President Reagan invited America’s friends and allies to join the program, which was called “Space Station Freedom.” NASA, moving at the speed of government, had accomplished nothing other than a set of design studies by 1993, when Bill Clinton was inaugurated. Under pressure from the New York Times, which was on a jihad against so-called “big science,” Clinton canceled the Superconducting Super Collider, which was then being built in Texas, and he nearly canceled the space station.
But with his usual sharp political instincts, President Clinton realized the space program had more supporters than particle physics, and that, in any case, he didn’t have much to fear from the physicists: They would, on the whole, burn Isaac Newtons’ and Albert Einsteins’ collected works in a bonfire in Harvard Yard before they would vote Republican. So he killed their program and kept NASA’s space station. At the same time, in order to satisfy his liberal base, he recast the space station as “outreach” to Russia.
(snip)
America’s space engagement with Russia has been, like so many other foreign-policy initiatives, beset by wishful thinking and by the desire to ignore the hard facts of power politics. No party or faction in Washington comes out of this looking good: not the George H. W. Bush realists who made Moscow’s space program dependent on U.S. funds; not the policymakers from the Clinton and Bush II eras, who embedded Russia into the ISS and the EELV programs; and certainly not the current administration, which seems to be even more lost in space than its predecessors.
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