Plans for Space Station Face Political Asteroids : Science: Current U.S.-Russian mission is a prelude to international effort to launch permanent orbiting craft.

The space shuttle Atlantis will unclasp itself Tuesday morning from the Russian space station Mir and push off for another three days of experiments before heading home to Florida on Friday.

But that is not the end of its mission. The docking between the two 100-ton spacecraft is only a prelude to a vast international effort to build a permanent orbiting space station. Yet, as the astronauts are first to admit, the obstacles ahead may well be more cultural and political than technological.

Astronaut Vance Brand, who flew on the only previous U.S.-Russian docking, the Soyuz-Apollo spacecraft mission in 1975, said it was clear 20 years ago that “people in the same line of work from different countries can work together very well and accomplish big objectives. What we could not solve was the political problems.”

Brand also pointed out that in the early 1970s, the United States was a leader in space stations, an area in which the Russians now excel. Skylab, an 85-ton orbiting scientific laboratory plus crew quarters that was launched in 1973, “was a marvelous space station,” he said.

However, Skylab ultimately lacked the political, financial and physical boost it needed to stay in orbit. In 1979, it was allowed to fall back to Earth and burn up as it entered the atmosphere over the Indian Ocean.

Similar political dangers, observers say, threaten the current effort, which is the fruit of political, not technological, breakthroughs. “It got started by positive politics,” said John Logsdon, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University. “The question is, can it survive negative politics?”

Many observers are concerned that it cannot. “I worry every time there’s a twitch over in Moscow, that critics of Clinton’s foreign policy will use it as an excuse to cancel the space station,” said John Pike, head of the Federation of American Scientists, a longtime NASA critic but supporter of the current international effort as a step toward world peace.

The good news is that astronauts and cosmonauts, as well as their mission controls in Houston and Kaliningrad, have proved themselves adept at responding to technical problems and glitches. For example, when the shuttle Discovery flew by Mir in February and sprang a leak, agile negotiating skills were just as important as engineering in allowing the shuttle to get within waving distance of Mir, 37 feet, at least briefly.

More recently, the 45-foot-long Mir module Spektre, which provides biomedical equipment for experiments on human adaptation to space, failed to unfurl all four solar panels. In slightly longer than a week, Russian and U.S. engineers had rigged shears to cut a rod obstructing the panel and got them on board Atlantis in time to be delivered to Mir. The Mir crew has scheduled a spacewalk to free the panel next Monday.

But the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has downplayed, and even denied, some stickier problems. For example, before Mir and Atlantis docked Thursday, NASA had insisted the two commanders meet each other for the first handshake halfway through the three-foot tunnel connecting the vehicles. Russians were equally adamant that Atlantis commander Robert L. (Hoot) Gibson step into Mir for the handshake. Shaking hands across a threshold is a cultural taboo in Russia, considered rude as well as bad luck.

The issue was not resolved before the docking, and visitors to Russian mission control reported some tense moments before Mir commander Vladimir Dezhurov finally met Gibson halfway. When asked how the “threshold problem” had been resolved, however, space station chief Wilbur Trafton replied: “I didn’t see any threshold.”

Trafton also sidestepped the politically delicate question of why the international space station project does not yet have a proper name. It’s still referred to as “alpha,” the Greek letter A, a reference to the fact that it was “Plan A” of three options presented to President Clinton when the original space station, far bigger and more expensive than the current configuration, got its sails trimmed.

The names of space stations are considered politically important. Mir means world , or peace , in Russian. The original U.S. station was called Freedom. The question is how to choose a name for a station with partners from the United States, Russia, Japan, Europe and Canada.

Asked when the station might get a name, Trafton said it would when the President decided it would. “It’s a very high-level decision,” Trafton said.

The ultimate question is: Who’s the boss? So far, there is no concrete agreement on who gets to call the shots, although the United States has been holding most of the reins. (The other international partners still resent the fact that the United States invited the Russians into the group without first seeking their advice and consent.) All Trafton would say is: “The exact nature of the partnership has yet to be established.”

However, an aide to NASA chief Daniel S. Goldin, when asked who will make decisions on the joint space station, referred to the fictional leader of the “Star Trek” vessel: “There will be certain times when . . . you have to have a Capt. Kirk. Capt. Kirk will be in Houston.”

All partners have reportedly agreed that the official language on the space station is to be English. But it is clear the Russian space community is far from fluent in that language and that astronauts will have to learn Russian as well. Indeed, the astronauts seem more than willing to compromise on such issues.

Thagard, by all accounts, went out of his way to adjust to the cultural mores of his Russian host, including participating in the good-luck ritual of urinating on the tires of the truck that took the cosmonauts to the launch pad before his Soyuz flight to Mir in March.

Thagard was also a good sport about eating almost exclusively Russian food during his 105 days on Mir. Yet the fact that he lost weight has NASA nutritionists planning to send up more American food to accompany the next astronaut on Mir.

Even the current mission has some issues to resolve before Atlantis touches down.

The undocking procedure itself is fairly straightforward. The two craft will be set into free drift, the latches will be unlatched and a spring-loaded plunger will push Atlantis away. If the system fails, a series of explosive bolts will be fired, freeing the craft. If that doesn’t work, astronauts Ellen S. Baker and Gregory J. Harbaugh have been trained to step outside and manually undo the 96 bolts that hold the docking base to the air lock. Then Atlantis is to back several feet away from Mir, flip over, fly around the station and then depart.

At issue is the role the Mir crew will play in all this.

The Russians would like the two-person crew to get into the Soyuz that always sits on Mir and go off some distance in order to watch and photograph the undocking. NASA is wary because the plan would leave the Mir unpiloted. Thus far, no resolution has been reached, or at least not made public.

The landing of Atlantis is symptomatic of another problem that has yet to be resolved if a working space station is ever to become reality.

NASA likes shuttles to land at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, but volatile weather makes that unreliable. The shuttle often lands at Edwards Air Force Base in California. This costs NASA about $1 million and a week in turnaround time before the next mission.

To keep to its current schedule, NASA will have to get the next shuttle flight, on the Discovery, off by July 13--the shortest turnaround ever. That may be difficult, if not impossible. Yet the shuttle has to prove that it’s up to the task if it’s going to be primary ferry for the space station.

Making matters even more complicated is the brief 5- to 10-minute window for blastoff required to reach the proper orbit to dock with either Mir or the proposed space station.

NASA officials have said that finding a more efficient replacement for the shuttle is their highest priority over the coming decade.

“The shuttle is too expensive,” said Goldin. NASA needs a low-cost launch vehicle, “and that will require cooperation with the Russians.”

The truth is, any major space projects these days will require cooperation with the Russians, or with someone else. The space station has barely survived several attempts to kill it in Congress, and only the international aspect has kept it afloat.

“All manned flight is political,” said Caltech’s Bruce Murray. “Just as Apollo was political. That served our national interest then, and this serves our national interest now.”

Like other observers, Murray realizes that the international cooperation necessary to keep major space programs flying will not come easily to the United States. “It makes people uncomfortable to consort with your former enemies, not to have everything under your control, to have to restructure your program to fit theirs.”

He credited Goldin with having pulled it off, at least so far. One of the most important changes Goldin made, according to Murray, was turning the original plan for a 508-foot-long space station on the drawing boards in 1990 into a reasonable alternative.

“Before, we were building a hotel,” said Murray. “It was a very expensive hotel because it had to be something for everyone. It’s found its focus now, largely due to Dan Goldin.”

If NASA keeps this focus, he said, it means that the current Mir-Atlantis mission will be “the first step in the way we’re going to do human spaceflight. It means that all those flights [to the moon, to Mars, and so forth] will be viewed as international.”

While both Russia and the United States have said they would continue with human spaceflight no matter what the other does, most observers think that is unlikely.

“We would not again like to face a situation where the politicians again would stop the process,” cosmonaut Elena Kondakova said.