Who Needs This?

By Jeffrey Kluger

If Russian cosmonauts aboard the soon-to-be-launched International Space Station find themselves running short of borscht, there will be a very good reason: the technicians on the ground ate it all. The Russian space agency has been running on fumes since the end of the cold war, but never more so than in the past few years. Employees at the Baikonur space center in Kazakhstan often go unpaid and sometimes slip away at the end of their shifts taking pilfered electrical components with them. Some of those employees, less interested in fencing stolen goods than simply eating a decent meal, have even broken into provisions intended for cosmonauts and made off with as many cans of borscht--and as many rations of vodka--as they could carry.

There's something darkly comical in watching the once feared Russian space agency reduced to such pratfalls, and there was a time when U.S. officials might have enjoyed the show. But Washington is not laughing, and with good reason. On Nov. 20, the first piece of the 16-nation, NASA-led International Space Station is set to be launched from Baikonur--marking the start of an eight-year construction project that ranks as the greatest peacetime engineering job in history--and a bankrupt Russia is only one of the problems it faces.

The station is three or five or 12 times over budget, depending on who's counting the fiscal beans, and while everything from rubles to yen to pounds is supposedly bankrolling the work, it's American dollars that are really keeping it going. The project is also 14 years behind schedule and will probably slip further before construction on the 360-ft.-long, 460-ton skyliner is done. Worst of all, once the ISS gets into orbit, there are very real concerns about whether it will have anything truly useful to do.

Barring a catastrophe, there is little likelihood that the space station won't fly. Too much money has been spent and too much metal has been cut for it to be scrapped now. But however much work the ISS eventually does, the lessons it yields will probably be less scientific than bureaucratic--lessons about how, and how not, to get a project like this done. "Most of the functions of the space station have disappeared," says Alex Roland, chairman of the department of history at Duke University and a former NASA historian. "NASA is mortgaging its future for the next 20 years."

The International Space Station wasn't always so complex a beast. The idea of a permanent U.S. orbital platform was first proposed by Ronald Reagan in his State of the Union address in January 1984. For all the station's great size, Reagan envisioned it as a fairly fat-free piece of engineering: a lean, $8 billion cluster of modules that could be manufactured on the ground, be assembled in space and go into service by 1992. Orbiting Earth 200 miles up, it would serve as a flying laboratory for inventing new materials and conducting pharmaceutical work. More important, it would help scientists study the physical effects of extended periods of weightlessness, a necessary prelude to interplanetary missions. "Our principal goal," says Daniel Goldin, NASA's current administrator, "is getting to Mars."

What Ronald Reagan could envision and what engineers could build were two different things, however, and when 1992 arrived, NASA had spent $10 billion basically drawing up--and tearing up--space-station blueprints. It fell to the Clinton Administration, which came to town the next year, to set things right. The new White House team decided that while the space station had always been a global enterprise--with Japan, Europe and Canada all contributing parts--NASA would fling the doors open even wider, inviting the Russians, with their wobbly new democracy, to join. With Russia sharing the work, the Administration figured, the overall costs would plummet, holding the U.S. contribution to no more than an additional $17.4 billion.

The Administration figured wrong. Russia agreed to construct two principal components of the ISS: the Zarya, a 40-ft. power-and-propulsion pod that is the part set to fly next week; and the Service Module, a school bus-size assembly that will serve as living quarters for at least part of the six-person multinational crew. Although Russia has the know-how to get both jobs done, it has not had the cash. To jump-start things, the U.S. agreed to pitch in, sending Moscow financial aid that was little more than a handout intended to be used for space-station construction. "Russia's participation was supposed to save us $2 billion," complains Democratic Congressman Timothy Roemer of Indiana. "We've sent $2 billion to Russia."

Especially worrisome has been the Service Module. The Russians pledged to have that station component ready for launch by April 1998. But April came and went, and no Service Module appeared. Moscow insists that the work is 95% complete and that the module will be ready for launch in July 1999, but Westerners have doubts. Says John Logsdon, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University: "It's been 95% complete for a long time."

What makes things especially dicey is that if the Service Module doesn't go aloft, nothing else can stay aloft. On Dec. 3, NASA will send up a shuttle to deploy the Unity node--a 22-ft.-long pod with six portholes that will connect to Zarya and serve as the station's central docking hub. Neither Unity nor Zarya is equipped with adequate propulsion systems, though, and without the Service Module, their orbits will decay. To prevent this, NASA wants to send an additional $660 million Russia's way. In the event that even this isn't enough to get the Service Module built, NASA is looking into modifying the shuttle so it can nudge Zarya and Unity into a more stable orbit. The space agency is also considering other contingency plans, such as building its own emergency-return vehicle for the ISS, replacing an off-the-shelf piece of hardware that Russia had originally agreed to provide. "It's not as though we're ignoring the situation," Goldin says.

But all those plans take money--American money--and NASA is being hit from all sides. Prime contractor Boeing admits that it erred in its estimates by as much as $800 million. This, along with other overruns, pushes the ISS cost to $21 billion--and that's on top of the $10 billion spent on R. and D. before 1992. Moreover, none of this includes the 28 to 38 shuttle launches it will take to truck the station into orbit between now and 2006--launches that will start at a cool $400 million each. When the annual expense of maintaining the ISS during its 10-to-20-year life is included, the Government Accounting Office frets that the project's total price tag could reach $96 billion. Goldin disputes that, stressing that the space agency is spending only one-seventh of its total budget on the ISS.

Money isn't all that's giving station critics night sweats. Years ago, NASA estimated that building a ship this big would require astronauts to make some 80 space walks--a proposition so dangerous it was one of the reasons Congress almost killed the project. NASA pledged to change that figure, and it did--in the wrong direction. Last week the agency admitted that astronaut construction crews may have to venture outside a hair-raising 162 times.

No matter what the numbers are, a simple, low-cost project the space station isn't, and calls have gone up to cancel it altogether--or at the very least show the Russians the door. That, however, is unlikely. Having climbed up into the ISS treehouse, Washington officials seem to have kicked over the ladder that would have let them climb back down. Moscow's promised modules, after all, are vital ones, and if the Russians go, so would their hardware. Political considerations play a role too. A project this big inevitably turns into budgetary pork, and the ISS has been nothing short of a flying ham. In July the Senate overwhelmingly killed a proposal to scrap the station, in part because that would mean canceling contracts in vote-rich California, Texas, Florida and Virginia. "Machiavelli could not have designed it better," says Indiana's Roemer. "The bread crumbs have been spread out in the congressional districts."

If the country is stuck with the ISS, will the new outpost at least return enough science to justify all the trouble? It's debatable. Pressed to explain just what astronauts will be doing up there for the next two decades, NASA points again and again to the same few areas of research, particularly protein-crystal growth and materials manufacturing. But the value of this is disputed. Protein crystals, which grow more uniformly in zero-G and can help scientists develop drugs, are fragile and can be deformed by a mere bump--something that can happen a lot when astronauts are onboard. Materials manufacturing is similarly subject to human error. A cheaper solution would be to conduct those studies aboard unmanned spacecraft.

Weightlessness research is a far better argument for the ISS. Even a few days in zero-G can be hard on the body; a three-year Mars mission would be murder. But with reams of data in hand from Russian and American stays aboard the Mir space station, is more zero-G research the best way to spend $96 billion?

None of this has moved Washington, and after this week, when the first ISS component should actually be in orbit, it will become harder still to pull the plug on the project. No one doubts that NASA could finance plenty of other missions--both manned and unmanned--if the station were canceled. Just $1 billion of ISS funding, after all, could pay for four missions of a robot spacecraft like the Mars Pathfinder--the little rover that so electrified the country last year. The ISS, however, appears to be here to stay, and could dominate NASA's exploratory agenda for a generation. Over the past 40 years, the space agency has shown itself capable of flying brilliant, even transcendent, missions. The space station, sad to say, is not likely to be one of them.

--Reported by Jerry Hannifin/Cape Canaveral and Dick Thompson/ Washington

With reporting by Jerry Hannifin/Cape Canaveral and Dick Thompson/Washington