Thirty Years Of Fudge Could Bring Down The Shuttle Yet

At one of the Columbia hearings, the Shuttle program's manager during Shuttle development explained how 30 years of lying led to our current space program.

I was just surprised that the reporter was surprised, this has been known at NASA for years. Nixon wanted a cheap program without a single year big budget number and decided to sell Congress on how reusable shuttles made economic sense when they didn't. They were needed to build a space station that wouldn't be built until years later and the military needed a vehicle that could launch large spy satellites so they drew up the cargo bay specs.

The same fuging the numbers might be said of the space station. It was deliberated oversold then stretched out over years so there would not be a big budget shock - escalating costs astronomically.