Word: iss
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...spent elsewhere. "With the Russians' delays holding up the U.S.-led International Space Station, the Americans have been pushing for this for a while," he says. "It should have happened three years ago, but the Russians kept it taped together until now out of pride." Chuckle not, NASA -- the ISS, already late and over budget before it's even habitable, should have half Mir's luck. "Say what we will about Mir's jalopy days, next spring will be 14 years for a station intended to last only five," says Kluger. "Most of those years were smooth and uneventful...
CAPE CANAVERAL: NASA's next delivery to Mir could be four cinder blocks and a set of socket wrenches. Russian and U.S. space officials, looking for ways to save a buck on the gargantuan ISS, said Wednesday they were now considering stripping Mir for parts, to be used on the new International Space Station. But TIME science writer Jeffrey Kluger smells an excuse to keep Russia's never-say-deorbit space jalopy up a little while longer...
...floating space commissary," he says. "The cost, in both Russian funds and talent, would be far more than the equipment is worth." In any event, there's plenty of time to decide what to do: The Mir's expected to stay up for at least another year. And the ISS's production schedule looks stalled again. After a mysterious alarm sounded in the cockpit, NASA delayed the launch of the space shuttle Endeavor and its cargo of an ISS connector-passageway named Unity, until Friday...
...pounds is supposedly bankrolling the work, it's American dollars that are really keeping it going. The project is also 14 years behind schedule and will probably slip further before construction on the 360-ft.-long, 460-ton skyliner is done. Worst of all, once the ISS gets into orbit, there are very real concerns about whether it will have anything truly useful...
Barring a catastrophe, there is little likelihood that the space station won't fly. Too much money has been spent and too much metal has been cut for it to be scrapped now. But however much work the ISS eventually does, the lessons it yields will probably be less scientific than bureaucratic--lessons about how, and how not, to get a project like this done. "Most of the functions of the space station have disappeared," says Alex Roland, chairman of the department of history at Duke University and a former NASA historian. "NASA is mortgaging its future for the next...