The New York Times February 4, 2003
Now, the Space Station: Grieving, Imperiled
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
The grounding of the three remaining space shuttles after the destruction of Columbia poses enormous, and potentially calamitous, challenges for the International Space Station and the 16 countries trying to maintain it as a permanent foothold in space.
All of the shuttle launchings scheduled for this year and early 2004 were missions to ferry crews or components to the station, which has been under construction since 1998. Now this schedule is in total disarray. If delays persist for a year or more, some experts says it may even become difficult to prevent the station from falling into Earth's atmosphere. Until now, occasional nudges from the shuttle have helped keep it from sinking under the tug of friction as it skims the outermost ether.
For the moment, as investigators continue to scour eastern Texas and Louisiana for fragments of Columbia, some 244 miles overhead the station spins through day No. 1,537 in orbit, looping the world every 90 minutes.
Today its crew of two Americans and one Russian -- officials have described them as grieving and isolated -- is to be visited by Progress 10, an automated Russian space ferry.
The vehicle has close to three tons of food, research paraphernalia and other supplies, enough to sustain the astronauts at least through June.
Further Progress visits scheduled later this year should adequately supply the crew, officials said, and -- if need be -- the astronauts can be retrieved or relieved on a scheduled April flight by a Russian Soyuz craft.
Despite the problems, officials of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration insist that the space station will survive, as it has survived two decades of budget battles and revisions of its mission and design.
Calling the space station "a key and essential staging ground for what comes next," Maj. Gen. Michael C. Kostelnik, the NASA deputy associate administrator for the space station and space shuttle, said the Bush administration was committed to seeing it expand.
"We're going to find this problem and we're going to fix it and we're going to get back to flight," General Kostelnik said. He said the proposed budget included money to proceed with long-term expansion plans.
The budget also calls for refining the Orbital Space Plane, a reusable craft that may eventually replace the Soyuz vehicles now used as the station's lifeboat, he said.
Perhaps the biggest question, if the delays persist, is how to keep the 200-ton device -- as capacious as a three-bedroom house -- from sinking out of orbit altogether and incinerating as Columbia did.
It has been routine for each shuttle that delivers a fresh crew or the latest truss or module to boost the expanding assemblage about eight miles upward, countering the steady sinking caused as the station's broad surfaces encounter drag exerted by diffuse molecules of air.
The Russian Progress spacecraft can haul fuel to boost the station, as well, but they will not be visiting nearly enough this year to compensate for the absence of space shuttles, five of which were to have docked before 2004, including one in November that would carried a teacher, Barbara Morgan.
The station has its own store of propellant to keep properly positioned, but even those supplies could be depleted eventually, space experts said.
This leads to the troubling calculus about keeping the station in space, said John E. Pike, a space technology expert and director of globalsecurity.org, a Washington research group.
"Everybody's going to be looking closely at the inventory of Progresses and Soyuz boosters to put them up, and running that against the need to reboost the station," Mr. Pike said. "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 might have to try to cobble together a tanker of some sort.
If the station is not continually boosted higher into space, though, he said, trouble will be inevitable, and will intensify the lower the station drifts.
"The lower you go, the less time you've got," he said.
Besides keeping the station flying, NASA and the other space agencies are grappling with the implications of having the shuttle fleet paralyzed just as the space station program is scheduled for a major expansion.
The shuttle and station have evolved in tandem, like mutually dependent organisms. Over the last several years, the shuttle's main purpose has been delivering vital components to the expanding complex of living quarters, power plants, laboratories and other systems.
No other spacecraft, here or abroad, can handle the four-story truss sections that, when linked like Lego blocks, comprise its spine or the accordion-like solar panels that supply power.
The station began as a single Russian-built 21-ton component in November 1998. But a succession of shuttles and Russian flights steadily added components and supplies until the most recent additions, in December, brought it to its current size, 134 feet long and close to 200 tons.
But NASA officials had looked ahead to 2003 as a critical juncture.
This year was to have been the busiest year yet in bringing the station from its original embryonic state -- in which its single module and paired solar wings gave it the look of a housefly -- to its full-flowered metamorphosis as an orbiting laboratory, dormitory and observatory as sprawling and intricate as a mated pair of giant dragonflies.
Pending improvements included the addition of small but important safety systems like additional shields to protect living quarters against penetration by micrometeoroids. But Rob Navias, a NASA spokesman, said that "any launch delays would not pose a threat to the safety" of the space station.
By early 2004, electrical power capacity was to have nearly tripled. Forty tons of additional pieces were to have been added during two dozen space walks, including four new trusses, extending its skeleton from 134 feet to 310 feet.
It would be ready then for the addition of another major node with attachment points for more laboratories and other facilities.
It would also be ready for more than its current limit of three crew members.
Even before the loss of Columbia, European space officials, particularly, had been pressing the Bush administration not to cut the budget and delay expansion plans, as it had been favoring. There was even talk a year ago about Europe's pulling out altogether.
The General Accounting Office, which has long criticized the program, last June estimated it will cost $92 billion to complete.
Now everything is being re-evaluated once again. Yesterday, American and European officials working on the project said they were scrambling to figure out next steps: not only how to sustain the station in orbit, but also how to sustain political and public interest in its lofty, but sometimes ill-defined mission.
One option not being considered is mothballing the station.
"We don't want to leave it unmanned because we're exploring, we're doing science, we have a mission," Col. Robert D. Cabana, an astronaut who directs flight crew operations at the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center near Houston, said at a news conference on Sunday. "We're up there to do what we set out to do, and that's not leave the space station. The crew is working very hard up there. They've got a lot to do. And it just wouldn't be right to quit."
Many officials said the station was not likely to be fatally affected by the delays after Columbia's fall. "In order to keep the station alive, I don't think there are major problems," said Lionel Suchet, a senior official with the French counterpart to NASA, the National Center for Space Studies. But he added that the shuttle was essential for the expansion.
But in Europe and in Houston, station officials said problems were bound to multiply for the mission as more time elapsed.
"We must concentrate on the explanation of what occurred and we must know soon how long the fleet is grounded," Mr. Suchet said.
Keeping momentum toward expanding the station is vital if significant science is to be accomplished, several government space officials said. Already, much of the time available to the station's three-member crews is spent in running, expanding or maintaining its systems or orbit.
Supporters of the station insist that, already, even in its limited configuration, it is producing valuable data on biological, industrial and other questions.
The eventual design, with the capacity of two Boeing 747 cabins, is intended to accommodate six crew members. Only then will substantial research be possible, experts and government officials said.
Everything now hinges on timing. The longer it takes to solve the Columbia conundrum, the more troubles will loom for the station, and for coming up with options -- even accelerating work on a shuttle replacement.
"If it's something that is fairly easy to fix, then that's one thing," said John W. Douglass, the president of the Aerospace Industries Association, a trade group representing all the big space-technology companies. "But if it's a really significant problem that causes them to reassess the shuttle's risk equation, then we're drifting into a pretty serious situation where we'd have to go to some kind of crash program."
Some independent experts said the shuttle's second mortal failure could derail the space station entirely by sapping public interest and political will.
The station has long been a target in Congress, most famously in repeated -- failed -- efforts by some representatives to pass amendments killing the project and diverting the money to paying off the national debt.
NASA has so far heard pledges of support from President Bush and Congress, but the station's fate, with delays compounding costs, has never been murkier than it is now.
General Kostelnik of NASA said critics of the station's costs should not lose sight of the significance of its existence and prospects.
Someday, he said, "if we looked back in history and were accounting for the wonders of the world, the International Space Station, for its technical achievements, would certainly be in that category."
GRAPHIC: Photos: Astronaut Don Pettit and, in the background, commander Ken Bowersox, center with back to camera, and cosmonaut Nikolai Budarin. They are trying on spacesuits in the Quest airlock, Dec. 5. (Associated Press/NASA); (Illustration by Frank OConnell; Bill Marsh and Farhana Hossain/The New York Times)(pg. F1); The International Space Station, a 200-ton complex of labs, dorms and power panels, needs to be continually boosted into space. (Agence France-Presse)(pg. F4)
Chart: "Much Done, but Much More to Go"
The Columbia disaster stalls construction of the International Space Station well before its completion, planned for 2008.
INSTALLED SECTIONS LISTED BELOW
1. STRUCTURAL TRUSSES -- Four out of 12 sections in place.
2. CANADIAN ROBOTIC ARM -- Used for assembly, maintenance.
3. U.S. DESTINY LABORATORY -- For studies of longterm effects of space.
4. U.S. UNITY/RUSSIAN-U.S. ZARYA MODULES -- The first sections assembled.
5. RUSSIAN ZVEZDA MODULE -- Living quarters during construction.
6. SOLAR ARRAYS -- Will be repositioned later.
7. THERMAL RADIATORS -- These disperse heat.
1998 -- First component, Russian Zarya, launched. Later, U.S. Unity module attached.
Progress so far ...
1999 -- Logistics and supply mission.
2000 -- Russian Zvedza module (living quarters, early station core) installed.
2001 -- U.S. Destiny research lab arrives.
2002 -- Two radiators, three trusses go up. Canadian robotic arm complete.
... and what remains
2003-2004 -- Remaining trusses and U.S. solar arrays complete the American core of the station; European lab added.
2005 -- Canada Hand device for servicing the exterior. Brazilian pallet for attached payloads.
2006-2007 -- Japanese Kibo lab. Russian docking module and power platform.
2008 -- Russian Cupola control tower for observation and operation of robotic arm.
(Sources: NASA, Boeing)(pg. F1)
Copyright © 2003, The New York Times Company
