Outposts on the Frontier: A Fifty-Year History of Space Stations (Outward Odyssey: A People's History of Spaceflight)

by Jay Chladek

  Under the Soviet system, it was the design bureaus that were in charge of their own projects with approval from the Soviet government. While the Russian Space Agency was mandated to be in charge of the entire space program, NPO Energia was still the primary driving force behind the manned program since it supplied spacecraft, rockets, and technical personnel. This rendered the fledgling RKA all but powerless after its formation.

  In the new economy, Energia became a privately traded company known as Russian Space Corporation (RSC) Energia. This was a necessary change as Energia would have to generate its own revenue to help keep the projects going to support Mir’s operation in the face of major budget cuts. Many of the supporting bureaus that supplied hardware also became private companies as well. Unfortunately for Energia and RKA, not all the suppliers were based in Russia anymore. Prices for many of the goods and services these companies provided increased as Russian currency devalued heavily during the 1990s.

  Mir for Hire

  Even before the Soviet Union fell, Energia turned toward flying paying customers to Mir by advertising it as an orbiting laboratory for hire. Frequently, guest cosmonauts would take rides on the Soyuz to Mir for about $35 million a seat, but some rides to Mir were provided as favors. Soyuz TM-13, which launched to Mir on 2 October 1991, was an example of both since Aleksandr Volkov was the only career cosmonaut on board. The other two seats were occupied by Austrian research cosmonaut Franz Viehböck, who had a privately funded seat, and Toktar Aubakirov, who was flying as a citizen of the soon to be independent Kazakhstan as a favor to that country’s government. The flight for a Kazakh citizen was considered important since the Baikonur launch complex was located in Kazakhstan.

  This meant that Sergei Krikalev, who was scheduled to return home with Anatoly Artsebarsky at the end of a normal five-month tour, would have to remain in orbit for at least another five months with Volkov. Krikalev didn’t mind the extension since he had flown with Volkov before and the two men got along well with one another, but the situation brought rampant speculation in the media that Krikalev was stranded in orbit with no ride home, when technically he had access to a Soyuz in an emergency. Ultimately, Sergei Krikalev would spend ten months aboard Mir before returning home in March of 1992 with Volkov. Krikalev holds the unique distinction of having launched into space as a Soviet citizen and returning to Earth as a Russian citizen.

  During the next few years, Mir would host many research cosmonauts from other countries. Klaus-Dietrich Flade from a newly unified Germany flew in March of 1992. French astronaut Michel Tognini went up next as part of a program where CNES astronauts would fly to the complex once every one to two years to conduct ongoing experiments. Jean-Pierre Haigneré from France followed Tognini into orbit in 1993. Even Ulf Merbold flew to Mir in late 1994 to conduct scientific work for the ESA and Germany. Mir itself seemed to be functioning well with equipment upgrades as everything appeared stable to the outside world. While Russia was suffering from an economic crisis, the space program seemed to outside observers to be one bright spot that people could point to as a tangible success story. To observers, the Russians were flying for less money than what NASA was spending on continued space shuttle operations.

  However, the monetary troubles were beginning to manifest themselves. Conflicts with agencies that built flight hardware were beginning to cause work stoppages as some of the contractors would not deliver their goods until the bills were paid. Kazakhstan also cut power to the Baikonur Cosmodrome a couple of times when the electric bill wasn’t paid. In 1993 the Buran program was officially canceled. This resulted in the loss of one quarter of Russia’s entire space workforce, which numbered four hundred thousand strong in the late 1980s.

  Since independent states now also controlled many of the former Soviet sea ports, many vessels in the tracking network fleet were unable to set sail until port fees were paid. During the 1980s Russia had launched a series of satellites that could allow for continuous coverage of Mir in much the same way as NASA’s TDRS network. But some of these satellites were beginning to break down, and others needed the tracking ships to relay signals back to Kaliningrad. Without the ships, Mir’s communications periods were limited for the most part to when it passed directly over the tracking stations in mainland Russia.

  The cosmonauts themselves also had to resort to peddling commercial products in orbit by filming television commercials for the advertising revenue. However, this income along with the revenue from the flights of foreign researchers wouldn’t solve all the problems. Infrastructure at Star City, the TsUP at Kaliningrad, and Baikonur were all beginning to show signs of age and decay. Because of these problems, both Roscosmos and Energia began to look for additional opportunities to drum up business. They found it from a seemingly unlikely partner, the United States.

  Space Station Freedom

  At the time of Russia’s space budget woes, NASA was having problems justifying its own future in manned spaceflight. After the early success of the shuttle program in the 1980s, then NASA administrator James Beggs sold the Reagan administration on the idea that NASA’s “next logical step” should be the construction of a space station. In 1984 President Reagan made a public announcement to endorse the project. The new program would be called Space Station Freedom. The loss of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986 slowed those plans. But they weren’t canceled outright, and NASA spent many years refining the design of the new station and its capabilities. All of this took money, and a portion of NASA’s budget during subsequent years was channeled to Freedom for early design and testing work.

  Once the shuttle fleet was flying again in 1988, NASA expanded its focus on Space Station Freedom, and they had a more pressing need to do so. As a result of the Challenger disaster, the planned frequency of shuttle flights was heavily curtailed. Since the shuttle program would no longer be launching commercial satellites, NASA would no longer have a source of revenue to help offset the costs. The DoD also scaled back its planned use of shuttle after the handful of classified shuttle missions had been flown, moving its future payloads back to unmanned rockets. NASA looked to the space station Freedom to become the shuttle’s destination and the purpose for the manned space program’s existence.

  Even with NASA’s post-Challenger situation, Reagan never abandoned his support for the station. But it would be up to his successor, George H. W. Bush, to take the next step when Reagan concluded his second term in office. On 20 July 1989 during the twentieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, President Bush announced a “Space Exploration Initiative” with plans to build the space station Freedom, a return to the moon within ten years, and an ultimate destination of Mars within about twenty years. NASA’s administrator Richard Truly, who was appointed after the Challenger disaster, had a ninety-day study conducted to see how much these goals would cost. The resulting figure was an astronomical sum of $500 billion, spent over the next two to three decades. This resulted in a bad case of sticker shock for the president and Congress. The lunar return and Martian plans were soon curtailed but not abandoned entirely.

  Freedom continued to receive funding to support design work, although the program was underfunded from the start and suffering from cost overruns. By 1993 Freedom had gone through no fewer than seven major design changes since 1984; each time, its capabilities were pared down in an attempt to bring the budget in check. International partners from the ESA and Japan were brought in to help build some of the hardware. But even bringing in these partners would not take care of all the problems, and there were very vocal calls in Washington DC to cancel the program outright.

  The Road to Russian Partnership

  NASA’s new administrator, Daniel Goldin, was appointed near the end of Bush’s first term in office to help refocus NASA. While Richard Truly’s experience as an MOL and shuttle astronaut had made him a very good fit for the agency after Challenger, the Bush administration felt that there was a disconnect between the White House and NASA. The astronomical dollar f
igure quoted for the space initiative did not sit well with Bush’s advisors, and it was felt that Freedom’s cost overruns were not being reigned in properly. Bush wanted somebody who was more in tune with what the White House wanted yet still had the charisma to both rally NASA and inspire the general public.

  Dan Goldin worked as an engineer for NASA in the early 1960s, but he left the agency to work for TRW, eventually becoming its general manager during a twenty-five-year career. Part of the reason he was nominated to become the NASA administrator was his success at TRW in controlling the costs of space hardware development while still maintaining a high standard of quality. Dan’s mantra became known as “Faster, Better, Cheaper” during his tenure at NASA. What helped Goldin to remain as NASA’s administrator after Bush lost the 1992 election was his political party affiliation and his philosophy, which meshed well with the administration of newly elected president Bill Clinton.

  Cowboy Diplomacy

  One of Goldin’s first duties as administrator was to restart a project that was agreed to, at least in principal, by President Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev during a summit meeting: an exchange of space travelers to revive the spirit of cooperation from ASTP. The plan was for the Soviets to fly a cosmonaut on the shuttle while a NASA astronaut would fly to Mir. The plan fell by the wayside when the Soviet Union was dissolved, but Goldin felt that it would be a public and foreign relations coup if the same agreement were made with the Russians. It took some serious arm-twisting to get members of the State Department to go along with it. But Goldin was successful, and an agreement was made for the crew swap during a summit meeting between Bush and Yeltsin.

  The early discussions were done with RKA and not Energia, which meant that Energia wasn’t exactly a willing participant when a NASA delegation went to Moscow to hash out the details of the exchange. To Energia, Mir was theirs; if NASA wanted to deal, they had to negotiate directly, which would require hard currency. The attitude of many from Energia toward the NASA representatives was less than inviting in a number of ways. For instance, Energia’s lead negotiator, flight director Valery Ryumin—the big, burly, stereotypical Russian cosmonaut who had accumulated a total of 362 days in space—was not exactly cordial to the American astronauts who were part of NASA’s negotiating teams. To Ryumin and other cosmonauts who had spent hundreds of days in orbit, the Americans were little more than rank amateurs. To Americans like astronaut Brian O’Connor, who was the lead NASA negotiator on the first team, Ryumin wasn’t exactly somebody who oozed confidence either. As O’Connor said in Bryan Burrough’s book Dragonfly, “I never trusted him, and he never appreciated me. He would bad-mouth people and complain about everything—and drink vodka. He was just a jerk.”

  There were concerns from many at NASA that having an astronaut on Mir wouldn’t be much more than a publicity stunt with no practical spaceflight value. But the decision was a political one, and it was already made at the top. So NASA had to follow through with it, assuming Energia would play ball. Energia’s stonewalling on the issue was largely put to rest when Dan Goldin used his characteristic bluntness during a reception to explain to Energia’s leader, Yuri Semenov, in no uncertain terms that this cooperative space effort was going to happen since the presidents of both of their nations had already agreed to it and Semenov did not have the power to veto it. To drive home his point, from that moment on, Goldin dealt primarily with Yuri Koptev and the RKA. If Semenov needed something from the NASA administrator, he had to go through the Russian space agency, as opposed to going through direct channels.

  Goldin’s decision is said to have given Roscosmos legitimacy, although many observers felt that his blunt approach and breach of international protocol might have doomed things from the start. But for those who had knowledge of how the Russians did things, sometimes being blunt and rude was how you got things done if nothing else worked. For better or for worse, there would at least be one exchange of an astronaut and a cosmonaut on each other’s vehicles. But this was only the beginning.

  The Shotgun Wedding with a Russian Bride

  When President Clinton took office, things were a bit bleak for Freedom’s future, as few politicians in Washington wanted anything to do with it. Leon Panetta, who back then served as the head of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB), informed Goldin that NASA’s budget was going to be cut by 20 percent in the coming fiscal year and that the station was on the chopping block. Goldin asked for time to study the situation further before the budget was presented to Congress and was granted a “stay of execution” until he could come up with possible alternatives. Goldin analyzed the problem and consulted veteran NASA people such as George Abbey and John Young among others. Goldin’s handpicked team came up with some ideas. One of the ideas involved a partnership with the Russians to build the new station.

  In theory, having the Russians participate was a sound idea. Part of the reason for the cost overruns with Freedom had to do with NASA’s and its contractors’ relative lack of experience in these matters. Sure, there was the experience of the Skylab project to draw from. But Skylab was a program with a beginning and an end. By comparison, the Russians had a lot more experience in designing stations for long-term occupancy and open-ended missions. Over the course of five Salyut stations and Mir, they had done simple maintenance, performed life-extending repairs, and even saved their stations from potential mission-ending damage on at least two occasions, all while keeping the stations resupplied with a gradually maturing fleet of Soyuz ferries and automated Progress cargo vehicles. Mir had also given the Russians experience with the building block approach to station construction, something that NASA had yet to accomplish as a standard practice.

  The idea appealed to President Clinton, as he had another potential problem brewing with an international security matter. The Russians had been in negotiations to supply rocket booster technology to India, for use in a new satellite launcher design. India had succeeded in launching a couple of small research satellites on their own, but they had no capability to launch anything bigger. But a rocket booster capable of sending a satellite into geosynchronous orbit can just as easily carry a nuclear warhead. Given the long-simmering tensions between India and its neighbor Pakistan, the idea of India with a heavy-rocket capability did not sit well with Clinton’s security advisors. There were also concerns that if the Russians were successful in selling heavy-booster technology to India, then they might be inclined to do the same with nations potentially more hostile to the United States.

  There was talk of imposing sanctions if the Russians went ahead with the deal, but Clinton decided to go for a combination of the carrot and the stick approaches. If the Russians could be encouraged to drop their deal with the Indians and instead have their efforts focused on a partnership to construct an international space station with NASA for potentially more money, it would be a win-win situation for both sides. So with the White House’s blessing, NASA made the pitch.

  It turns out that Energia was thinking along the same lines concerning a space station partnership. A lot of details would need to be hashed out, but it seemed like the two countries were on the same page. After NASA, Roscosmos, the international partners of the ESA, and Japan’s National Space Development Agency had negotiated the details, all parties involved would cooperate to build the International Space Station, also known as the ISS. Ultimately, the Indian rocket deal wasn’t canceled, but the Russians agreed to only sell built rocket stages and not provide India with manufacturing equipment.

  Genesis of the Shuttle-Mir Program

  As part of the deal made with the Russians for their commitment to the ISS, it was decided to get American astronauts as much flight experience as possible on the Mir space station; so the first joint program, with one cosmonaut flying on a shuttle and one astronaut flying to Mir, was expanded to a total of seven astronauts visiting Mir over a three-and-a-half-year period. Most would be delivered by a shuttle, which would dock with the complex by using the APAS-89
docking adaptor built for Buran. On one flight, cosmonauts from Mir would also return to Earth on the shuttle, instead of on a Soyuz vehicle. The collaboration between NASA and Mir officially became known as ISS Phase One, while actual construction of the International Space Station would be known as ISS Phase Two. To most everyone who worked on ISS Phase One, it simply became known as the Shuttle-Mir Program.

  Before a shuttle could dock with Mir, the APAS-89 docking system had to be tested. Soyuz TM-16 with an APAS docking collar was launched on 24 January 1993 and executed a proper docking with the Kristall module’s Buran port. When Soyuz TM-17 arrived six months later, it shot some unique photos of Mir with TM-16 on Kristall, a Progress module docked with the station’s Kvant 1 port, and a second Progress backing away from Mir’s front port to make room for TM-17 to dock. It gave Mir the appearance of a busy airport in space.

  The shuttle would deliver logistical supplies to the station and additional experiments as well. NASA would also supply funding to finish Mir’s final two modules: Spektr (a Russian term meaning “Spectrum”) and Priroda (a Russian term meaning “Nature”). These two modules, based on the TKS spacecraft like the Kvant 2 and Kristall modules, sat mothballed in the factory, as there were insufficient funds to complete them. Their internal systems would be heavily reconfigured to act as a pair of scientific modules, and Spektr would also serve as living quarters for the NASA astronauts. If the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project was anything to go by, the Shuttle-Mir Program should have gone off without any major hitches, but events would transpire to make Shuttle-Mir more than what either side bargained for. It would be an experience that many of the people involved would not soon forget.