Setbacks In Soviet Space Program Worry U.S. Collaborators, NASA

WASHINGTON—U.S. space scientists, frustrated by delays caused by the explosion of the shuttle Challenger, have increasingly pinned their hopes on joint experiments with a thriving Soviet space program. But serious technical problems in recent Soviet missions, combined with unprecedented domestic concern over the cost of the Soviet space program, now threaten to dim once-bright opportunities for scientific collaboration in many areas. Ironically, the recent Soviet setbacks also have spawned fears that Congress may back away from its own financial commitment to space exploration. A crippled Soviet, space program poses less of a threat to U.S. leadership in space, so the logic goes; and requires fewer dollars to compete against. The most serious of the recent Soviet mishaps, in terms of its effect on joint efforts, was the mechanical failure of Phobos 2 in April. The accident occured just as the probe was finally approaching its target— the Martian moon Phobos—after nearly 10 months in space. It left the orbiter unable to respond to commands in a tantalizingly close, but useless, orbit around the planet. “The timing couldn’t have been worse,” says Cane Pieters, a planetary geologist at Brown University. “It was a standard mishap, but it occurred just as a lot of collaborative discussions were taking hold.” Adds Andrea Dupree, a physicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, “We were just beginning to think of ways to collaborate with the Soviets, but nothing had been signed, sealed, and delivered. Now we’re going to have to be more cautious.” By itself, the Phobos mission’s untimely end was nothing very unusual—a piece of hardware going awry 155 million miles out in space. But its demise occurred only six months after the failure of another Martian probe, Phobos 1, which was left spinning helplessly two months after its launch when a Soviet technician sent it an erroneous command. And last month, the Mir space station became vacant for the first time in more than two years after funding shortages forced Soviet officials to shorten the stay of three cosmonauts and delay indefinitely the flight of its next occupants. Those setbacks are only the most obvious cracks in the Soviet space program. In recent weeks Soviet space officials have attacked the government budget process, other space programs, and each other. At one recent Soviet policy forum, as reported in Aviation Week & Space Technology, space scientist V.S. Avduyecskiy hinted at recent cutbacks in the once-lavish sums that the Soviets had been spending on space. He warned that, if the next government space budget were made public, it would show that “space research will drown in the budgets of other recklessly spent [government] money.” Other scientists at the forum criticized the disarray that had hampered the Phobos project. And one of the Soviet program’s harshest internal critics, Phobos project director Roald Sagdeev, illustrated the extent of the bitter infighting when he told. members of the Soviet Academy of Sciences that commercial space agency head Alexander Dunayev was “a very odious person.” Although it is too early to judge the extent of the Soviet cutbacks, it’s clear that the salad days of the early 1980s are gone. There are no planetary missions currently planned to replace Phobos. The space station Mir is expected to remain empty for at least the next few months, and U.S. analysts say that plans for the second-generation space station to succeed Mir are running at least two years behind schedule. Although the turmoil inside the Soviet program is disappointing to U.S. scientists, it doesn’t surprise them. “It’s important to realize that the Soviets are, in many ways, entering [a period like what the U.S. faced in] the seventies,” explains planetary geologist James Head, a long-time collaborator with Soviet space scientists, also of Brown University. Like U.S. policymakers of that time, he explains, Soviet leaders are facing a world of harsh fiscal realities, driven by domestic economic troubles and growing environmental concerns. “They’re starting to ask questions and set priorities,” says Head. “All of a sudden, they’re becoming aware of the environment and the role science should play in it.” As Soviet officials redirect precious research funds toward solving long-standing environmental problems, space science is seen as increasingly expendable. Soviet space scientists, Head points out, are learning what U.S. scientists have long known: In an era of tough competition for scarce funds, science projects have to be heavily promoted. That attitude is foreign to Soviet scientists accustomed to an environment in which space science had intrinsic value, if for no other reason than to stay ahead of the United States. “They’ve started asking me how to sell a program and who to talk to,” says Head. “They’ve never before had to show the relevance of what they are doing.” In contrast, lobbying for space has long been a staple of Washington politics, teaming scientists with the multibillion-dollar aerospace community. But the current campaign to convince Congress to keep alive a $30 billion space station, as part of a $12.5 billion budget for 1990, is a hind sell even for veteran NASA officials. It’s a challenge made more formidable by perceptions of a declining Soviet role in space. “The fact that the Soviets are no longer in space [aboard the Mir space station] may make it harder for us to get funding,” admits Lennard Fisk, NASA space science director. “There’s no one to point to overhead as our competition, and that makes space harder to sell to Congress.” A Soviet slowdown provides the U.S. with an opportunity to climb to the top as the unchallenged leader in space exploration, notes John Pike, head of space policy for the Federation of American Scientists. But he says that it may be difficult to sell Congress on scientific merit alone. “Space science is sold on its political reasons, so to the extent that the Soviets are slowing down [their space program], that lessens the rationale for our program,” Pike says. The next few years will see a welter of scientific missions, including this month’s Magellan mission to Venus, the Galileo mission to Jupiter in October, and the Hubble Space Telescope launch next spring. But this flurry of activity represents only the clearing of a backlog generated by the 32-month hiatus in the shuttle, not a wave of new starts. One way in which NASA hopes to ease the future financial burden on the U.S. taxpayer is through a growing emphasis on collaborative efforts. The new approach reflects both Soviet glasnost and a desire for better relations between the two countries. Alan Bunner, who heads NASA’s X-ray and gamma-ray science branch, says he only recently got State Department permission to explore collaborative proposals. With military tensions between the two countries at an ebb, officials say, the major sticking points to greater cooperation are matters relating to export restrictions on high-tech scientific equipment. Bunner’s branch expects to spend about $8 million over the next four years on collaborative space science. The bulk of those funds will go to support U.S. participation in a single Soviet mission, the Spectrwn X-Gamma X-ray astrophysics satellite scheduled for 1993. Although U.S. officials believe that the mission is immune from any sudden cutbacks, Soviet space officials who attended a meeting of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics earlier this month in Washington suggested that it, too, might be delayed. However, Valeriy Barsukov, director of the Vernadsky geochemistry institute, says that any delay “will have no effect” on future U.S. collaborations. The unanswered questions in the Soviet program translate into uncertainty for U.S. scientists who had hoped to use Soviet collaboration to cut through interminable delays in launch dates and protracted budget battles in Congress. Still, the Soviet presence in space remains a force to be reckoned with, especially in light of past troubles with the U.S. program. “I’m not sure I’d want to be a Soviet putting down rubles on us,” says geologist Head. Referring to past U.S. failures in space, he notes that “we have a Mariner 8 at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, and we managed to accidentally turn off a Viking probe without any help from anyone else. Sure there’s a big unknown in their future, but it’s not much different from the unknowns in our future.”

Setbacks In Soviet Space Program Worry U.S. Collaborators, NASA

Interested in reading more?

Become a Member of