Wit & Attitude Quote by Larry Niven

Niven’s jab lands because it treats a sacred cow of “big science” with the moral seriousness of a punchline. The space station, in public imagination, is the one shining cathedral in orbit: international, singular, expensive enough to prove we meant it. Niven flips that prestige into a liability. “For everyone” isn’t idealism here; it’s a design flaw. The word “insane” is doing deliberate work: it’s not a mild policy critique, it’s a diagnosis of a system that confuses cooperation with centralization.

The subtext is engineering as politics. A single, shared station becomes a choke point: one schedule, one budget, one set of vetoes, one inevitable round of compromises that satisfy committees more than users. It encourages risk aversion and punishes iteration. Niven, a science-fiction writer steeped in the logic of systems, is arguing for redundancy and competition the way an aerospace engineer argues for multiple engines: not because collaboration is bad, but because single points of failure are. A dozen stations would mean experimentation, specialization, and the freedom to be wrong cheaply: microgravity manufacturing here, astronomy there, life-support prototyping somewhere else.

Context matters: Niven comes out of an era when space was imagined as an ecosystem, not a monument. He’s reacting to the ISS-shaped pattern of post-Apollo ambition shrinking into one politically maintainable megaproject. The line is really an indictment of our timidity: we built one station to prove we could cooperate, instead of many to prove we were going somewhere.