Space station science gets squeezed

Hoping for help
NASA could get some budgetary relief in the form of a $1 billion stopgap currently being considered in the Senate — a supplement that's designed to make up for extra expenses NASA incurred because of the Columbia tragedy and Hurricane Katrina.

It's not clear how much of that money will go toward restoring research, said Koizumi, the AAAS budget analyst. But the initiative at least signals that Congress recognizes NASA's tough financial straits, he said.

"It is hard for the scientific community to do anything when NASA pretty much admits that there are priorities, and NASA can't do everything within a basically flat budget," Koizumi told MSNBC.com. "What the community has done is to write letters to the appropriators, asking them to ensure that NASA has enough money to keep a robust scientific portfolio going. ... So far, at least on the Senate side, it looks as if that has borne fruit."

Thomas said he expected more research time to become available on the space station in 2009, when the crew complement is due to rise from three to six. The number of crew hours available for research should rise from 150 to 800 for a typical six-month stint, he said. (In contrast, an unusually full schedule might leave only about 50 hours for research during the upcoming space station expedition, he said.)

"There's a lot of good things about to happen once we get the crew up to six," Thomas said.

After 2010, more questions
But there are more questions than answers about what happens after 2010. Will the station really be completed by that time? How will the station be resupplied after the shuttle fleet's retirement? NASA is counting on Russian, European and Japanese spaceships — or commercial spaceship builders — to fill the gap between the shuttles and their successors.

"We're waiting to hear how we're going to get our payloads up to orbit. ... There are a number of things, they're not well-defined right now," Thomas said. "Am I nervous about that? No."

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He and other NASA managers voiced confidence that at least some avenues for resupplying the space station will be available. "Perhaps not all of them will be equally successful, but certainly we will see a transportation capacity in the next decade that is far greater than the transportation capacity we have had to date," said Mark Uhran, the agency's assistant associate administrator for the space station.

It's also not yet clear how NASA will run its space station operations in the post-2010 time frame. Congress has called on the space agency to consider the country's national laboratories — such as, say, Los Alamos or Oak Ridge — as models. NASA is "right in the middle of those studies right now," Uhran said.

He told MSNBC.com that NASA was surveying other government agencies to determine the level of demand for space research. Theoretically, the National Science Foundation or the Department of Energy could make arrangements with NASA and private space transport companies for future projects, he said.

"The space station is a national asset, so it will be available to all U.S. government agencies," he said. "However, NASA will have priority use of it, obviously, because it meets our mission objectives first."

How long will it last?
Right now it's not clear how long NASA expects to use the space station. Koizumi had the impression that the station could be decommissioned as soon as 2014 or 2015 — meaning there'd be just four or five years of full-scale orbital research after a 12-year construction phase. But Walz said the agency was still in the midst of discussions about "what happens after 2016."

Uhran said the way the space station is managed as a scientific platform may well change over the coming years. "Clearly we will have a very different scenario when the assembly has been completed and we're in a full utilization phase," he said. "What that scenario will be, I wouldn't venture to guess that today."

Amid the uncertainty, Uhran, who has been involved in space station planning since the program's inception in 1984, said he drew inspiration from one of NASA's biggest scientific success stories.

"I can remember when the Hubble Space Telescope was first conceived, it took 20 years to go from concept to reality, and then once deployed on orbit the Hubble didn't work quite right initially," he said. "But you look through it now, and there's absolutely no question that it was the right thing to do. Well, the space station is just about 20 years into its history, and it is halfway deployed on orbit. And I'm confident that by the time we complete the assembly, there will be no question that it was the right thing to do as well."

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