Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, April 16, 1993 TAG: 9304160445
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-11 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DAVID SHRIBMAN
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
COLD WAR'S END COULD BOOST SPACE EXPLORATION . . .
HERE COME the Russians to bail out the U.S. space program, and it may be the best news in aerospace since Neil Armstrong took his one small step on the surface of the moon.It took more than three decades, some of the most dangerous flarings of the Cold War, the death of communism and the greatest economic crisis since the Depression, but finally the U.S. space program may be about to fulfill its promise.
Now the White House is looking to the Russians to help redesign the space station Freedom, which already is something of an international operation involving Western Europeans, Canadians and Japanese. The largest international technological partnership ever attempted is about to get larger and, in this case, better.
From the start, misty-eyed idealists, philosophers, scientists, clerics, poets and politicians agreed that the promise of the human adventure into space was much like our more prosaic progress here on Earth: It was the journey and not the destination that mattered.
And now that this country is bankrupt, the Soviet Union is in shambles, the arms race over and the space program rudderless, we may have a chance to get it right.
The ironies here are rich. The dissolution of the Soviet Union left the United States in a position nearly as commanding as the one it had in 1945, that of the single great power in a chaotic world. And by most measures, the United States won the space race the moment Armstrong climbed out of his fragile lunar landing module.
But now the United States can't go it alone, in most cases not on Earth and certainly not in space. At the Vancouver summit, President Clinton invited the Russians, who have been operating a space station for more than a decade, into the U.S. space effort. Since then, there has been a flurry of activity. The question no longer is whether the Russians will participate, but how much.
For years, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has studied using the Soyuz TM, the three-person spacecraft the Russians use to ferry cosmonauts back and forth from the Mir space station, as a rescue vehicle for Freedom. Now, that's almost certainly going to happen.
More than a decade ago, U.S. astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts met in space, and soon, perhaps in 1995, U.S. astronauts are all but certain to dock a space shuttle with Mir. The spacecraft will use a Russian docking mechanism. Already two cosmonauts are in Houston training for the fall shuttle launch.
The big issue is whether to use Russian launch vehicles. Many U.S. space officials and engineers fear it would lend too much credibility to the Russian space program. Others worry that the United States then would be relying too heavily on launch facilities in the former Soviet Union.
But U.S. engineers are also looking longingly at the space suit that cosmonauts wear during space walks, at advanced automated welding technologies the Russians have developed, and at the device Russians use to keep their spacecraft from spinning.
The impetus for much of this cooperation is financial. Initial cost estimates for the space station came in at $30 billion or more - in any case, too much for the Clinton administration. Working with the Russians is a good way to shave costs.
"NASA has wanted to cooperate with Russia for a long time," says Samuel Keller, head of the East-West Space Science Center at the University of Maryland. "But now with the space station having serious financial problems the idea of using Russian technology is very attractive."
The cost cutters are at work overtime at NASA these days, shelving ideas for a new launch vehicle and looking to trim money from budgets for communications satellites and space travel. A NASA task force will offer recommendations in two months on how to operate the space station on less than half the $30 billion figure.
The budget released the other day by the administration called for increasing NASA's overall budget by $600 million, and also included large increases in money for space research. But lawmakers on Capitol Hill may want to cut the space budget, and some may try to eliminate the space station altogether.
It comes as the nation undertakes a new debate about the purpose of space travel.
The first steps off Earth were driven by Cold War rivalry. President Kennedy embarked on the race to the moon because he needed a dramatic competition that he was sure the United States could win.
The space program provided the Pentagon with delivery systems for advanced weapons, to be sure. But the real purpose of the manned space program, as it was called, was to demonstrate U.S. technological power in the 1960s. That was a period of rapid decolonization around the globe, and as new countries in Asia and Africa struggled to determine whether to embrace Western capitalism or Soviet-style communism, U.S. policymakers searched for symbols of supremacy.
Technological wizardry and dramatic space accomplishments were a way for the United States to demonstrate to these newly independent countries that America was the society (and capitalism the economic system) to emulate.
Now that struggle is over, and space is no longer new and shiny, or even a great adventure into the unknown. Teachers no longer wheel television sets into classrooms so their students can watch space shots; the very notion is ludicrous today. A generation ago, schoolchildren could name the seven Mercury astronauts and say a little something about each of them; now hardly anyone can name even one astronaut.
But in this atmosphere - a blase population and a bottom-line approach to government - there is renewed talk about the value of space travel, and not only for the sense of international cooperation it might nurture in the years ahead.
"There's no doubt we're going to continue to put satellites up for spying and to watch weather and climate changes, but those are examples of using space to do something for Earth," says John Logsdon, the director of George Washington University's Center on International Science and Technology Policy. "The real question is whether we are going to go outward and think outward, and make that part of our vision for the future."
Now, if we go, we will go with others, including the Russians.
David Shribman is Washington bureau chief for the Boston Globe. Knight-Ridder/Tribune