The U.S. Has Invested(?) $100 Billion in the International Space Station

And the Return on That Investment – 000,000,000 etc.

The problem with Conservatives who want to cut government spending is that they are never around when the nation needs them.  The grossest (in every sense of the word) example of this is the $100 billion and counting that the United States has spent to support the Space Station.

But NASA has been struggling for years to square ambitions with budgets. The space station is widely praised as an engineering marvel, but it didn’t come cheap. The United States has poured close to $100 billion into the program and is contributing about $3 billion a year to the station’s operation. Space policy experts warn that, without a significant boost in budget, NASA will not be able to keep running the station and simultaneously carry out new, costly deep-space missions.

The United States and its partners need to make a tough call: Keep the station flying? Or bring it down?

Tough Decision???? 

How can this be a tough decision.  What exactly has been the return on this investment, how is anybody in the United States except the direct recipients of the funding been made better off?

Of course, NASA is based in Texas, and Texas is controlled by Conservatives and Conservatives are unabashedly against government spending, except of course when they and their constituents are on the receiving end.  So there is a lot of blame to go around here, but it would be nice if just once the Conservative obsession with reducing government spending would focus on government spending that should be reduced.