What's worse, the Space Shuttle, one of which blew up in 1986, is clearly a white elephant. The Shuttle is overly complex, over-designed, the creature of bureaucratic decision-making which tried to provide all things for all constituents, and ended-up with an unworkable monster. The Shuttle was grotesquely over-promoted, and it will never fulfill the outrageous promises made for it in the '70s. It's not and never will be a "space truck." It's rather more like a Ming vase.

Space Station Freedom has very similar difficulties. It costs far too much, and is destroying other and more useful possibilities for space activity. Since the Shuttle takes up half NASA's current budget, the Shuttle and the Space Station together will devour most *all* of NASA's budget for *years to come* -- barring unlikely large-scale increases in funding.

Even as a political stage-show, the Space Station is a bad bet, because the Space Station cannot capture the public imagination. Very few people are honestly excited about this prospect. The Soviets *already have* a space station. They've had a space station for years now. Nobody cares about it. It never gets headlines. It inspires not awe but tepid public indifference. Rumor has it that the Soviets (or rather, the *former* Soviets) are willing to sell their "Space Station Peace" to any bidder for eight hundred million dollars, about one fortieth of what "Space Station Freedom" will cost -- and nobody can be bothered to buy it!

Manned space exploration itself has been oversold. Space-flight is simply not like other forms of "exploring." "Exploring" generally implies that you're going to venture out someplace, and tangle hand-to-hand with wonderful stuff you know nothing about. Manned space flight, on the other hand, is one of the most closely regimented of human activities. Most everything that is to happen on