pretty much like the Shuttle. NASA will go to any lengths to justify spending tens of billions building and operating the ISS. It's a white elephant. Growing up in Huntsville near the Marshall Space Flight Center, I remember reading blurbs in the paper every year about millions being spent on "space station definition studies" (searching for a reason to build one) dating back to the early 1970s. Like most government boondoggles, the ISS was built as a pork program.

I'm currently working in a government office (as a civilian contrator). We're working to complete a document that we hope will influence the FY 2008 budget cycle. The DoD budget cycle is 2 years long and the FY 2006 budget request is already pretty locked down, so 2008 is the soonest we can hope to influence anything. Our goal is to have the systems in place by 2014. That's 10 years from now.

The government routinely does things over a long period of time. Look at the F-22 Raptor. Development work began on it about 20 years ago and it still isn't operational. Look at the interstate highway system - it began in the 1950s and the primary construction for the major routes wasn't finished until decades later. NASA has been getting about $15 billion a year for 30 years. What have they done with it?

Like I said in the above post about Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo, some steps are too big. Going to Mars is, IMO, too big a step to make without some incremental development. I know a lot of people have a romantic fixation with Mars. I hope to live long enough to see humans land there. I just believe we aren't ready to do so given the current state of the art, so developing the core technology and skills through some intermediate missions seems the right way to go. But then, what do I know? I only work with this stuff for a living.