From 1997: Abandon spaceship

From The Economist, April 10, 1997: Abandon spaceship
T HAS not been a good week for space flight. On April 8th the space shuttle Co lumbia returned to earth with a faulty fuel cell, having spent only four of its planned 16 days in orbit. As it was making its final approach, an unmanned launch was docking with Russia’s Mir space station. This was bearing the chemicals and equipment needed to keep Mir’s oxygen supply intact after the latest in a series of mishaps that would provide enough material for a full-length disaster movie. And, a day later, NASA, America’s space agency, announced that the first part of the International Space Station (ISS) will be launched in October 1998 instead of this November, because of Russia’s inability to keep to its part of the schedule.

When things go wrong, it is science—the alleged main purpose of manned space flight—that suffers first. Columbia was carrying more than 30 experiments; these will now have to compete with other strident claims on future shuttle time. On Mir, time for any science at all has to be snatched between attempts to keep the 11-year-old rust bucket going. And each time there are delays and cost overruns on the ISS, NASA, under its tight budgetary constraints, takes money out of the pot marked “on-board experiments”.

America invited Russia to join in building the ISS in 1993 (which was when it was redubbed “international”). It did so in the name of world peace, mutual friendship and a substantial cash discount for the American taxpayer. Russia was to undertake several of the 75 launches needed to put the bits of the station into orbit, and would build some of those bits, among them the service module, one of the habitable spaces at the station’s core.

Since then peace and friendship have abounded—between astronauts anyway—but savings have not. Even though the deal included $400m of American support for Mir, in return for letting the shuttle dock with it and American astronauts live in it, a question mark has hung over Russia’s ability to pay for its share of the ISS. Early last year the two countries tried to shore up their deal by signing another one: Russia promised to deliver on time, and America promised to bolster the Russian space programme still further with, among other things, extra flights to Mir.

But it all unravelled. Early in February, Russia’s space agency, RKA, having still had no money from the government, quietly allowed the launch date of the service module to slip from April to December of 1998. NASA advanced RKA $20m to keep work ticking over, aiming to deduct the money from its contributions to Mir next year. The Russian prime minister, Viktor Cherno myrdin, then promised that the first $100m of $450m earmarked for this year’s work would be released by February 28th. The deadline passed like a spaceship in the night.

A delay to the whole project was by now inevitable. The service module is third in the assembly sequence. Besides containing living quarters, it will carry the booster rocket needed to push the station back into place if it starts to fall out of orbit. If NASA had tried to stick to the old schedule, the first two parts of the station would have been floating in space, useless and at risk, for a year before this module joined them.

Not only is the delay a pity, it will also mean more budgetary squeezes and a longer wait before on-board science can begin—and hence more pressure to do some of it on Mir instead. And Mir, even with copious infusions of NASA cash, is not in the prime of health.

American spacefarers, accustomed to exacting safety standards (Columbia returned despite the fact that it could have functioned safely on its two remaining fuel cells), must find Mir a scary place. Its most recent glitch was a leak that disabled the apparatus for removing carbon dioxide from the air. This followed a leak in a cooling system that made the astronauts swelter, a fire that nearly forced an evacuation, and the failures of both the main and the back-up “Elektron” units, which produce the station’s life-giving oxygen from waste water. Currently its oxygen comes from “candles” of lithium perchlorate, a chemical that releases the gas when burned. This cannot be reassuring to NASA con trollers, still mindful of the fire, who will have to decide whether or not another American astronaut should board Mir when the present incumbent leaves in May.

For now, NASA is expressing confidence in Mir. But another emergency could cause its premature demise. Meanwhile, an American delegation that went to Russia at the end of March to discuss the ISS reported that the Russians are once again promising to pay up. But if they do not, America has little with which to put pressure on them. In the worst case, the station will have to be redesigned. NASA is already working on ways to modify its components so that they can be used as substitutes for the Russian ones. Either way, it looks increasingly possible that there will be a hiatus between the end of Mir and the beginning of the ISS. If, indeed, it begins at all.