NASA has completed an initial contingency study of how to evacuate the International Space Station and leave it without a permanent astronaut crew for up to a year. The interruption of permanent occupancy of the space outpost may be forced by Russia’s failure to finance the regular visits of manned Soyuz space taxis and unmanned Progress cargo ships.
InsertArt(1708478)THE SPACE STATION, sponsored by a 16-nation consortium, recently celebrated the second anniversary of a permanent astronaut presence on board. With the total cost of the station soaring toward an estimated $100 billion in recent years, the project has been under strong pressure from scientific groups for not living up to its research potential. Even a temporary evacuation of the station is bound to have significant scientific and political damage, observers say.
Internal documents obtained by MSNBC describe a “top-level assessment” delivered to officials at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston on Nov. 22. Russian Space Agency representative Mikhail Shutikov told NASA that his side is examining evacuating the station, technically called “demanning,” in early June 2003.
“Preparations should begin now” just in case the evacuation becomes necessary due to Russia’s funding shortfall, the four-week NASA study concluded. It specified critical follow-on assessments to be performed in coming weeks.
Publicly, NASA said again Tuesday that it expects the Russians “will meet their commitments under the International Space Station Agreements.” However, they are seeking reassurances. NASA spokesman Dwayne Brown said the space agency has asked Russia for “an update on the status of vehicle production and its ability to meet ISS commitments in 2003.” Brown said NASA expects to receive a response in the near future.
Sources within NASA were unable to estimate how likely the evacuation was, since the issues involve internal budgetary conflicts in Moscow. Russia’s parliament will give final approval to the government’s budget next month, but the proposed inflation-adjusted allocations for space activities have been significantly reduced from previous years.
Experts who talked privately with MSNBC consider NASA’s study to be a prudent precaution in order to identify operational issues that may need to be addressed in the near future.
WHAT WOULD HAPPEN IF THE CREW LEFTEven without a permanent crew, NASA planners expect that space station assembly missions would continue at intervals of several months, with shuttles docking for 10 to 12 days at a time. But more work would be added to each of these missions, and it would require that a veteran space station crew member — probably a Russian — be added to each of these flights.
In the absence of a live-aboard crew, visiting shuttle missions would be responsible for much more work beyond the normal assembly operations. The NASA documents cite “significant maintenance [and] inspection task additions,” an extra day of work to prepare the station airlock for spacewalks, and however long it takes to repair any equipment that has broken down since the previous shuttle visit. To make room on the shuttles for station maintenance items, most of the food would be removed, and the astronauts would have to eat food already stored aboard the space station.
The originally planned assembly operations would be impacted as well. Since most of them require use of the station’s robot arm, shuttle crews would have to be trained to operate the arm, adding a major training load to each mission, the NASA documents say.
“Significant risk increase” is expected based on the loss of the ability for a permanent crew to make an urgent repair spacewalk, as may become necessary under the normal rate of equipment breakdown. Nevertheless, the study concluded that continued station assembly during the “demanned” operations mode “is physically executable.”
What is not executable, however, is most of the scientific work that the station was being built to perform. More than 80 percent of the science activities currently under way on the space station would have to be canceled during this period. Some research could continue via remote control from the Payload Operations Control Center at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, but the NASA documents admit “there are limited mitigation possibilities.”
“Entire disciplines, many of which are high priority research activities, will not be feasible,” the briefing charts state. “It is clear that in an unmanned mode, expectations from the ISS research program will have to be significantly revised downward.”
WHY THE RUSSIANS ARE IN TROUBLE The problem behind all this is simple: Russia’s space program faces a financial crisis. Normally, Russia launches two Soyuz space taxis and three to four unmanned Progress cargo ships a year, but there may be as few as two vehicles completed next year. Thus, the “potential vehicle availability issues” in 2003 cited by the internal NASA briefing.
“Uncertainties exist in Russian ability to meet schedules,” the documents state.
Russian space officials first raised this possibility in public two months ago. Valeriy Ryumin, a former cosmonaut and now a top official at the plant that manufactures Russian space vehicles, said that due to inadequate funding “Russia will have to postpone operations on its segment” of the space station. And last week, Yuri Koptev, head of the Russian Aviation and Space Agency, said that Russia would delay or even cancel further spacecraft production unless it received supplemental funding from its international partners on the project.
One contributing factor to the budget crisis was the failure in recent months of commercial flights aboard Soyuz vehicles. Although some seats have been sold to European astronauts, the financial collapse of the project to fly pop singer Lance Bass, and the apparent inability of the Russians to find a paying customer for the third seat on the Soyuz that is set to launch next April, have resulted in losses of between $20 million and $30 million. Each Soyuz spacecraft costs $10 million, with additional costs to launch and operate.
Fabrication of the next-in-line Soyuz TMA vehicle, scheduled for launch April 28, is already far behind schedule. Although it normally would now be undergoing “integrated testing” of all its installed components, documents indicate that Shutikov, the Russian Space Agency representative, told NASA last week the Soyuz “is missing approximately one third of its components” and is still in the assembly hall at the Moscow factory. Contractors have not been delivering components because they haven’t been paid for deliveries already used for previous missions. The Progress robot freighter now under construction is in a similar state and is “currently lacking 20 subcontractor components required for module assembly.”
WORST CASE OPTIONS “Worst case” options for 2003 would involve launching only two vehicles — either one Soyuz and one Progress, or simply two Progress vehicles. With only a single Progress supply vehicle, the station’s on-board propellant reserves would fall to an unacceptable level by September 2003, so the report concluded that the “only demanning option with any viability requires TWO Progress vehicles” next year. This would only be possible by immediately stopping all work on the next Soyuz and concentrating efforts on the unmanned supply craft.
According to these documents, the long-term expedition crew would depart in the Soyuz that is currently attached to the station as an emergency bailout vehicle. It arrived at the station on Nov. 1 and has a certified lifetime of 200 days. This could be stretched to 220 days if needed, according to the Russian side.
If the decision is taken to interrupt permanent occupancy, there would be significant housekeeping and documentation tasks for the departing crew, since they would not be able to perform the normal “hot handover” briefings to their replacements. Once the Russians acquired enough funding to begin regular fabrication of additional vehicles, a new long-term crew would be sent up on the first available Soyuz, probably in mid-2004.
Because of the possible need to land in a Soyuz, consideration is being given to reversing the sequence of the next two long-term crews. The current plan calls for the Expedition 6 crew, which has just arrived at the station, to be replaced by the Expedition 7 crew in March 2003 during a space shuttle visit. If the space station partners go ahead with the demanning option, the shuttle would bring up the Expedition 8 crew instead, since it includes more experienced Russian cosmonauts who can be trained for the evacuation preparations and Soyuz landing.
James Oberg is a veteran Mission Control specialist and a full-time writer and consultant in Houston. Among his books is a history of the U.S.-Russian space alliance titled “Star-Crossed Orbits.”