New Era About to Dawn for Space Station

The International Space Station is already one of the brightest stars in the sky, a marvel of human engineering visible to the unaided eye on a clear night.

To some, its purpose and future are just as lucid. To others the most expensive man-made object in space is really nothing more than an eyesore, a $25-billion boondoggle whose cost is growing out of control.

This week, despite chronic delays, massive cost overruns and fierce debate over its usefulness, the space station will finally go online with its first long-term crew.

With the basic infrastructure in place, three astronauts--an American and two Russians--are to lift off Monday from Kazakhstan and become the first inhabitants of the orbiting craft. Space station commander and U.S. astronaut Bill Shepard, Russian Soyuz commander Yuri Gidzenko and flight engineer Sergei Krikalev are scheduled to dock with the Zvezda service module Thursday and begin a four-month stay.

This week’s mission is “a watershed mark,” said Joe Mills, deputy program manager for the space station at Boeing Co., the project’s prime contractor. “Everything is moving really fast now, and we’re ready to go.”

The fact that the program is moving forward at all is a marvel in itself. Fourteen years behind schedule and at triple its original budget so far, the space station has encountered numerous operational problems, and its funding has been under constant threat. The project has survived 22 full votes in either the House or the Senate to have it scuttled.

The station has been resilient thanks to the way it has been able to evolve, from child of the Cold War designed to counteract Russia’s own space station, Mir, to olive branch intended to improve foreign relations in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse.

In the process, it quickly became one of the largest aerospace programs in the post-Cold War era, helping the aerospace industry--particularly in California--cushion itself from defense spending cuts that led companies to lay off thousands of employees.

Still, critics who want the project shut down deride it as pie in the sky, a waste of taxpayers’ money that has sucked valuable funds from other worthy scientific endeavors.

“We are still proceeding with this monstrosity that even Machiavelli could not have spread out with as much pork barrel,” said Rep. Tim J. Roemer (D-Ind.), one of the space station’s harshest critics and someone who unsuccessfully pushed to kill the program eight times in as many years. “If this was a welfare project, it would have been canceled a long time ago.”

Others hail the station as a jewel in space with a potential to yield yet unknown scientific discoveries with huge commercial potential.

Marshall Kaplan, president of Launchspace, a Potomac, Md.-based space consulting firm, said Roemer and other critics are short-sighted.

Taking advantage of long-term zero gravity research on the space station, for instance, new drugs could be discovered or new manufacturing techniques developed that would not have been possible on Earth, Kaplan said.

“It’s in the early stages, it’s evolving and it’s going to take some time before you see the benefits,” Kaplan said, noting that nothing like it has been built before. “There is a good chance it may be much more useful than how it appears today.”

Supporters also say the station is a critical test of international cooperation in the post-Cold War era. With the U.S. leading the technical effort and providing most of the funding, the station is one of the largest international scientific efforts ever undertaken, involving 15 other countries: Russia, Canada, Japan, Brazil and 11 member nations of the European Space Agency.

Despite the delays and cost overruns, Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.), chairman of the House Science Committee, said the station “should happen, has to happen.”

“This is the first international cooperative effort since the end of the Cold War,” he said. “Yes, it’s expensive, but if this type of international cooperation fails, it will be a long time before we will be able to do another.”

There are also foreign policy implications to the project. By being preoccupied with helping build the station, Sensenbrenner said, Russia may feel less need to develop weapons for Iraq, North Korea or other rogue nations.

While the debate has dragged on, the station has become an economic boon to California and other states, where it has helped offset a downturn in defense spending.

Boeing alone has about 4,500 employees working on the station across Southern California. In Huntington Beach, the company is building the structural backbone of the station, and in Canoga Park it makes and maintains the station’s electrical power system.

Thousands more work for hundreds of subcontractors, most of them local. And Boeing, which has a $9.3-billion contract to help build the station, estimated that it has already paid at least $1 billion to suppliers from California.

So far, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration estimates that the project has provided jobs to more than 40,000 people in 30 states.

In all, the U.S. General Accounting Office projects that this country will have spent about $96 billion on the station by the end of its 20-year life span. The cost projections include shuttle launches to staff and resupply the outpost, making it perhaps the most expensive machine man has ever made.

“California will have had its share of the money,” said Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Huntington Beach), a supporter of the project. “The space station helped us at a time when the aerospace industry needed the boost.”

Ironically, the station was supposed to be one of the more frugal space projects, costing about $8 billion. The budget concessions also meant that NASA could not pursue radical new technologies, as it did on the Apollo and space shuttle programs.

Still, critics argue that many of the experiments planned for the space station could have been done even more cheaply using satellites or other unmanned craft.

But President Ronald Reagan, smarting from the Soviet Union’s success with its space station, wanted one for this country too and announced in 1984 that the United States was going to launch its version by 1992.

However, cost estimates on the station, dubbed Freedom by Reagan, kept rising--as high as $30 billion--and NASA twice delayed the first launch. In 1993, after the agency had spent $11 billion on the project, President Clinton directed NASA to re-engineer a cheaper and more efficient version that would involve the Russians. He also set a U.S. spending cap of $17.4 billion.

But the involvement of the Russians, planned as a cost-saving measure, turned out to be just the opposite. Money troubles held back the launch of the Russian-built Zvezda, the living quarters for the first crew, by 2 1/2 years.

NASA now estimates that the current station will have cost U.S. taxpayers $24.1 billion to $26.4 billion by the time it is completely assembled in 2006, three times more than anticipated and 14 years behind schedule. And that doesn’t include 43 rocket and shuttle launches still left to ferry crew and supplies at a cost of $15 billion to $20 billion. In addition, the estimated tab for maintenance and operations over the station’s life span is about $40 billion.

Delays have also hurt Boeing’s bottom line. Officials at the company said the project is running about 11% over budget, which could wipe out any profits, once expected to be about $200 million to $300 million. But the company could still receive a monetary award from the government if it meets certain targets at the end of the contract.

The cost overrun is “more than what we like but not unreasonable, based on past history of doing a project of this magnitude,” Mills said.

For space buffs, the station will be an amazing sight. When fully assembled, it will span two football fields, weigh a million pounds and house six research laboratories--two operated by the U.S., two by the Russians, and one each by the Japanese and the European Space Agency.

From Earth, it is already one of the brightest celestial objects, clearly visible to the unaided eye as it moves across the night sky at 17,000 mph 250 miles above ground. When its four massive solar panels are in full bloom, the station will also be visible during the day.

The astronauts are to be ferried this week on a Russian Soyuz launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, the same launch pad that put the first man in space 39 years ago, setting off the space race. Much of the crew’s work will involve flight testing and assembly.

The Expedition 1 crew, as the first inhabitants are called, will be picked up by the space shuttle Discovery in February as it drops off their replacements.

The workhorse for the station will be a Canadian-built 55-foot robotic arm, which will move along a central girder called the truss--built in Huntington Beach--and help connect the modules and four giant solar arrays.

Initially, NASA officials say, the station will be primarily involved in long-term scientific research, mostly related to taking advantage of the special conditions that space provides.

For instance, purer protein crystals can be grown in space, and they could help scientists develop new drugs to help treat cancer, diabetes and immune disorders. Such experiments have been conducted on the space shuttle but were limited due to the short duration of the flights.

In addition, conditions in space will give scientists the ability to develop new metal alloys or semiconductor chips as well as to study the long-term effects of reduced gravity on humans, which could be valuable for longer human space travel.

NASA officials say the benefit of a research lab in space is virtually impossible to quantify, although any development such as pharmaceutical research could result in drugs worth millions of dollars in potential sales.

“The future commercial markets for the [space station] are still too premature, and any market study would be wholly speculative,” said a recent study completed by consulting firm KPMG, looking at commercial prospects of the space stations.

The report, commissioned by NASA, concluded that the station held strong potential for research and development of economically viable products or services in the long run but that in the near term the return-on-investment potential was limited to areas such as education, entertainment and advertising.

Indeed, three companies are vying to bring the space station into people’s living rooms. They include Enermedia, a joint venture of Russian rocket company Energia and Washington-based Space Media. The venture hopes to eventually broadcast a space sitcom detailing the lives of astronauts living in a module.

And NASA is quietly conducting an internal study looking at the prospects of commercializing the space station, including the possibility of allowing companies to sponsor certain space station projects, similar to sponsorship of the Olympics by Visa or Samsung.

Last summer, NASA chief Daniel Goldin announced a deal in which Excite.com would pay $100 million to broadcast high-definition images from the space station. The Internet company would also gain access to the agency’s huge trove of films and images.

In the end, NASA says private-public partnerships will free up billions of dollars of government money for new initiatives. Under a new policy enacted recently, 30% of America’s physical space on the station will be set aside for commercial development.

“The only way we’re going to break loose of Earth orbit is to turn over low Earth orbit to the entrepreneurs,” Goldin said.

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Some Assembly Required

The International Space Station will finally go online this week as its first permanent residents dock with the Zvezda service module. The linkup comes 16 years after President Ronald Reagan announced that the U.S. was going to build the outpost to counter the Soviets’ success with their space station. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the station evolved into an international project involving 16 nations, including Russia. In the U.S., California has played a key role in the project’s development.