This month marks a milestone for the International Space Station. As of Nov. 2, there had been a continuous human presence on the orbiting lab-in-progress for exactly one year. Besides the three crews that have successively called it home, 14 spacecraft had visited. Eighteen space walks had been carried out. To all appearances, the ISS had overcome the construction delays and cost overruns that had long plagued it to become the space success story of the decade. Right?

Apparently, wrong. Also on Nov. 2, an independent task force jointly set up in July by the United States' National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Office of Management and Budget published its main finding. It was grim: The ISS project has spun out of fiscal control, the review panel warned, thereby losing credibility with both Congress and public in the U.S., the station's progenitor and principal backer. Without radical financial and management reforms, it said, NASA will run out of the money it has been allotted for the project. This would jeopardize completion of the station's assembly -- currently scheduled for 2006 -- and scuttle the chances of the ISS' major international partners, including Japan, to carry out planned onboard research. It might even affect the planned 2004 launch of the Japanese Experiment Module "Kibo," key parts of which have already been built.

What is going on here? Just four years ago, it was late-joining Russia that was being lambasted by U.S. critics as the "weak partner" whose inefficiency threatened the project's long-term viability. Now, it is the U.S. itself that is in the hot seat, thanks to self-confessedly poor management on NASA's part. Not surprisingly, those same critics have been quick to use the current sense of crisis as an excuse to redouble their calls for the outcome they have wanted all along: abandonment of the whole idea of a space station and redirection of space-agency funds to more glamorous goals: going to Mars, going to the asteroids, going, in short, where no man has gone before rather than shuttling back and forth to what they see as a glorified high-school lab just 400 km from home.