With the retirement of the Space Shuttle Atlantis last week, American astronauts are now totally dependent on Russian vehicles for access to space. The question in front of us is how best to negotiate for fair compromises in the US-Russian space alliance. Some of NASA’s recent agreements are not encouraging.
The US needs to realize that it holds some high cards. True, the Russians have, in the Soyuz, the only vehicle that can carry passengers. But the destination – the International Space Station, which is more than 80 percent funded by the U.S. – provides many critical space services without which getting into orbit is pretty pointless for the Russians. Chief among them is electrical power and space-to-Earth communications, most of which comes via American equipment.
U.S. has superior equipment
According to independent Russian space observer Igor Lissov, the “Russian Segment” of the ISS gets 90 percent of its kilowatts from solar arrays on the American side. Without such power, the Russians could barely run the life support equipment. The U.S. has also installed far superior equipment for air and water supplies, and can use visiting supply drones for orbit reboost as needed.
Russian cosmonauts have complained that their communications are trapped in the dial-up era. Ground sites provide occasional data passes, but the rate is so poor, said one cosmonaut, that it takes an entire flyover of Russia to download one photo image. Plans to replace some long-defunct relay satellites are at least a year away.
A position of weakness
And yet NASA negotiators seem to have gone into bargaining sessions under the impression that they were in a position of weakness. This is most apparent in the allocation of crew slots for the ISS.
In the early years, crew slots were allocated 50:50, reflecting the balance of mission support hardware. In early 2010, when the station crew size increased from 3 to 6, a disturbing new pattern emerged: there are now three Russians, two Americans, and one ‘other’ partner – Canadian, Japanese, European, etc.
Initially, when asked about this, NASA press spokesmen consistently replied that it was just “random fluctuation” and would “even out in the long run.” But it never did. At a press conference in Houston in June, station program m anager Mike Suffredini offered another explanation for the disparity. The original crew size of the station had been seven, based on the design of a ‘Crew Rescue Vehicle’ by NASA that would be permanently linked to one of the station’s ports, ready to evacuate seven people in any emergency. There would be three crewmembers each from Russia and the U.S., with a seventh from another partner.
Rescue by Soyuz
When NASA cancelled that program, the only alternative for crew rescue was the Russian Soyuz with three seats per vehicle. With two of them permanently docked, that allowed a maximum rescuable crew size of six. Since the reduction from seven to six was the fault of the U.S., Suffredini indicated, the U.S. paid for it by losing one of its original three permanent seats.
Despite relying more than ever on Russian space hardware, the Russian space safety process remains opaque. NASA engineers see a slap-dash approach to “kludge” anomalies with complicated redesigns. A recent example of this came after two terrifying failures in 2008 when returning Soyuz vehicles hit the atmosphere nose first, presenting their non-shielded outer surfaces to the searing heat.
NASA officials act as if they have no choice but to blindly accept this. But a more realistic give-and-take, in which they recognize that without American hardware on the station, Russia’s ability to get to the station is useless, could compel Russia to provide more insight and consequently make the program safer for all.
Or maybe there is no choice. Another NASA tacit agreement allows the Russians to have the only firearms at the space station. True, they are ‘survival pistols” in each Soyuz spacecraft, and the idea that anybody would actually use them as a threat is preposterous. Still, the grounding of the space shuttle and the meek NASA bargaining over mutual space support services have left us already in a very strange situation whose elaboration may present us with unpleasant surprises in years to come.
James Oberg is a leading space commentator for NBC News and a former space engineer in Houston, where he worked as a NASA contractor.