Nasa's Plea: Help!

By MICHAEL D. LEMONICK

The fiery, Jupiter-bright object that flashed across moonlit skies from Florida to New York early last Thursday morning was neither star nor planet nor UFO. It was the space shuttle Discovery putting on a spectacular light show on its way into orbit for eight days of atmospheric research. The successful -- at last! -- launch was a big relief for NASA. Two days earlier, Discovery's countdown was halted 11 seconds before lift-off because of a faulty computer circuit. Two weeks before that miscue, a mission by sister shuttle Columbia was scrubbed just three seconds before launch, after a valve got stuck. Columbia is still sitting on the ground at Cape Canaveral.

These latest glitches are mere footnotes in the seemingly endless litany of NASA's woes: the Challenger disaster, the nearsighted Hubble Space Telescope, the crippled Galileo probe to Jupiter, the badly designed and perpetually redesigned space station Freedom. By now, the U.S. space agency has a firmly established reputation for mounting expensive, ambitious projects that don't quite work right. At a time when Congress is looking at every possible way to slash the budget deficit, NASA has become an obvious target.

That is why an idea that was at first unthinkable and then unlikely now seems almost inevitable. The space agency has grudgingly agreed to pool its brainpower -- and perhaps hardware -- with its former archrivals the Russians. Last week the White House ordered NASA to bring Russian experts into discussions on how to scale down the planned space station. With its current $30 billion price tag, Freedom will never get off the ground.

The idea sounds eminently reasonable: the former Soviets are experts at launching heavy objects, while the U.S. hasn't tried it since the mid-1970s. They already have a working space station; the U.S. does not. And the Russians have far more experience in the physiology of long-term space flight than their American counterparts have. If this bold collaboration comes off, it could lead to even more ambitious projects, like a joint manned mission to Mars, and forever change the way space research is done. Says John Logsdon, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University: "Cooperation is a win-win opportunity. Space exploration only makes sense if it's done on a cooperative basis."

The Russians have been pushing for a shared space effort for more than a decade, but until recently NASA wasn't interested. At first there were security questions. The U.S. didn't want Soviet scientists to have access to American electronics for fear it would be used for spying. After the cold war ended, another objection surfaced: Russian hardware was too unsophisticated to be of much use on U.S. missions.

That was before NASA came under severe pressure to cut costs dramatically and justify its decisions on what missions to fly. Budget constraints have already led to the cancellation of some projects and to the development of a bargain-basement mini-spacecraft that could scout out Pluto for a fraction of the cost of a typical planetary flight.

Suddenly, Russian space technology is looking better. In fact, even before last week's White House order, some small-scale cooperative projects were in the works. The Americans decided last year to purchase a Russian Topaz space- based nuclear reactor, admitting that the Russians' design was superior to anything in the U.S. A Soyuz space capsule is on the potential shopping list as well, to be used as a kind of lifeboat to get astronauts away from a failing space station. Later this year Russian cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev, who was stranded in space for months by political maneuverings during the Soviet Union's breakup, will fly on a U.S. shuttle. In 1995 an American astronaut will be a guest aboard Russia's Mir space station. And in the same year, a shuttle will hook up with Mir, possibly to retrieve the American astronaut, using a Russian docking adapter.

The White House directive will quicken the pace of such collaboration. The Administration wants NASA to come up with three options for a cut-down version of the space station, reducing the cost over the next five years from $14.6 billion to $5 billion, $7 billion or $9 billion. If NASA selects the $9 % billion model, it will have to raid other programs to fund part of it. Thus the agency will probably go with one of the cheaper options, making the use of inexpensive Russian know-how more likely.

Just what form Russian participation will take is still unclear. At the very least, Russian space-station experts will be joining the U.S.-dominated team of engineers now working on the latest space-station redesign; in fact, NASA is already looking for living and working space for the first contingent of Russian designers.

But U.S. officials acknowledge that Russians may end up doing far more. One serious obstacle to building Freedom is that it could take as many as 18 shuttle flights, each one risking the lives of astronauts, to get the necessary construction materials into space. Using the Russians' unmanned Energia booster, the most powerful rocket in the world, could reduce the number of launches and greatly decrease the risk. The Russians are already fabricating parts for their next space station, Mir-2. The new station could be used as a model for Freedom, or the two could be combined into one large unit.

No one is happier about the prospect of joint missions, and especially about cooperation on the space station, than the Russians. While the U.S. space program has declined slowly, the Russian effort, though still technologically strong, has suffered mightily from the Soviet Union's collapse. The space facilities are now located in several different countries -- launch pads in Kazakhstan, flight controllers in Russia, manufacturing in Ukraine -- each with its own political agenda.

Beyond that, the Russian program has lost some of its guaranteed funding. Some projects, like the manned space effort, have retained government support, but many labs have been freed from central control and forced to look for customers -- and the Kremlin can no longer be counted on as a reliable client. "Gone are the days when Soviet space engineering basked in the comfort of huge government financial injections," says Mikhail Osin, chairman of Kosmoflot, a company formed to market space-engineering services. "Today the pay of those who build spaceships is lower than that of a floor sweeper." Kosmoflot's latest project is a restaurant built out of rocket parts, while a factory designed to churn out components for Russia's own space shuttle has begun producing steel bed frames, to generate income for workers' salaries.

Among the strapped enterprises is Energomash, a former secret government rocket-design agency and now the capitalistic manufacturer of the Energia rocket. Says Energomash spokesman Felix Cherkis: "Experts elsewhere know that our liquid-fuel engines are about 20 years ahead of American ones. This technology is state of the art -- and we could use the money." So could the Russian economy. Observes Roald Sagdeyev, former head of the Soviet Union's Space Science Institute and now a physicist at the University of Maryland: "Hard currency is very important. The ruble is in trouble, and there is near hyperinflation. Now, instead of philanthropic aid or foreign credit, Russians can make money for themselves."

Scientists applaud the idea of cooperation; they've been arguing for years that the superpower space race was inefficient and perverse. Says Logsdon: "This is all being couched in terms of budget decisions, but it's much deeper than that. Human spaceflight has always been driven by national rivalry. It's taken 30 years to dissipate that, and now it's gone."

If exploration truly does become depoliticized and denationalized, as the experts hope it will, some international management agency will eventually have to be formed -- sort of a U.N. for space, perhaps. That in turn could lead to much more ambitious projects, like the manned flight to Mars. Such a mission was vaguely proposed by George Bush, but no one who understood the technical and budgetary difficulties took him seriously. Working together, the U.S. and Russia just might be able to make that trip to the Red Planet.

With reporting by Dick Thompson/Washington and Yuri Zarakhovich/Moscow