Now, NASA and Russians need each other

James Oberg NBC News space analyst

HOUSTON - Going into the 2008 presidential campaign, spaceflight advocates hoped that the subject might actually become a topic of political interest for the first time in decades. Now it has, for all the wrong reasons.

Some politicians have suddenly realized that the safety-motivated retirement of the space shuttle in 2010 will leave the United States dependent on Russian rockets to reach the international space station for five years or so. Many of those politicians have known for years exactly what NASA’s plan was: to buy Russian spaceship tickets. They put through budgets that prevented NASA from developing alternatives. Now they're feigning shock and outrage that this is really going to happen, and demanding a wide range of stopgap measures, each costing billions of dollars.

With relations between Washington and Moscow deteriorating, it’s become politically profitable to "bash the Russians" over allowing them to carry our astronauts into space. And with the presidential campaign closely contested in Florida, it's become expedient for politicians of all stripes to adopt a position of "no job losses" in the shuttle program.

All this posturing is so patently opportunistic and half-baked that it can only distract from real debates and delay implementation of real solutions.

Setting aside the staged outrage and bashing, that political energy could better be productively turned into realistic planning that doesn’t involve magically reanimating the space shuttle program, which is already well down the track to a well-deserved retirement.

One small step
The first step in a "get better" strategy is to stop going into the U.S.-Russian deal acting as if the U.S. was over a barrel. Playing the preordained patsy is a sure way to prompt the Russians to escalate their demands, in space and back on Earth.

The truth is, while NASA has become dependent on the Russian contribution to the international space station, the Russians' manned space program has become even more dependent on the station (and U.S. support of it). If NASA will have to depend on the Russians to transport astronauts between Earth and space for several years, it won't be any different from the situation that existed from 2003 to mid-2005.

The Russians are stuck with a different kind of dependence. The American half of the space station provides their modules with critical power and communications resources, not to mention advanced research devices, that they have never been able to build themselves. While it may become technically feasible at some future point to unhook their section and fly free, this will only become possible after several more expansion modules are added at their end, some of them carried aboard the remaining space shuttle missions.

By that time, NASA and its partners in Europe, Japan and Canada will have a facility that contains (or has access to) all the critical functions that in the first decade of operation were provided by Russian hardware.

Moreover, even if the Russians did cut loose their section at that point, they would be thrown back to the meager level of operations they suffered through a quarter-century ago — a primitive mode which even their own experts have now come to denounce as useless grandstanding. There would also be a legal dispute over who actually owns the U.S.-financed, Russian-built Zarya cargo module. NASA has no practical need of it now, except that the Russians want it, which makes it far more valuable as a bargaining chip than as a space asset.

And with China (and soon afterwards, India) potentially champing at the bit to step in and replace Russia as space station partners, it would be the U.S. side holding the high cards, not Moscow.

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