With Repairs Needed, Empty Space Station’s Warranty Has Expired

NASA’s space station warranty ran out last month, and the agency is no closer to finishing the project than it was when the first two pieces rocketed into orbit in 1998.

After almost 500 days aloft, the international space station has no occupants, no experiments, no firm assembly plans. Instead, it’s a barren two-roomer with bad batteries, noisy equipment and poor ventilation.

Blame the Russians: They were supposed to launch a service module that would assume control of the station and provide living quarters just five months after the initial components soared, but they have been stymied by insufficient funds and malfunctioning rockets.

As a result, the all-important third component, the Zvezda service module, will not fly before July and astronauts and cosmonauts will not move in until October--at the earliest.

In the meantime, the warranty for what’s in orbit has expired. And that has space shuttle astronauts flying to the rescue this month.

The 496-day guarantee for Russian-built electronic equipment ran out March 30, according to figures provided last year by then-station manager Frank Culbertson, an astronaut who will command a future station crew.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration expects the space station to keep running normally until astronauts arrive later this month with new batteries, fans, air filters, fire extinguishers and smoke detectors. The astronauts were supposed to wait until the service module was in place, but with the warranty expiring and batteries failing, NASA moved up the visit.

“Would you like it to fall out of the sky?” asks NASA Administrator Daniel S. Goldin. “I mean, we’re going to go up and keep it in good repair, and we’ll be ready for the service module when it comes.”

Space station chief Michael Hawes expects the upcoming repairs by astronauts to extend the certified lifetime of the orbiting Zarya control module to the end of this year.

Neither Hawes nor program manager Tommy Holloway is overly concerned.

The design lifetime of parts is “mostly paper analysis kind of stuff,” Holloway says. “As you know with your automobile, it may break a day after you drive it out of the showroom and it may run for 100,000 miles.”

Built by Russians with U.S. funds, Zarya was launched from Kazakhstan on Nov. 20, 1998--when the 496-day warranty began.

Since then, the space station has orbited nearly 8,000 times. Shuttle crews have been inside twice to drop off supplies and make repairs.

The main trouble has been the batteries: Six provide power and have been faltering one by one.

In addition, a crane attached to the outside of the station by spacewalking astronauts last spring is not locked down properly. The next shuttle crew will secure it. The crew also will take numerous air samples; the last visitors suffered headaches and nausea, supposedly because the air ventilation was disturbed by maintenance work.

Zarya, Russian for Sunrise, was not designed to fly so long by itself, says Hawes. It was modeled after lab modules that were self-sustaining until they docked with space station Mir’s nerve center.

“We’ve always known that Zarya was a less capable module from a lifetime standpoint,” Hawes says. “But we have done quite a bit of work . . . to try to understand where the issues are, component by component, and that is what’s really defined our mission for this upcoming flight.”

The problem is that for years the Russians lacked the money to complete Zvezda, Russian for Star. Now that it’s done, the module fails to meet NASA safety standards for noise, self-sustaining equipment and shielding against space junk.

Then Russia’s Proton rockets, the type needed to launch the heavy Zvezda, began failing.

“Right now, as I see it, the only thing standing in the way of launching the service module is a demonstration flight from the Proton,” says NASA’s boss, Goldin.

He’d like to see a few successful Proton launches before the Zvezda module flies. Just in case, NASA is building its own control module, which could be ready by December.

Goldin and others point out that NASA has had its share of space station problems, most notably in software. Boeing, the prime contractor, projects overruns of close to $1 billion, according to NASA’s latest inspector general report.

The most embarrassing debacle occurred in February. With so many stockpiled parts, workers accidentally threw out two oxygen and nitrogen tanks at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. The tanks were worth $750,000.

Russian delays, meanwhile, have cost NASA as much as $3 billion. Ironically, NASA and its foreign partners had invited Russia into the international space station program in 1993 in hopes of saving time and money.

Should NASA have waited to launch the first two space station components when it was obvious the service module was in trouble?

NASA officials are loath to second-guess that decision. But former astronaut Jerry Linenger, who spent nearly five months on Mir in 1997, says it was a political maneuver. “You do it, then everyone has to come up with more money or you’ve got things floating up there doing nothing,” Linenger says.

NASA clearly anticipated delays, especially as Russia’s problems worsened. But no one guessed the Russians would take this long to launch the service module. A 496-day warranty seemed plenty.

“That’s a long way off,” Culbertson said with a shrug last year.

He’s no longer shrugging.

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On the Net: NASA’s human spaceflight: https://spaceflight.nasa.gov/index-m.html.