Space Station Launch Held Up 11 Months

The nation’s space agency will delay by 11 months the first mission to construct the international space station and will shift $300 million from other programs to meet anticipated cost increases, NASA announced Wednesday.

Construction of the space station was scheduled to start with a launch in November, but financial problems in Russia have delayed work on a critical component needed for assembly next year. As a result, the construction schedule of the $30-billion system is in jeopardy for at least the next several years.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration unveiled a plan Wednesday to build backup hardware for the Russian system, using parts of a spy satellite platform built by the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington.

Additional software and hardware modifications will be needed on several other space station components in the years ahead, raising the possibility that NASA will have to cobble together the project as it goes along, critics said.

The delays and added cost drew a sharp rebuke in Congress, indicating that the program is probably headed for a political crisis.

“The program is falling apart around us because of the Russians,” said House Science Committee Chairman F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.). “There is a limit to how many excuses you can give to the American people. There is a limit to how many blank checks you can ask for.”

The delay in getting the space station in orbit will expose NASA to an additional year of both political and technical risks that could damage the program.

“We are struggling a little bit,” acknowledged NASA space station chief Wilbur Trafton in an interview. “We did not anticipate some of these problems in 1993 [when Russia was brought into the program], but the problems are here, and we are trying to deal with them.”

Trafton said that the $300 million will not cover all of NASA’s expenses if Russia does not build the expected hardware, known as the service module. The Navy hardware would not be a permanent replacement for the Russian system, used to keep the space station in orbit, because it will carry enough fuel for only one year.

Russian officials have promised at least half a dozen times to release several hundred million dollars to its space industry for production of the service module, but as of Wednesday Trafton could not verify that the money has been released.

In February, NASA agreed to advance the Russian space industry $20 million after Russian Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin promised that the money was forthcoming.

Trafton’s plan for rescuing the space station program received little sympathy from lawmakers when he unveiled it at a hearing Wednesday of the space and aeronautics subcommittee of the Science Committee.

The space agency plans to get $200 million of the $300 million in added station costs from the budget of the space shuttle program. NASA does not yet know where it will get the other $100 million.

“NASA threatens to allow Russia’s problems to compromise the safety of our shuttle program, which has experienced jammed hatches and fuel cell failures in just the last six months,” Sensenbrenner said, adding that NASA Administrator Daniel S. Goldin had promised not to reduce the shuttle budget further.

But Trafton said that NASA would continue with planned upgrades to shuttle safety.

The Russian problems in the space station have been unfolding since last year, when NASA disclosed that the Krunichev aerospace operation no longer was being paid by the Russian government and had stopped much of its work.

Russia was brought into the station program by the Clinton administration, which described the partnership as the most important cooperative project in the aftermath of the Cold War.

The administration argued that Russian participation would save American taxpayers $2 billion, reducing U.S. costs to $17.4 billion (not including billions of dollars for launch costs and other items).

With those savings now apparently melting away, political support for the space station will evaporate, according to Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-Redlands), chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee that oversees the NASA budget.

“When you combine this delay and the potential for Russia to fall out of our partnership, it becomes part of the arsenal of people opposed to this program,” Lewis said.

John Pike, a space expert with the Federation of American Scientists, said that the space station program has become two houses of cards, politically and technically, because of the Russian delays. “It is getting to the point where one house of cards will knock over the other. The only question is which one will go first,” Pike said.

But Trafton gave a lengthy defense of the space station Wednesday, noting that 59% of the U.S. flight hardware for the station is completed and that manufacturing activity in plants across the nation is now at a peak.

McDonnell Douglas is making portions of the truss assembly in Huntington Beach, and Boeing Rocketdyne is building the station’s power system in Canoga Park.

Ironically, the U.S. part of the highly complex program is going well compared to past space programs. Boeing Co., the prime contractor, is $196 million over budget on the work completed, but that is far from the worst overrun on past NASA programs.