No Bargain Fare To Mars

Early Friday morning, the space shuttle Endeavour took off with a critical piece of the planned international space station, launching life to the dreams of space enthusiasts. CBS News Correspondent Sharyl Attkisson reports.

It will take more than 40 American shuttle flights and Russian launches to complete the space station. But at $54 billion, the project comes with a much higher price tag than originally anticipated.

Depending on who you talk to, the space station is either the key to sending scientists to Mars or a financial black hole.

"The space station is the essential stepping stone if man is to return to the moon or eventually send scientists to Mars to look for life there," says John Pike of the Federation of American Scientists.

In one of the most complex and dangerous engineering projects ever, spacewalking astronauts will connect a U.S. module with one launched by the Russians two weeks ago. NASA also has to contend with the gravitational pull of politics and critics who say costs must be capped.

"One of the biggest scams that has taken place in the last 8 or 9 years is NASA keeps coming back and coming back and coming back with cost overruns to the tunes of hundreds of millions of dollars," said Space Committee Chairman, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.

The space station was supposed to have been finished by 1994 at a cost of $8 billion. Now, construction of the space station won't be done before 2004, and the price tag is more than six times that initial cost.

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It's been an ongoing controversy on Capitol Hill, where some in Congress have tried unsuccessfully to impose spending caps on the space station.

All of the problems have tested even the most ardent station supporters like John Logsdon, who studies space policy.

"No one would hold up the international space station as how to dsign and manage a program," says John Logsdon, Director of the Space Policy Institute.

But he argues it makes no sense to limit future spending.

"The idea that somehow you're going to cap costs now, not invest in using it now that we've committed to building it, seems to me to be rather stupid policy," Logsdon says.

Hearings are planned for February, and even the staunchest space station supporters have admitted that the program is fraught with the possibility of cost overruns and delays.

What bothers members of Congress is that America is the one paying the bulk of the tab on the space station. It was intended to be more of an international project than it is, and other nations were supposed to be picking up more of the cost than they have so far.

NASA is aware that Congress will be watching its every move during the five-year construction of the space station. Many experts believe the fate of the entire manned space program rests with whether the space station is viewed as a success.