Re: ISS and Shuttles
This seems silly for what we get out of it. What's the cost of a Mars lander mission, compared to a Shuttle flight. And I don't see anything coming OUT of the ISS.
"The suggestion was that shuttles would fly every week at a cost of $14m a pop. In fact, the four-to-six launches a year that the agency now manages cost roughly $400m each. The space station, meanwhile, was supposed to cost $8 billion when it was first assessed in 1984, and it was meant to take a decade to build. The total cost of the project, when it is completed (which is not yet), is now put at some $100 billion."
Arf