On 16 Jan 2004 17:23:33 -0800, (Hobbs aka
McDaniel) wrote:

Since a major point of the shuttle was to construct a
space station why didn't construction start with like the
third or fourth shuttle launch in the 1980s?

Neither the President (three of them) or Congress would fund a Space
Station until 1984.

Why didn't
more people question the absence of any serious station
plan then?

There was a cart/horse or chicken/egg problem to overcome. NASA
originally wanted to launch a Space Station on Saturn V rockets, and
use a much-smaller Shuttle to deliver crew and supplies to the Space
Station. That concept died when Saturn production was officially
killed circa 1971. In the absense of Saturn V to launch a Space
Station, NASA had to stretch the Space Shuttle to launch a modular
Space Station. But the politicians would not agree to fund the Space
Station until the Shuttle was actually flying. The Shuttle flew in
1981, Reagan's first year in office. By 1983, he was seriously
considering building a Space Station, and he officially gave the
go-ahead for Space Station Freedom in his January, 1984 State of the
Union Address. Then came Challenger and the drastically reduced
Shuttle flight rate, which made the initial Space Station designs
impractical, forincg one redesign after another until Space Station
Freedom was cancelled by Clinton in 1993. Some of Freedom was revived
as International Space Station in 1994.

I recall seeing lots of newspaper articles
in the late 1970s depicting how the fancy new space
station might look

There has been no shortage of Space Station stories in the popular
media since the first one showed up in Collier's in 1953.

and there was a lot of talk about
that sort of thing but it all faded away sometime BEFORE
the first shuttle launch replaced with an emphasis on
flying habit modules and labs in the shuttle cargo bay.
Or am I remembering wrong?

You're ignoring political reality, which was "we'll only fund one
major program at a time".

Brian