Space station construction under way

Project symbolizes human spirit of adventure

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M E E T   T H E   M I S S I O N O P S   M A N A G E R CNN's John Holliman interviews Robert Springer, Boeing Operations Manager for the space station project Please Note: You will need Macromedia's Shockwave plug-in to listen to Shockwave streaming audio files and have Javascript enabled. We also recommend Netscape Navigator 3.0 or Internet Explorer 3.0.

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From Correspondent John Holliman

HUNTSVILLE, Alabama (CNN) -- Government officials and rocket scientists spent decades debating whether there should be a U.S. space station floating 240 miles above the Earth. Now, technicians are working seven days a week to build one.

The station is no longer an all-American project; budget pressures have forced NASA to take on partners. Parts are coming from factories in Russia, Japan, Europe and Canada as well as the United States.

One of the things people may not know about the space station is that big sections of it have already been built. If all goes according to schedule, the orbiting laboratory will be completed and circling the Earth by 2002.

Boeing won the role of primary contractor for the International Space Station in 1993. "The thing that's so neat about this program is that it is real hardware," said Ross Dessert, one of Boeing's project managers for the station. "This is something that's real. It's going to go up in orbit, and it's going to serve a real function for this nation."

Since the station was first proposed, one of the most common questions has been whether we need it. The companies making millions to build it say that we do.

"When we launch this station we are going to be able to conduct research, science, technology in a way that mankind has never seen before," Dessert said. "This is a fantastic capability, and I think it offers great hope for our nation and the world."

But critics in Congress and the private sector say the multi-billion dollar construction of an orbiting home in space is a waste.

Ralph De Gennaro, director of the federal government watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense, says the space station program is "about politics ... and giving money to our foreign partners."

"America has a space shuttle program that allows us to put humans in space on a regular basis and do lots of experiments, we don't need anything more than that," De Gennaro said.

NASA says the station will be used for medical and technical research, and claims that it will do everything from improving international relations to inspiring children. On top of that, they say, it will return two dollars for every one spent on the project.

People who make money from building space hardware have conducted surveys showing that Americans support space exploration. Rockwell International, for example, has commissioned an annual survey of voters every year since 1978.

According to their most recent results:

• 68 percent of American voters support a space station.
• 57 percent like the idea of building it with Russia and other countries.
• Three-fourths want to see humans in space over the long haul.
• 72 percent believe the United States is going about exploration in the right way.

When we took the issue to the streets of America, we found that people who support space exploration want the U.S. government to rediscover its spirit of discovery and adventure which, in the 1960s, led the country to spend billions of dollars on the space program.

When Apollo astronauts walked on the moon, the whole world watched. Some experts believe launching the space station will have the same effect.