A question about the ISS

I was wondering, if all of the recent problems on board the ISS eventually make it uninhabitable, would we still be responsible for paying off the money we agreed to contribute to that piece of crap? Or even worse, would we be obligated to contribute to a replacement?

The money and resources could be much better spent on something more serious than maintaining an orbiting international country club/russian tourist trap just for the sake of being multicultural. I would really like to see us put a permanent U.S. presence on the moon(possibly in the form of our own station) followed by a man on Mars within the next 15 years, and unshouldering useless burdens like the ISS could allow us to achieve that goal possibly years sooner than projected. I'm not saying its entirely useless, but we are certainly not getting back nearly as much as we're putting into it.

Then consider this:
Whole budjet of NASA is about 15 billion.
Same time your military budget is about 400 billion.
And even just Homeland security thing gets way more money than NASA.

www.nasa.gov...
www.defenselink.mil...# ("green book")
www.globalsecurity.org...

So here's your "expensivity" of space exploration.

[edit on 2004-7-2 by Teknik]