During the past year, the Russian space station Mir has had enough crises to fill a Star Trek episode: a fire, oxygen supply problems, a crash with another spacecraft, dwindling water supplies, plugged toilets and computer failures.
But the foibles that fuel the punch lines of late night TV also stoke the fires of resolve for many Americans and Russians. They continue to see the orbiting space station as a triumph of human ingenuity and a unique opportunity to bridge political and cultural boundaries.
If NASA’s relationship with the Russians started out like space itself–cold and distant–it has developed into a true partnership, particularly among the astronauts and engineers who make it run every day.
“People will say Mir’s a rattling bucket of bolts, and that’s good for a few yuks for Jay Leno and David Letterman,” said National Aeronautics and Space Administration spokesman Brian Welch. “But that joke overlooks the fact that the Mir has flown farther than any other human-piloted vessel of exploration in history–2 billion miles, the distance to Saturn.
“If we decide to go back to the moon, go to Mars, mine the resources available in the asteroids . . . we need to pay attention to how you fly a vehicle for a long period of time in space.”
The American and Russian space programs have distinct styles of working and their own ways of looking at risk, and they sometimes let fly at each other in the occasional public disagreement. At heart, however, they share a special appreciation for what it takes to chart the frontiers of space.
“Overall, I would say there are far more similarities than differences between the two groups,” said Gorimir Chernyi, a professor of fluid dynamics at Moscow State University. “They both want the same thing.”
At the moment, that consists of getting Mir powered up and back on track.
On Wednesday, American Michael Foale and his two Russian partners restored the computer system that keeps Mir aligned with the sun and allows its solar batteries to recharge. That corrected a system failure Monday that robbed the station of most of its power, but Mir is still limping from a June 25 collision with an unmanned cargo craft.
The crew hopes to restore most of Mir’s power Friday. While Foale stands by if needed to pilot the escape craft, commander Anatoly Solovyov and Pavel Vinogradov will perform what amounts to a spacewalk within Mir.
They will enter the depressurized Spektr module, damaged in the June collision, and try to restore cables leading to the module’s solar batteries.
The repair job’s outcome could be a key factor in whether NASA, and ultimately the Clinton administration, decide to stay the course with Mir.
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The Russians have said they want to keep the station in operation until the year 2000, though Deputy Finance Minister Vladimir Petrov hinted this week that the funding would be cut sooner. Other Russian officials said he spoke out of turn and that there were no plans for an early end to Mir.
The Russians, who desperately need the $400 million that NASA is pumping into their space program between 1994 and 1998, acknowledge Mir’s shortcomings but insist it remains viable, useful and safe–or as safe as a spacecraft circling the globe can be.
The Russians also bristle at suggestions that they care less about crew safety than Americans do. Those who have experience in both camps, even those who believe that Russian society as a whole values individual life to a lesser degree, defend Russian safety measures.
“The care and concern about the crews is at least as great in Russia as it is in the U.S.,” said Norman Thagard, a medical doctor who was the first U.S. astronaut aboard Mir and who now teaches at Florida State University.
Or as put more bluntly by John Pike, space policy director for the Federation of American Scientists:
“When the Russians kill their crews, they have big, fancy funerals just like we do. They don’t stuff them in a pine box, plant them in the back yard and keep right on going.”
On matters of safety, the two countries weigh certain details differently.
The Russians, for example, will not use solid-fuel rocket boosters to lift manned vehicles into space because they believe they are unsafe; the shuttle Challenger exploded when a seal failed on such a booster. Still, NASA uses solid-fuel rocket boosters to lift each shuttle into space.
The Americans, meanwhile, worry that the Russians leave too many sharp edges on the outside of the station, raising the risk of a torn suit during a spacewalk.
“When I went over to Russia, one of the things I thought was that safety would not be as much of a concern to them as it was to us,” said Kenny Mitchell, who established NASA’s operations in Russia and now works at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.
“But I did not get that impression once I started working with them.”
“They are more pragmatic about the loss of life. Sometimes we worry that if we lose somebody it’s the end of our space program. To them, if they lose someone, it probably was to be expected.
“There is tremendous risk and danger to space exploration for humans.”
This helps explain why the astronauts enrolled in the Mir program scoff at the notion of abandoning the effort. They accept the risks as the inevitable consequence of pushing boundaries.
“I know that my attitude and the attitude of most astronauts is closer to the Russians’ than to people in the U.S.,” Thagard said. “We (astronauts) don’t think that it’s reasonable to drive down to zero risk and a fault-free, no-harm life. We’re just not of that ilk.”
The Russians and the Americans do diverge in other areas, however.
In computer technology, Russia trails well behind. Parts of mission control in Korolyov look like a 1980s high school computer classroom.
The computers are old, large, shared and well broken-in, tied together by a tangle of extension cords and cables that snake here and there.
Russia’s economy is partly responsible for this. In the late 1980s, and especially after the Soviet Union collapsed, the Russian economy plummeted; funding for the military, and thus the space program, followed it down.
The Soviets were never at the forefront of the computer revolution, but even more than usual Russian engineers had to make do with what they had and what they could cobble together from old equipment and leftover parts.
“The basic difference is that the Russian program has a lot of hardware,” Pike said. “The U.S. runs a lot of computer simulations and builds only the hardware it thinks is actually going to fly.
“The Americans approach things this way because computers are cheap in America and expensive in Russia. Hardware is cheap in Russia and expensive in the United States.
“It’s cheaper for the Russians to build and test on the ground a lot of prototype hardware. But it’s cheaper for us to have the computers think about it a lot and build the one piece of hardware that’s actually going to fly.”
Yet money is not the only factor. Philosophy also plays a role.
“The Russians just use good strong engineering and don’t use all this gold plating,” said Bill Kaufmann, an aerospace engineer and professor at the University of Michigan who worked in Russia with the U.S. Air Force.
“Their things tend to be more massive, less sophisticated. But that doesn’t mean that they are crude. They produce things that work and do what they are supposed to do.”
The Russians also build upon what works, then build upon it some more. The Soyuz spacecraft, which ferries the Russians from Mir and back, has changed little since the 1960s, for example. Finding a way to make something simple and to keep it simple, the Russians are fond of pointing out, is sometimes more challenging than making it complicated.
With a touch of envy, Gail Bingham, a researcher at Utah State University who has a plant-growth experiment on Mir, touched on another difference, a favorite topic of the Russians.
Russian engineers are alternately amused and frustrated by the various steps in decision-making at NASA. To the Russians, NASA has far too many procedures to follow, approvals to secure, forms to fill out.
Bingham tells the story of working with an astronaut aboard Mir to craft a new way of planting seeds for the experiments.
“We’re here with a mandate from Houston to write the procedure down so he has a written procedure,” Bingham said. “He invented it, he can remember it, but we’ve got five people down here working on it.”
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For their part, the Russians envy the fiscal commitment the U.S. makes to its space program. They marvel at the shuttle, a craft they were unable to master. They admire the work ethic of the American astronauts.
What Americans respect most about the Russians, they say, is their ability to improvise, to face a problem and find a solution rather than turn back. Others praise their vast institutional knowledge, pointing out that mission control is full of designers and engineers who have been there since the 1960s.
“What I’ve learned from them is something I guess I always knew but that got reinforced,” Bingham said. “You can’t be safe and advance. It’s the old adage that if you’re going to get ahead, you’ve got to stick your neck out . . .”
“Their attitude is, `Let’s go ahead and try it.’ We’ve been able to do things in about half the time it would take if you went according to the NASA procedure.”
One other significant difference: While NASA is a civilian agency, the Russian space outfit remains an arm of the military. This helps keep the Russians’ costs down because civilian-military duplication is avoided.
And the Russian space agency’s coffers would no doubt be even more empty were it not for the military budget.
But the military’s role hobbles the Russians’ relationship with the American space agency. NASA officials must get clearance to go many places in Russia, even on routine business. Beyond that, the secretive nature of the Russian military has some U.S. officials wondering whether they are being kept in the dark about some things.
Now, as NASA considers whether to stay with Mir, the secrecy issue becomes even more significant.
“My frank opinion is that we don’t have all the information we need,” Mitchell said. “I think we’ve pressed hard to make sure that we do know everything, but I’m not sure we do.”
“That’s just the Russian mystique,” he said. “That’s just the way they are.”