Register news services February 3, 2003
Russia might be only savior
With NASA flights grounded after Columbia explosion, Russian program could be lone supporter of space station.
MOSCOW - Russia launched an unmanned cargo ship to the international space station Sunday, a day after the loss of the space shuttle Columbia threw into doubt future missions to the orbiting complex.
The Progress M-47 lifted off atop a Soyuz-U rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 3:59 p.m. local time and entered orbit a few minutes later, said Nikolai Kryuchkov, a spokesman at Russia's mission control center outside Moscow.
The craft is scheduled to dock with the station Tuesday, delivering fuel, equipment, food and mail for the three-astronaut crew - a Russian commander and two Americans.
The long-planned launch came as stunned Russian space officials offered condolences for the astronauts - six Americans and one Israeli - killed when the Columbia disintegrated shortly before it was to have landed Saturday.
NASA plans had called for expanding the international space station, or ISS, during five shuttle flights this year. But space shuttle program manager Ron Dittemore said Saturday that flights would be put on hold until officials determine what caused the Columbia to break up.
With all space shuttles grounded, the health of the international space station suddenly hinges largely on the ailing Russian space program, and experts expressed doubts on Sunday about whether Russia was up to the task.
The Russian Interfax news service Sunday night quoted one unnamed Russian space expert as saying that "closing down the international space station this year is inevitable," even if shuttle flights were halted only briefly.
Keeping the station occupied is only one challenge. Another is keeping the giant complex of trusses, modules and solar panels from sinking out of its orbit - generally about 250 miles up - and burning up in the atmosphere.
Normally, each time a space shuttle visits and docks with the space station - and five visits were scheduled this year - it burns its engines enough to nudge the station higher, countering the steady descent of the station's orbit. The space station has a surface area about as big as two football fields, and it is slowly brought toward Earth by friction as it rubs against the outermost edge of the atmosphere.
But NASA officials said Sunday that the Progress vehicles were able to accomplish the same thing and that the space station had stored propellant that would also help it maintain its orbit.
But American experts and Russian space officials and experts questioned whether Russia would be able to supply any more than it had already committed to the program.
Russia, the only other nation able to service the international space station reliably, is physically capable of launching only the two manned Soyuz flights and the three Progress- class cargo freighters, which it had already pledged to send to the station this year.
Should the shuttle be grounded, the unnamed expert told Interfax, Russia would need to send three more Progress ships this year to prevent the space station from being mothballed.
Even if Russia had the money to build those rockets, they could not be ready until 2004, experts told Interfax.
That leads to the troubling calculus about keeping the station in space, said John E. Pike, a space technology expert and the director of GlobalSecurity.org, a Washington research group.
"Everybody's going to be looking closely at the inventory of Progresses and Soyuz boosters," he said, "running that against the need to reboost the station. Maybe the answer is that there's more than enough, or just enough, or more than enough for this year, but after that there's a real problem."
He said that if the Russian craft could not fill the bill, NASA would have to try to cobble together a tanker of some sort. If the station is not continually boosted higher, he said, trouble would be inevitable and would intensify the lower the station drifted.
"The lower you go, the less time you've got," he said.
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