What a trip! Space station turns 10

James Oberg NBC News space analyst

HOUSTON - The 10th anniversary of the international space station's birth, marked on Thursday, provides a good opportunity to appreciate the project's accomplishments — and there's an impressive list, as NASA is eager to boast. But the milestone also brings to mind how unrealistic the space agency's original plans for the project were, and how many unnecessary risks were taken.

Looking back at the judgment errors can provide valuable perspective for assessing the latest crop of promises and proposals for future American space projects.

If anyone had told NASA officials in 1998 that the station would still be unfinished a decade later — and in fact wouldn't be ready yet to accommodate a six-person crew — they might well have been appalled. Back then, the station was scheduled for completion by 2003. Instead of ignoring this embarrassing delay, NASA must figure out how it got those initial expectations so wrong so it can avoid repeating the mistakes next time.

Indeed, if those officials had known in advance even a portion of the trials, tribulations and excess expenses that would be set into motion by the flight of the first station element, a Russian-built module called the FGB (a Russian acronym for "Functional Cargo Block"), they could easily have concluded the launch was premature — as critics claimed at the time.

They might have determined that the station's inauguration was being rushed for political and diplomatic purposes that transcended the traditional standards of reliability and safety — and the launch might well have been rescheduled with no damage to the program's ultimate milestones.

A closer look at the station's beginnings brings to mind the old adage about making sausages and making laws: Looking too closely at the process can make you sick to your stomach, regardless of the quality of the final product. But look closely we must, if we ever hope to succeed in similar efforts in the future.

Station’s shaky start
Why was the FGB module ever needed in the first place? It was supposed to be only a temporary module, and unlike every other modular component of the station it had a very limited lifetime. Its main purpose was political, to avoid having the initial space station configuration look too "Russian."

Even though the FGB module was built in Russia and designed for launch by a Russian rocket, it was paid for and owned by NASA under the terms of a U.S.-Russian contract. The FGB was supposed to hold the first U.S. element, then called Node 1, steady in space after its delivery on a shuttle flight. This was to last only a few months, until the Russian habitation module arrived. Then the first permanent crew could occupy the station.

The space station project was behind schedule from the start, however. When the FGB launched, the habitation module (which would eventually be called Zvezda, Russian for "star") was nowhere near ready for a launch date. It would be almost two years before that key module was put into orbit, and during all that time, the FGB would continually need repairs from visiting shuttle crews.

Within hours of reaching orbit, the unmanned FGB encountered its first crisis: It refused to acknowledge ground commands to raise its orbit to a safe altitude. While Russian controllers  feverishly threw together a plan to reprogram the nonresponsive vehicle’s circuits, oblivious NASA officials were happily popping champagne corks at their Moscow hotel.

There was no backup for the Russian Control Center. Even though NASA was the nominal owner of the FGB, which had a tiny U.S. flag painted in an obscure corner of the ship at the last minute, the Americans had never been given the keys. All commanding would occur only through Russian military sites. And it was there that experts finally succeeded in establishing a link. Their reward: back pay that had been owed them for months by a bankrupt administration.

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