This week, as usual, I am going to write a column that says at its head, "Borderlands of Science." However, after reading it you may decide that my subject is not so much science as the illusion of science.

A few weeks ago I said unkind things about the largest space project in existence. Specifically, I referred to "the half-finished clutter of orbiting junk known as the International Space Station." Harsh words, and not surprisingly I was called on them. I was asked, how can you, someone who has been involved in space exploration for many years and who believes that science is crucial for the future of this country and the world, be against the Space Station?

Well, I didn't used to be. When the Space Station was first promoted and given a strong presidential push, I was as pleased and excited as anyone. Read these words: "We can follow our dreams to distant stars, living and working in space for peaceful, economic, and scientific gain. Tonight, I am directing NASA to develop a permanent space station, and to do it within a decade."

That was President Reagan, giving in January of 1984 a strong and stirring speech that was inevitably reminiscent of President Kennedy's 1961 commitment to put a human on the moon before the end of that decade. When a book about the Space Station came out in 1985, I endorsed it heartily and gave it an enthusiastic cover blurb. Now it's 2000, six years after President Reagan's deadline for completion, and although we have bits and pieces up there in orbit we in no sense have a working space station. What happened since 1985 to change me from an advocate to a jaundiced cynic?

Many things. Let's begin with one that concerns all of us: money. The original cost estimates for building a space station were wildly optimistic. Eight billion dollars may sound like a lot - it is a lot - but for a government program, where caution and safety are paramount, it's not nearly enough. The projected cost rose steadily from that first estimate. Now we're over forty billion, and counting.

The escalating price tag led to what seemed like a smart idea. Rather than the United States footing the whole bill, let's bring in partners in Europe and elsewhere who will split the cost and be allowed to use the station. Instead of the U.S. Space Station, it will become the ISS, the International Space Station. With the end of the Cold War and the breakup of the Soviet Union, Russia seemed like a logical partner. Their Salyut space station was much smaller than the planned ISS, but it had been occupied from 1971 well into the 1980s. It had been followed by the Mir station, still in use. The Russians had more experience in long-duration space missions than the rest of the world put together.

Unfortunately, during the 1990s Russia went broke. Not totally broke, perhaps, but without the money to pay for their contribution to the ISS. The United States has been forced to provide funding to Russia, in order for them to produce their piece of the ISS. In essence, we're paying their share.

At the same time, the Space Shuttle is absolutely essential for carrying to orbit and assembling the pieces of the ISS. In today's plans, every one of the shuttle orbiters will be needed. Meanwhile, the shuttle fleet is 20 years old and aging fast. If we lose the use of even one, not necessarily in a Challenger-like disaster, the ISS program schedule will fall apart.

In the middle of all these worries, the people responsible for the ISS were scratching their heads and trying to answer a more basic question: When we have this thing in orbit, what are we going to do with it? A broad survey of the leading scientific organizations in this country came up with a discouraging answer. The ISS was (and is) viewed largely as a political, not a scientific exercise, providing many jobs in many states and for that reason politically unstoppable. But scientists could find little for the ISS to do that couldn't be performed better and less expensively in some other way. Most of them were flat out against it, because it was draining money from better programs.

Oddly enough, this was true even in the life sciences. The vast increase in the power and versatility of computers makes free-flying unmanned missions more feasible, and lessens the value of a manned space facility. Experiments which once were impossible without a human presence can today be run by automated computer-controlled equipment. Human needs for air, food, water, waste-disposal, and safety measures make it almost an axiom that if there's any way that you can manage experiments in space without humans, you should.

Let me put all these issues together. My final answer to the question, why are you against a space station, is simple. I'm not. I'm just against this one. I would love to see a real space station, stripped of its pretensions to be all things to all interest groups, and designed to address one basic issue: Can humans live and thrive in space, not for a few days or weeks but for many years? Will we be able, not now but at some time in the future, to "follow our dreams to distant stars"?

It shouldn't cost tens of billions of dollars to build a habitat in space to address those questions. Unfortunately, we seem determined to spend more and answer less.

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