ABC News.com February 3, 2003
Back to the Future
After Columbia, What's Next for International Space Station?
By Ned Potter
As upsetting as the news of the Columbia disaster was to millions around the world, try to imagine what it must have been like for the three men who are not on Earth.
U.S. astronauts Kenneth Bowersox and Donald Pettit and Russian cosmonaut Nikolai Budarin have been orbiting in the International Space Station since the beginning of December. Many people have remarked that, right now, they must be the loneliest men in the universe.
"They're grieving up there also," said Robert Cabana, the former astronaut who serves as director of flight crew operations. Cabana talked with the space station crew members at length over the weekend. "They feel a little isolated," he said.
They are safe, NASA says. Although all shuttle flights have been suspended, a Russian Soyuz spacecraft is docked at the space station at all times so the crew can come home in emergencies.
They are well-supplied with air, water, food and power, and the Russian space agency launched more supplies to them in a small cargo ship on Sunday morning.
But they were supposed to get their ride home next month on the shuttle Atlantis. Now, nobody can imagine that happening.
Pros and Cons
Other astronauts say the three crew members knew, when they began their mission, that they might have to stay in space longer than planned.
"They committed themselves," said Bill Readdy, NASA's associate administrator for space flight, "to stay up there for however long we needed in order to get the job done."
But "the job" of the International Space Station was the subject of heated debate, long before the Columbia accident.
"What are we doing up there?" said Robert Park, a physicist from the University of Maryland. "One gets the impression NASA's primary purpose for flying astronauts was to get them on TV."
Park says the space station - and the shuttle fleet required to assemble it - are draining funds that could go for robot ships, which do a lot more science for a lot less money.
"The benefits to the world of the space program are apparent, but it's all from the robotic program," he said. "I sincerely hope that we will cut back on the amount of resources we devote to humans in space, and get on with the exploration of the solar system."
Earth Orbit and World Politics
Other people disagree. They argue that the International Space Station never really was a scientific venture. Instead, they say, it was a political tool.
President Reagan first proposed its construction in 1984, to match the Soviets' series of space stations. Reagan suggested the U.S. station be named "Freedom."
By the time Bill Clinton became president, the station budget had mushroomed - and the Soviet Union had collapsed. So the station took on a different role: as a way to collaborate with the Russians. Better to have them build space-station components, reasoned the Clinton administration, then watch them try to sell missiles to Iraq or Iran.
Defense expert John Pike, who runs the Web site globalsecurity.org, argues the policy has paid off, and may now save the space station. Because of that Soyuz spacecraft, astronauts do not have to depend solely on the now-grounded shuttles.
"With permanent human presence on the station and with Russians to get the crew back and forth, we can keep flying in space even though the shuttle is not," he said.
There's one more faction that appears to want American astronauts in space: the U.S. public. In a Gallup poll Sunday night, 82 percent said they wanted the shuttle program to continue.
Copyright © 2003, ABC News Internet Ventures.
