Globe and Mail December 17, 2001
Garneau protests U.S. cuts in space
By TU THANH HA
U.S. plans to curtail the scope of the International Space Station are unacceptable and could constitute a breach of international treaties, says the new head of the Canadian Space Agency, former astronaut Marc Garneau.
Space shuttle Endeavour is to return to Earth Monday morning from a visit to the ISS, ending the last mission of the year in which some of the most challenging space flights in history were made.
Despite a year with a record number of space walks and a record amount of hardware assembled in orbit, the future of the ISS has been thrown in doubt. The U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration has so badly overshot its ISS budget that it is about to be put on the equivalent of financial probation.
The United States is set to cut its commitment to the ISS to such degree that the orbiting outpost could end up with only half as many astronauts as previously planned.
"This is not acceptable and we have to do something about it," Mr. Garneau said. "The clock is ticking. We've built the station...and it will last 10, 15 years, maybe a bit longer if we're lucky, and therefore we need to get the science going."
The U.S. move is not sitting well with the space agencies of Japan and Europe, either. They have invested billions of dollars in the station and say the move jeopardizes scientific research.
"The partners of the International Space Station are saying to the United States that it is defaulting on an agreement which we regard as a treaty-level document," Mr. Garneau said.
Canada is the first to send a high-level diplomatic note to raise concerns over what it sees as a unilateral move by the United States to change the scope of the ISS.
The concerns were made known as U.S. President George W. Bush chose Sean O'Keefe, the White House's No. 2 budget planner, to be the next head of NASA.
Mr. O'Keefe is a budget hawk and has said he believes that technical excellence at any cost is not an acceptable approach by NASA.
Sherwood Boehlert, chairman of the House Science Committee, agrees. "The era of the blank cheque for NASA is over," he said recently at a U.S. congressional hearing.
Mr. O'Keefe supports the idea of temporarily scaling down the ISS to three crew members rather than the originally planned seven-member team for the outpost. Essentially, NASA is on probation and has two years to show it can control its ISS budget, otherwise the station gets stuck with a three-member team.
Canada spent $1.4-billion building a robot arm for the ISS because in theory it gives the country 2.3 per cent of the research space on the station.
At least 2½ crew members are needed merely to operate the ISS. With only three crew members, Canada estimated that its share of the research would drop to only a half-hour a week.
"There's no question that a crew of six will allow more sophisticated experiments," said Doug Watt, a McGill University researcher whose experiment measuring human reflexes in space is being conducted on the ISS.
The Japanese and Europeans have even more to lose, said John Pike, the director of and an analyst at GlobalSecurity.org, which bills itself as a group "focused on innovative approaches to the emerging security challenges of the new millennium" and which "seeks to reduce reliance on nuclear weapons and the risk of their use."
Japan's contribution to the ISS is the Kibo, a laboratory to be launched and assembled on the ISS starting in September of 2004. The European Space Agency is spending $1.4-billion for Columbus, its own research facility in the form of an an 11-tonne module to be ferried to the station in October of 2004.
"They're the ones who've been planning for the last decade-and-a-half to put up these laboratory modules, and basically now there's no place for their scientists to work on them," Mr. Pike said.
"We are afraid that the Japanese Experiment Module Kibo will be insufficiently utilized and the ISS scientific significance will be decreased considerably," Tetsuya Yonezawa, a spokesman for the Japanese space agency said in an e-mail interview. "Decrease in flight opportunities for Japanese astronauts with a three-person crew is not acceptable for us."
As Canadian officials did seven years ago when NASA initially had trouble developing the space station, Mr. Garneau said he wants to give more visibility to other parts of the Canadian space program - satellite-based remote sensing, Earth observation and communications technology - areas where Canada has recognized expertise.
Copyright 2001 Globe and Mail
