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The Science Of Spending Billions

getting beyond hotels and eye candy
by Bruce Moomaw
Los Angeles - Sept 21, 2002
At its September meeting at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the NASA Advisory Council heard a good deal about the U.S. Mars program and about NASA's attempt to integrate itself with the U.S. educational system.

But its most important item of business by far was to consider what remains NASA's central problem: the seemingly ever-growing cost of the International Space Station, and the difficulty of making it worthwhile if limits are placed on its growth -- as the federal government has finally made it clear it intends to do.

And at this meeting, NASA officials finally started to unveil their radically revised new plans for the Station (at least through the end of 2007). They made it clear that, at least through that period, the original plans to provide the Station with a permanent crew of 6 or 7 will be dropped.

The funds simply do not exist for the needed Crew Return Vehicle to allow such a crew to evacuate the Station in the event of an emergency, or for the additional Habitation Module needed to hold them in the first place.

They also did make it clear that the Station will be completed, not just to its minimal "U.S. Core Complete" configuration (now set for completion in February or March 2004), but through its "International Partners Core Complete" configuration, in which the lab modules being built for it by the European Space Agency and Japan will be added -- without which our partners, understandably, had threatened to pull completely out of the program.

But the Station's permanent crew will remain limited to three -- which places very serious limits on the amount of actual scientific work that it can do, since plans up to now have concluded that about two and half crewmen are needed full-time simply to maintain the Station's systems.

During a televised appearance, NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe assured the Advisory Committee that at some point after 2007 NASA intends to provide the Station with both the emergency Crew Return Vehicle (CRV), and the Habitation Module necessary to raise its permanent crew to six or seven.

Indeed, he assured former Senator John Glenn -- the Advisory Council member who was most vocally concerned about the Station's problems at the meeting -- that NASA intends to include funds in its fiscal year 2004 budget to begin work on the development of the CRV, although he refused to specify the form it might take.

But he and the other NASA officials who spoke also made it clear that there is no chance of the Station being expanded beyond a 3-man permanent crew at least through the end of 2007, and perhaps for longer.

This leaves the key question: with the permanent crew cut to only three for at least the next five years, how can NASA possibly carry out enough research of all kinds to justify the Station? ISS Program Manager William Gerstenmaier presented NASA's new strategy for trying to do so.

First, he announced big news, to be confirmed in a formal request this week: Japan will delay delivery of its "Japanese Experiment Module" due to funding problems, forcing its launch to the Station to be delayed from early 2005 to mid-2006.

However, this allows compensatory earlier launches of some other Station components -- including the European Space Agency's "Columbus" laboratory, whose launch will be moved forward several months from its current April 2005 date.

Two other Station components -- the "Special Purpose Dexterous Manipulator" and the "Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer" (a huge 6-ton instrument to be attached to the Station's outside to make the most sensitive check yet for antimatter particles in cosmic rays) -- will also have their launches advanced forward somewhat.

As further compensation for its delay of "JEM", Japan has responded to the REMAP group's urgent statement that a large centrifuge capable of creating simulated low-gravity environments -- providing various intermediate states between Earth gravity and zero-G -- is crucial for Station research, especially in biology.

Japan's "Centrifuge Accommodations Module" -- previously delayed all the way into April 2008 -- will now have its launch advanced by fully a year, to April 2007.

Finally, Brazil has pulled out of its agreement to provide three "Express Pallets" allowing Shuttles to carry large tailored collections of small experiment packages to the Station -- but Gerstenmaier said that this will be compensated for either by the Pentagon funding them in exchange for some military experiments, or by NASA requesting new funding for them later in the Station's schedule.

All these changes are due to be officially approved by NASA in October. But -- as Gerstenmaier pointed out -- all this reshuffling still leaves the central problem of maximizing scientific research on a Station which may well certainly be limited to the 3-man "International Partners Core Complete" ("IPCC") configuration through 2007 -- and which will take years to achieve even that level.

The "US Core Complete Configuration" -- itself not to be completed until spring 2004 -- contains only the already-attached US Laboratory Module, with a total of 10-12 "systems racks" for individual experiments (as against 27 research racks for the total IPCC configuration).

There are actually three separate serious problems in meeting even the desired requirements for Station research as specified by NASA's Office of Biological and Physical Research (OBPR). The first is simply launching the needed total mass of experiments and crew supplies into orbit.

At the current time, NASA's budget problems have caused it to reduce the launch rate of Shuttles to the Station to four per year, along with four unmanned Russian "progress" cargo carriers.

Russia's legal obligation to use any of those Progress vehicles to carry non-Russian experiments or supplies for non-Russian crewmen ends in NASA Fiscal Year 2006 -- but, barring unexpected problems, the ESA's new Ariane Transfer Vehicle (ATV) will be ready to replace them for that purpose a year earlier.

Even with this setup, however, just flying four Shuttles per year to the Station leads to a disastrous lack of adequate cargo "upmass" -- the backlog of delayed cargo simply grows endlessly bigger.

However, adding a fifth Shuttle flight each year deals effectively with the problem -- the backlog of undelivered cargo does grow to fully 18,000 kg in FY 2005 (thanks to the Shuttles' necessary role in finishing the Station's construction), but then (assuming that the ATV does come on line), it shrinks steadily, dropping to zero in five years.

Thereafter, a setup of five Shuttles per year plus the ATV allows a steadily growing buildup of excess capacity.

For this reason by itself, Gerstenmaier told the Committee that he regards a schedule of five Shuttle flights to the Station yearly -- rather than four -- as an absolute necessity.




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