Thirty years later, a considerably less popular space program has the potential to push us past the current horizons of technology. The International Space Station is a 16-country effort to put a full- time laboratory in orbit, and human beings a few steps further down the path of exploring our universe.

Late last week the first of many components of the station, the Zarya Control Module, was scheduled for launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, assuming engineers conquered a thousand critical tasks needed to heft the 20-ton, 43-foot-long module into orbit. But before this ambitious program could get off the ground it faced withering criticism from legislators and the media.

Congress hammered the program earlier this year in the wake of a report that it could cost the United States $24.7 billion, or $7.3 billion more than estimated. The collapse of the Russian economy-and of that nation's ability to participate financially-has only made matters worse. Recently The Economist magazine said it was time to "scrap the space station," questioning what real contributions to physics, biology or astronomy an orbiting lab could offer.

It's not hard to find fault with the economics of the International Space Station, especially in a year of global economic turmoil. And it's easy enough to discount the elusive benefits of basic research in the micro-gravity environment of space. But the fact remains that particularly in the United States, where technology spending has historically been tied to the quarterly demands of Wall Street or the strategic demands of the defense industry, we need to bolster our support for long-term research and pave a route to tomorrow's techniques and applications.

Is the space station our best vehicle for that? Is this an observation deck on the new frontier of the next generation, or is there some other vantage point we should be pursuing? I think the technical community needs to broadly debate that issue, and I'd like to hear what you have to say at the address below.