -- there's really not a lot of cost models out there," Bridges said.

Oh, really? Funny, I seem to remember Skylab, Salyuts 1 through 7, and Mir. Tell me again how no one has ever built a space station before. Sure, no one has every built one on the scale of the ISS before. Maybe there's a reason for that - perhaps it wasn't necessary to build a space station as big or complex as the ISS to accomplish what they need to do. Nah, couldn't be.