I remember very well the initial launching of the ISS module. It was thrown up into orbit by panicking self interested groups afraid of cancellation of the ISS and Shuttle programs. It was thought (correctly) that once the building of the ISS was started, inertia would carry it forward. The shuttle had failed its design requirements in terms of its reliability, turn around time, and cost to launch. But it had been used as a requirement for building the ISS. So, now once the ISS is started the shuttle is required to be kept in business. We proceded to make all sorts of interlocking promises to international partners that made stopping the ISS building even more difficult.

What would have been the correct way to proceed? Very simply we needed a reality check. The space shuttle was too costly to use as a base vehicle for the most complex(by an order of magnitude or 2) engineering job every attempted in space. We needed to lower cost of orbit, proceed with improvements in communication and robotics, and automate as much as possible the building of ISS elements. We needed to accept that building the ISS with the shuttle was not practical and that would've forced us to go to the next generation vehicle to support manned space development. The cost has been high in both lost astronauts lives, delay in the natural development of the manned space program, and in national treasure.

Some will say this is hindsight, but plenty of people including myself saw the reality at the time and predicted delays and massive cost overruns were in the future. I wanted more emphasis on robotic probes in the short term with a long term project of developing a better way to orbit with funds saved by not building ISS. If this process had followed there is a good chance that we would already have our next generation orbital craft now and space automation and communication would be further advanced as well. We could probably have built a roboticized space platform that could have been doing science for years using expendable launch vehicles. With the new orbital capability we could then have added habitable modules to the science platform as well as supported moon and mars programs. Frankly we could be a decade ahead of where we are and have been returning more science the whole time.

Corporate welfare and politics with a lot of self interested decisions has wasted BILLIONS AND BILLIONS as Carl used to say.