#4
San Francisco Chronicle
October 16, 2002
Russia's decaying space program up in the air
Anna Badkhen, Chronicle Staff Writer

Moscow -- It was meant to be the next big thing, a way for Russia to maintain its place as a leader in space.

But now Russia's role as a senior partner in the 16-nation, $100 billion international space station project is in doubt, as officials here warn that the country can no longer maintain its financial obligations to the project.

Russian space officials say that Moscow may have to scale back its operations supporting the station because it has no money to manufacture Soyuz vessels for manned space flights.

The United States pays most of the space station's costs, but Russia, which has designed and built some of its key parts, provides two Soyuz craft each year to take cosmonauts to the station and remain as lifeboats for six months. Russia also provides five or six cargo ships a year to deliver supplies to the station.

All this may end next year, said Valery Ryumin, deputy general-director of the Energia space corporation and coordinator of Russia's part of the space station program.

"We have no money for any trips to space," Ryumin said. "It looks like we may have to cancel our part of the international space station program."

Ryumin said the Russian government plans to allocate only $38 million out of the $133 million Energia needs to build and launch enough spacecraft next year. He said Energia would have to spend most of this money to pay a $25 million debt it accumulated in previous years.

SPACE STATION SAFE

The United States signaled that the dearth of funding for the Russian space program would not force astronauts to abandon the ambitious project NASA heads.

"It has been in continuous operation with a permanent presence for almost two years . . . and our full intention is we're going to continue in that pattern as far as anybody can imagine," NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe said in Florida.

About Russia's cash shortage, O'Keefe said: "Are they having financial difficulties? Clearly that's been signaled, and it's something they're going to have to work through."

Being kicked out of the orbit because of lack of money is the worst nightmare of Russia's disintegrating space program. With doubts arising over Moscow's ability to maintain its end of the bargain in keeping the international space station afloat, space experts wonder whether the country will ever recover the leading role in space held by the Soviet Union.

When Russia finally pulled the plug on its aging Mir spacecraft last year, space officials balked at giving up Russia's own presence in space, which they saw as a ticket to cosmic prestige. Even as the Kremlin decided to scrap the 15-year-old Mir, polls showed that more than 60 percent of Russians supported keeping the spaceship aloft.

Permanently underfunded and suffering from a brain drain from their impoverished program, the Russians have sometimes missed deadlines by years, and have sought novel ways to raise funds, including sending space tourists to the international station for $20 million a pop.

Concerned that Russia wasn't able to meet its commitment to the international project, U.S. officials persuaded Russia to let Mir go last year.

At the time, the United States argued that the international space station would guarantee Russia a high profile in orbit in the future.

A BLEAK HORIZON

But as Moscow scrambles to fulfill its obligation to the international project, Russian space experts wonder whether the nation's space program has a future.

"One can't fly to space without any money," said Georgi Grechko, one of Russia's most celebrated cosmonauts. "Sorry to say, but I believe that our space program is dying."

To many in the West, the Russian space program has a reputation of a beleaguered, cash-strapped wreck, best illustrated by Hollywood films such as "Armageddon," which depicts a Russian cosmonaut as an unshaven madman in a fur hat trying to fix his malfunctioning spacecraft by pounding on it with a wrench.

But here, space officials still prefer to remember how their once-proud program stunned the rest of the world.

Recently, Russian space veterans celebrated the launch of the Soviet Union's first Sputnik 45 years ago. The news that a 186-pound artificial satellite was exchanging radio signals with Earth humiliated and panicked Washington.

Even though the glory days of the Soviet space program are over, Russians continue to draw on their country's enhanced status because of its past triumphs in orbit.

Years after the demise of Russia's superpower status as a space program, scientists across the country use Moscow's participation in the space race as a selling point of the country's technical know-how.

In marketing Russia's attractiveness to potential foreign customers, Rossoft, an association of Russian computer programming companies, said its computer scientists draw on the tradition that kept Mir in orbit for many years longer than it was expected to circle the Earth, and with fewer resources than their American counterparts.

But the way things are going, Russia's crippled space program may never repeat these achievements again, said Energia's Ryumin.

"We may have to stop launching manned spacecraft, and if we do, Russia's space program will be thrown back decades," he said.

BACK TO THE TOP    #227 CONTENTS    NEXT ARTICLE