- For the Americans Ken Bowersox and Don Pettit, and the
Russian Nikolai Budarin, the next 24 hours will be lonely. And they could
earn the title of the last men in space - for a long time.
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- They are at present aloft in the orbiting International
Space Station (ISS), waiting for the Russian Progress cargo ship launched
yesterday to ferry supplies to them. It is scheduled to dock tomorrow to
deliver food, equipment, fuel and post.
-
- While they are safe, with enough supplies to last them
until June, and a Russian Soyuz rocket is scheduled to go and pick them
up in April, whether anyone will follow them up there for years is unclear.
-
- The future of the ISS, and of manned space travel beyond
the Earth's orbit, is now uncertain. The failure of the space shuttle Columbia
- which disintegrated on re-entry to Earth's atmosphere on Saturday, killing
all seven astronauts on board - will almost surely mothball the ISS for
about two years. All of Nasa's shuttles have been grounded until the cause
is found and rectified.
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- After Challenger blew up in 1986, 32 months - nearly
three years - passed before the next one flew. There is no knowing how
long it will take to fixwhatever went wrong this time.
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- "It is the fate of the ISS that is at stake now,"
Boris Chertok, a Soviet space pioneer, said. With the shuttles grounded,
there are too few Russian Soyuz and Progress rockets available to keep
the supply and crewing missions flying.
-
- Sergei Gorbunov, of the Russian space agency Rosaviakosmos,
said that while the shuttles were grounded, "work in orbit [on the
ISS] will be carried out in a truncated regime". But, he added, "you
can forget about further construction on the station until the resumption
of American shuttle launches".
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- The ISS can be left dormant, with nobody on board, for
years; it has been designed that way. But that's not what anyone involved
in space travel wants.
-
- One former top Nasa administrator said over the weekend
that "the space station was intended to help us learn to live long-term
in space. If we're going to go to Mars and to the outer planets, we've
got to learn how to live for long periods of time in space".
-
- The ISS is a joint project between the US, Russia, Japan
and European Space Agency. But it has been suffering cutbacks already -
from the expected seven full-time crew to the three now there - and only
the US and Russia have had spacecraft capable of actually getting useful
goods to it.
-
- And since Saturday, and for an unknown time into the
future, it's only Russia. But Russia does not have enough launchers or
funds to pick up the slack. If Nasa plans to use Russian craft for crewed
missions to the space station, it will have to buy Russian Soyuz TMAs,
and those new craft would take two years to build. Russia builds two every
year, but, unlike the shuttles, they can be used only once. The shuttles
can also carry more cargo into space - 100 tons, against the Progress launchers'
five tons.
-
- The only other way for Russia to boost its funds would
be to do what it already has, by taking more "space tourists"
like the internet entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth, who paid $20m (£12m)
to travel into space last April. But, after the weekend, demand may slacken.
-
- Grounding the remaining three shuttles will significantly
delay the completion of the £65bn space station. Nasa had scheduled
five flights this year to ferry components and supplies to the station,
whose core structure is only two-thirds finished. Nasa and its international
partners had expected the station to become "a research facility with
unmatched capabilities" by early next year. Those expectations, added
to the presence of the three men on board, may lead to pressure for a quicker
resolution than happened after Challenger.
-
- "Obviously the shuttle has to be grounded for a
limited time," the Republican James Sensenbrenner, former chairman
of the House of Representatives space sub-committee, said. "[But]
this investigation ... has got to be done much more quickly than the Challenger
investigation."
-
- The possibility is that changes in Nasa's culture in
response to Challenger will help. "There's a far more open attitude
inside Nasa. We want to know what happened. We want evidence. If it were
being run by Dick Cheney, we wouldn't be being told a damn thing,"
wrote one woman, whose boyfriend works at Nasa.
-
- To add to the complexity, Nasa acquired a new administrator
last April, Sean O'Keefe, a former deputy director of the Office of Management
and Budget, to replace Dan Goldin, the man who had given Nasa the slogan
of "faster, better, cheaper".
-
- Mr O'Keefe had made his priorities clear in Senate hearings,
where he pushed for fewer crew on the ISS. In one of his first speeches
he said: "Our future decisions will be science-driven, not destination-driven."
-
- David Shayler, an American journalist who has written
a book on space disasters, said: "The guys who fly these missions
accept that risk. It all depends on politicians and the public, who don't
fly these missions, and whether they accept the risk. That will tell you
whether you have a future space programme or not."
-
- Now, it all comes down to how big a risk it really was
to send shuttles into space. And that depends on what emerges from the
investigations, which will fill the waking hours of all the Nasa staff
for days and weeks to come.
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- © 2002 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd
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- http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=375103
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