Politics, lack of vision muddle US space efforts

NASA announced on Friday that it had signed a $300 million deal with Russia's space agency Roscosmos to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS). It's a good thing too since without the deal after next year, NASA would have no way to get astronauts back and forth to the ISS.

That's because NASA is planning to retire the Space Shuttle - America's only manned space vehicle - at the end of 2010. Its replacement, the Orion, isn't scheduled for its first manned flight until 2014, and that project is said to be running behind schedule. So even as NASA is dedicating all of the remaining Space Shuttle flights to finishing the construction of the ISS, it won't have a way to send astronauts to and fro - hence the need to rely on Roscosmos as a taxi service.

It's typical of the lack of long-term planning and political will that has hampered the American space program since the Moon landings in 1969. Take the International Space Station for example. The space station idea goes back to the Reagan administration, only then it was dubbed space station "Freedom" that would have been an American-only affair (not to mention as large as two football fields). But there was little will among Congress to pay "Freedom's" huge cost, so the project was scaled back and eventually morphed into the International Space Station.

In the early 90's NASA struck a deal with Russia to gain access to Russia's expertise in operating orbiting space stations - something the Russians had been doing since the 1970's. NASA even contributed modules to Russia's Mir space station - the crown jewel of the Russian space program. But NASA soon took to viewing Mir as a drain on its resources and as distraction from the ISS, so they pressured Russia into abandoning it and backing the ISS - which Russia finally did in 2001, sending Mir to a fiery plunge into the South Pacific.

But now, even as NASA is rushing to finish the ISS, a task projected to wrap up in 2011, they are already making plans to abandon it as well, just four years later in 2015. The reason? NASA's interest now is in going back to the Moon and maybe then onto Mars, space stations, once vital to NASA's plans, now seem like a drain on resources (like Mir was seen to be in the late 90's).

And there's the problem - space projects, like going to Mars say, can take decades - but NASA doesn't plan and Congress certainly doesn't fund projects in terms of decades. So NASA acts in a herky-jerky manner - rush to finish the ISS then quickly abandon it - that in the end doesn't accomplish much, yet spends tens of billions of dollars in the process.

Meanwhile Russia is floating an idea for recycling on a grand scale - if NASA does abandon ISS in 2015, Russia is drawing up plans to pull their parts of the ISS off and use them to create their own just-Russian space station (likely to be named Mir-2). Russian officials say that their experience from Mir (Mir-1 that is) show that by replacing components as they wear out, a space station could, in theory, operate indefinitely.