Space Station Freedom

Space Station Freedom was a NASA-led, multi-national project proposed in the 1980s to build a permanently crewed space station in low Earth orbit. President Ronald Reagan announced the plan in the 1984 State of the Union Address, and the station was named Freedom in 1988. It was meant to serve as a repair shop for satellites, an assembly point for spacecraft, an observation post, a microgravity laboratory and a factory, and was to involve NASA, the Japanese space agency NASDA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency. Costs and schedules grew, funding was repeatedly cut, and between 1984 and 1993 the design went through seven major redesigns, losing capacity each time. No Shuttle assembly flights were ever launched for it. About 11 billion dollars had been spent when the program was cancelled in 1993, when the Clinton administration merged it with Russian plans to form the International Space Station. About ten percent of the hardware designed or built for Freedom became part of the new station.