Shuttle gap sets off station scramble

Slots for astronauts
One other item of living, breathing "space cargo" would have to be removed from the near-term flight manifests: German astronaut Thomas Reiter, who was due to travel to the station on Atlantis and stay behind. He was part of a plan to bring the station back to its baseline three-person crew, upgrading the two-man skeleton crew that has been the rule for more than two years.

If Reiter doesn't get transferred onto the space station later this year, another important transfer will also be delayed. This is the credit transfer from the European Space Agency's bank account to Russia's Federal Space Agency, to pay for Reiter's slot on the station.

The Europeans are paying the Russians because officially, Reiter will be in a "Russian slot," according to longstanding agreements among the international partners. The Europeans agreed to pay tens of millions of dollars to occupy the slot instead, and the Russians have no doubt budgeted that cash in their own spending plans for late 2006. Without it, other important space projects may not be adequately funded.

NASA will have its own astronaut flight slot crisis late this year if the gap in shuttle flights has to extend into mid-2006. The Soyuz slated for October, which will carry cosmonaut Valery Tokarev and astronaut Bill McArthur (as well as millionaire space passenger Gregory Olsen), marks the last time the Russians are obligated to carry NASA personnel for free. Beginning in 2006, all seats on Soyuz missions will be assigned on a purely cash-and-carry basis. But NASA is forbidden by law to buy any such goods and services from Moscow.

NASA had developed a plan to dodge this problem by transporting all its future space station crew members aboard shuttles. McArthur himself was slated for a shuttle return next April — a scheme that would give him the U.S. mission duration record.

The Russians would still keep "emergency bailout seats" available to U.S. station astronauts on a barter basis with occasional Russian rides on space shuttles, but would not carry any Americans up or down under ordinary conditions.

Those deals, or course, would be voided by a substantial new shuttle delay. Instead, NASA would need supplemental appropriations to buy the space transportation services, and that would require congressional clearance. Officials have known about this impending crisis for years but had developed elaborate schemes to dodge it — schemes that would no longer be workable.

Further ripples
A protracted shuttle flight suspension would also deal a death blow to the 28-mission manifest for the last five years of the shuttle program. Slated to be retired for safety reasons by 2010, the shuttle fleet is also supposed to complete station assembly — at least to the point that expendable rockets and foreign space vehicles can keep the station functioning until a new generation of U.S. spaceships come on line.

With the clock ticking through months and months of no shuttle missions, and the adamantine drop-dead date of 2010 looming on the horizon, more and more of the major elements of the station would have to be shifted to expendable rockets. The Russians are developing a space-to-space tug called "Parom," assembled from off-the-shelf spacecraft components, that will be able to dock to station-bound payloads in parking orbits and haul them up to the station — for a fee. If NASA officials have no alternative, it may be an offer they can't refuse.

Even beyond the station program, a major shuttle delay will have serious repercussions. It may, for example, crush any renewed hope of rescuing the faltering Hubble Space Telescope. NASA Administrator Mike Griffin had expressed support for inserting one repair mission into the shuttle flight plan, but only after about half a dozen critical station components have been installed.

That would have happened sometime in 2008, perhaps, with a good chance of getting to Hubble before the telescope’s control systems break down.

Now the odds of the mission arriving in time have dropped dramatically — raising the frightening possibility that the telescope itself will literally drop dramatically out of the sky.

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