As NASA Seeks Next Mission, Russia Holds The Trump Card
May 24, 2014
As an uncommonly brisk night fell over Houston last week a tiny Russian spacecraft, bathed in blinding sunlight, re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere and plunged toward a dusty steppe in Kazakhstan.
Of the three astronauts inside one was American, Rick Mastracchio, returning from a 188-day stay aboard the International Space Station. His arrival was closely watched in Houston, where Johnson Space Center has responsibility for U.S. human operations in space.
Here, in mission control, photographs of astronauts old and new line long halls. They offer a palpable reminder that these people have managed every Gemini, Apollo and space shuttle flight. Houston flight directors guided the moon landings, saved Apollo 13 and repaired the Hubble Space Telescope.
Over time, short-sleeve button-downs have given way to full dress shirts and blue blazers. Cigar chomping and fast talking have been replaced by purified air and hushed tones. And women, including the NASA flight director for Mastracchio’s return, Dina Contella, have joined the ranks.
Yet until recently one thing had remained constant. Those within the photograph lined walls called the shots. They made the life and death decisions for astronauts soaring in the heavens above.
No longer. During last week’s Soyuz landing, Contella could only spectate as the drama played out, in a different language, half a world away, aboard a spacecraft emblazoned with a Russian flag.
Such is today’s space Realpolitik that, while the United States paid for most of the $140 billion space station, launched nearly all of it into orbit, and controls most of its day-to-day operations from Houston, Russia still holds the trump card: access.
“They have us right where they want us,” said three-time NASA astronaut Mike Coats.
The mounting Ukraine crisis has highlighted the space agency’s vulnerability, but this state of affairs is not new. Russia began embracing NASA in a bear hug right after the space shuttle retired in 2011.
Former Johnson Space Center Director Mike Coats discusses NASA’s relationship with Russia.
Since that time Russia has substantially hiked the price of a trip to the International Space Station, to $71 million per seat. Less well recognized is the disparity in station crews. Before the shuttle stopped flying, an equal number of American and Russian crew members lived on board. But afterwards the bear began squeezing. For every two NASA astronauts that have flown to the station, three Russians have gone.
NASA doesn’t advertise this, of course. It’s an embarrassing reminder to the country’s political leadership of how their legislative vagaries have cast the space agency adrift.
But that makes it no less real to those toiling in mission control. Before retiring at the end of 2012, Coats lived with this reality on a daily basis while running Johnson Space Center for seven years.
Sitting in his stately home a few miles from the space center, Coats is immaculately dressed in a suit, his white hair trimmed as neatly as one would expect from a former astronaut, aerospace executive and Navy pilot who flew 315 Vietnam combat missions. Having landed on an aircraft carrier hundreds of times Coats isn’t easily rattled. He also doesn’t sugarcoat things.
“Astronaut to cosmonaut, scientist to scientist, engineer to engineer, we’ve had a wonderful working relationship with the Russians,” he said. “But politically, if they see an opportunity to exercise an advantage they have to do it. It’s in their makeup. They view weakness as something to be taken advantage of.
“It’s difficult dealing with Russians from a position of weakness, and we’re doing that.”
"After analyzing the sanctions against our space industry, I suggest to the USA to bring their astronauts to the International Space Station using a trampoline."
Dmitry Rogozin - Russian deputy minister
This weakness was amplified in April when the U.S. State Department required NASA to cut off contact with the Russian space program except for station business. Around the same time Russia’s deputy prime minister over the country’s space program, Dmitry Rogozin, was among the first seven Russians sanctioned by President Obama.
But Rogozin holds the trump card in space, and he’s playing it. Perhaps, he said last week, Russia will no longer be interested in running the space station after 2020 as the United States wants. And if America doesn’t like it? Too bad, he told his Twitter followers earlier this month.
“After analyzing the sanctions against our space industry, I suggest to the USA to bring their astronauts to the International Space Station using a trampoline,” Rogozin tweeted in Russian.
A taunting trampoline tweet.
During the 1960s America taught the Soviet Union a thing or two about spaceflight, and in the process helped establish democracy as superior to totalitarianism in the global mind.
Four decades after crushing the Soviet space program, however, the urgency reflected in the race to the moon has dissipated. Now, NASA is reduced to timidly paying Russia about $300 million annually for the privilege of flying its astronauts, packed like sardines, in cramped Soyuz spacecraft to the International Space Station. During their nearly three years of training for an ISS mission, U.S. astronauts now must spend as much as half that time away from home, principally in Russia.
It didn’t have to be this way.
NASA has had a litany of programs -- including the Shuttle-C, Orbital Space Plane, JSC Shuttle II, Delta Clipper and X-34 -- to replace the shuttle before its retirement. All failed. Space program critics inside and outside government variously blame either inadequate funding from Congress, lackluster Democratic and Republican Presidential leadership, or poor NASA management.
During a widely hailed speech at NASA’s Washington D.C. headquarters in 2004, President George W. Bush gave the space agency a vision to go back to the moon and settle space. This became known as the Constellation Program, and called for retiring the shuttle and building a new rocket, the Ares V, and spacecraft, Orion, to carry humans deeper into the cosmos. But Constellation never got the funds it was promised and development lagged.
Five years later, when President Obama came into office, there was already going to be a gap between the shuttle and a follow-on spacecraft for U.S. astronauts. Obama endorsed the quickest and cheapest means of filling the gap: paying U.S. companies to develop space taxis to reach the station. Obama, however, gave NASA almost no guidance on where its human program should go.
Congress didn’t approve, so it underfunded the “commercial crew” plan advanced by Obama by more than $1 billion, and instead of having U.S. spacecraft flying astronauts to the station next year, commercial transportation won’t be available until 2017 at the earliest.
During a subcommittee hearing earlier this month the subject of Russia’s space related sabre-rattling came up. Sen. Richard Shelby asked NASA administrator Charles Bolden whether more money could help the U.S. commercial launch industry get astronauts to the space station within a year.
Space industry observers on Capitol Hill couldn’t help but be struck by the inherent ironies: Shelby and his brethren in Congress on both sides of the aisle, they said, have caused many of NASA’s problems by fully funding their own parochial interests, which they have turned into jobs programs for their districts and states, while neglecting the overall health of American space endeavors.
Legendary NASA flight director Chris Kraft discusses retirement of the space shuttle without having a viable replacement.
“It’s a good question,” Bolden said, demonstrating what undoubtedly struck many in the hearing room as the patience of Job.
The failure by the American government to prepare for the shuttle’s inevitable retirement, and to articulate a plan for what was to come next, is for Chris Kraft an unmitigated disaster. He just might know. As America’s first flight director, he is the man for whom mission control is named.
During his nine decades Chris Kraft has observed the entire arc of U.S. and Russian history in space, from the early days of desperately trying to catch the Soviets in space, to beating them to the moon, to now hitching rides to the space station on Russian capsules and being threatened by Russian officials.
“The cancellation of the space shuttle may be the biggest blunder ever made by the United States,” Kraft said. “It’s fairly obvious that no one in the government thought through what they were about to bring about when they made that decision.”
Kraft isn’t alone. A Houston scientist who studies the moon, Paul Spudis, served on a Presidential Commission tasked with implementing President Bush’s vision in 2004. What has happened since then, he said, is appalling.
“I’ve never seen such a screwed up mess in my life as the way NASA is right now,” he said.
With the shuttles in museums, the station is NASA’s only operational piece of human spaceflight hardware, and will likely remain for at least a decade the only place for astronauts to go in space. Both Russia and the United States know that, without the station, they effectively have no human spaceflight program.
Only this lab, then, stands between the world’s two historic space powers and obsolescence.
The space station is the most expensive single object ever built. There are critics, many of them, who say it is a white elephant. But in many ways the station was the logical next step for NASA in the late 1990s.
Practically, it provided meaningful work for the space shuttle, which brought pieces of the station to orbit in its payload bay. Politically, it offered President Clinton the opportunity to improve relations with post-Soviet Russia. And now that it’s fully built, the station is finally hitting its stride as a unique science laboratory.
The station is also a useful waypoint for exploration beyond low-Earth orbit. Astronauts are working out the kinks in technologies, such as water recycling, essential for long trips from Earth. And by taking careful vital signs physicians are learning how to prepare astronauts for long duration missions in space.
Microgravity does all kinds of mysterious things to the human body. Some are harmful, such as a flattening of the eyeballs. Spaceflight physicians are very concerned about the potential for impaired vision on long-term flights. Space also makes some astronauts as much as 1 or 2 inches taller. During his flight, using a portable machine, Mastracchio underwent ultrasounds of his spine to help doctors understand why this occurs.
After Mastracchio returns home to his neighborhood, a subdivision in northern Clear Lake, he will return to his normal height.
He, like NASA’s 42 other active astronauts, live scattered around Clear Lake, which was marsh and wilderness before NASA chose the site in 1961 for its new manned spaceflight center and turned it into one of Houston’s largest suburbs. Less well known than the famous Apollo moonwalkers, today’s astronauts blend into a community that celebrates their presence but does not impose on their lives.
With fewer flight opportunities now -- there’s room for only four or five U.S. astronauts on the station in any given year compared to as many as 40 space shuttle berths a year -- the astronaut corps is shrinking. And without the station even this limited opportunity for NASA astronauts would go away. Houston’s claim as home of the astronauts is not certain to endure.
This is one reason why NASA’s desire to extend the station’s life to at least 2024 is critical for Johnson Space Center, and why Russia’s threats to abandon it earlier are so menacing. America simply can’t operate the station on its own. For a variety of systems, such as keeping the station pointed in the right direction, there are essential pieces under separate Russian and American control.
“The station was designed to be operational with both crews, both mission control centers, working in conjunction,” said Leroy Chiao, who commanded the space station a decade ago. “One side can’t operate the station by itself.”
During a private exchange of e-mails in August 2012, less than a month before he died, Neil Armstrong and a handful of other Apollo vets were grumbling about NASA’s lack of a clear goals. They invoked a Yogiism describe the space agency, “If you don’t know where you are going, you might not get there.”
After Apollo 11, Armstrong left Houston and moved back to his native Ohio. But his imprint remains here.
Near the entrance to Johnson Space Center stands a grove of live and red oak trees planted to honor astronauts who have died, both in accidents and to natural causes.
Last year, at the base of a particularly large oak, the space center Armstrong called from the moon placed a concrete replica of boot prints he left in the lunar soil.
Today the breathtaking speed of the Apollo program seems almost incomprehensible. Engineers in Houston and around the country with comparatively rudimentary technology built three generations of spacecraft, a massive rocket and all of the equipment needed to explore the moon in less than a decade.
NASA administrator Charles Bolden discusses his relationship with congress.
How did it do this? Armstrong knew. He left bootprints on the moon because NASA had a razor sharp vision and the funding to match it. America was going to the moon, President Kennedy said, and it was by God going to beat the Russians there.
NASA recognizes the importance of vision. Bolden, the agency's administrator, recites the proverb on the wall of the hearing room where he has testified before the House Science Committee: “Where there is no vision, the people perish.”
For decades, stretching from Presidents Nixon to Obama, NASA’s vision has been sending humans to Mars. But like his predecessors, Obama has failed to identify a series of missions NASA would need to fly to get there, establish a timeline for those missions, and provide the funds to do so. NASA presently is building a big rocket, the Space Launch System, to reach Mars. But the rub is that the rocket costs so much NASA has no money to actually fly missions anywhere close to Mars.
If everything goes really well, in about a decade, NASA might be able to send a robotic spacecraft to capture a small rock, tow it back to a location near the moon, and fly some astronauts to visit it. The White House wants this mission. Congress sees no value in such an exercise and has tried to block funding for it.
“Let me be very candid,” Bolden said. “I am not baffled by opposition to anything that the President puts forward. Very blunt. Republicans don’t like the President. They have stated very clearly that will oppose anything he puts forward, that they will not allow anything to go forward that gives him credit for anything, and I think that’s very unfortunate. But that’s politics.”
With divided masters, uncertain funding and vague goals, NASA is left to tread water. In some cases literally, such as at the Neutral Buoyancy Lab about five miles from Johnson Space Center.
The buoyancy of water mimics the lack of gravity in space, and astronauts have trained in pools since the beginning of spaceflight. But as NASA contemplated a station none of its pools were big enough to practice the multitude of spacewalks required to build the orbiting laboratory. To build the station NASA would eventually undertake more than 150 spacewalks, more than doubling the number done to date in all of human spaceflight.
NASA began using the 202-foot long, 40-foot deep Neutral Buoyancy Lab in 1996. And up until the shuttle’s retirement it was chock full of astronauts.
A partial mock-up of the station remains submerged here, but with station construction complete astronauts are far less frequent visitors.
Earlier this month NASA proudly tweeted photos of veteran astronauts Stan Love and Steve Bowen in the pool, testing tools and spacesuits that would be needed for the asteroid expedition the White House wants NASA to do. But the photos are far more revealing for what they didn’t show.
They didn’t show the large section of the pool that’s cordoned off, which NASA has leased to oil-services companies to help keep the lights on at this historic facility. In a pool once used exclusively by astronauts, oil rig workers now practice survival techniques in the event their helicopter has to ditch in the ocean.
A Russian space agency rescue team helps astronaut Rick Mastracchio off the capsule of the Russian Soyuz TMA-11 module shortly after landing in Kazakhstan on May 14, 2014.
AP Photo: Dmitry Lovetsky, pool
The photos also didn’t show the remains of party that had been held the night before. The company Tracerco used the famous pool as a backdrop for a crawfish boil to fete attendees of the Offshore Technology Conference and show off its subsea scanning technology.
Thus NASA has its astronauts training for missions it won’t do for at least a decade, and that it probably won’t ever do. And the space agency is doing so in a pool it can’t entirely afford any more.
Mastracchio’s unglamorous return home last week in a Soyuz capsule has been described by some veteran astronauts as akin to going over Niagara Falls, in a barrel, on fire.
Around the world, in Houston, mission control could only watch for critical signs of success, such as parachute deployment, listen to Russian flight directors and review the data being relayed from Kazakhstan.
When he finally reached the ground Mastracchio remained far from home, but at least it was spring, and the landing spot on. All Soyuz astronauts undergo two nights of winter survival training in case their spacecraft landing goes awry, and they’re stranded in the central Asian hinterlands for a couple of days. It’s a far cry from the handshake with the NASA administrator on a sunny Florida runway that awaited most shuttle astronauts.
Having flown for 188 days in space, Mastracchio still had one more long flight, for the better part of a day, aboard a NASA Gulfstream III from Karaganda in Kazakhstan to home.
Then, at last, Houston was again in charge.
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