Russia-United States Astronaut Situation At A Complete Standstill
At this present time, our government has been completely unable to move on a legislative that would allow NASA to purchase seats for their astronauts on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft past the year 2011. Why, I do not know unless it is because our presence on the International Space Station is not of importance to our legislature–being at a “virtual standstill” means we will NOT be a presence, regardless of how important it is. I’ve been taught as a young child to question what seems to be the obvious, and only a few will accept anything or anyone at face value.
The blame game by NASA Administrator Mike Griffin is Russia’s invasion of Georgia, combined with the inability of our government to put into place the needed contract, which will leave the United States segment of the U.S.S. to be unmanned for some part of 2012. Griffin said the problem is “very serious. We have been literally working this issue all year long. I need a contract vehicle in place by early ‘09 if we are to fly American and international partners on Soyuz in early ‘12.”
Currently, NASA is totally dependent on Russia to use Soyuz seats to bridge the five-year gap between the end of shuttle operations in 2010 and the beginning of the 2014/2015 Orion-Ares vehicle. The end year 2011 is the end of the current exemption to the “Iran-North Korea-Syria Non-Proliferation Act”, forbidding United States purchase of high technology goods from Russia, with new legislation needed for approval within a very short time, and needed contracts by early of next years. Otherwise, there will be no NASA presence on-board the ISS.
As of now, two alternatives are available—no presence after December 31, 2011 or we will continue flying with the shuttles, receiving enough money to continue with no dependence on Russia. According to Mike Griffin, “A third possibility is we could be told to keep flying shuttle, not be given any extra money, in which case we don’t get Ares and Orion anytime soon and we still have a gap, it’s just further out in time. All right? And all of these things ignore the fact that flying shuttle does not ameliorate in truth our dependence upon the Russians because we still need them for crew rescue. So if we continue to fly shuttle, either we’re flying without crew rescue capability, in other words putting crew on station and then leaving them there without a way to get home in an emergency, which we have never done, or our tenure on station is only during the two weeks you get when the shuttle visits a couple of times a year.’
“My own guess is at this point we’re going to have some period in 2012 where there’s no American or international partner crew on station, that there’s only the Russians there,” he said. “That period always ends three years from when we have a contract with the Russians. So if we can get through all this by June of next year and have a contract with the Russians, then in the latter part of 2012 we can fly a Soyuz flight and restore things to normal.”
This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008 at 4:52 pm and is filed under Mission History, Space Agency News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
