Whatever qualms Morin may have been keeping to himself, he overcame them last Saturday. As scripted, he passed through the station’s air lock and slipped his feet into special restraints on the tip of the station’s robotic arm. Dangling 250 miles above Earth, he took a deep breath and set to work–attaching instruments, connecting power cables, tightening bolts–as the arm pulled him from one end of the station to the other. On Tuesday, Morin, Ross and two other spacewalkers are scheduled to finish attaching a 44-foot, 14-ton truss–the first piece of the station’s 300-foot “backbone.” When completed in 2004, it will hold giant solar panels and elaborate computer equipment to support new research modules from Japan and Europe. It will also transform the ISS from a meager orbiting laboratory not much better than Russia’s (now dead) Mir into a truly permanent outpost that can support cutting-edge scientific research.
There’s also a chance that by the time this big orbital toy is finished, nobody will be allowed to play in it. NASA head Sean O’Keefe, an appointee of President Bush, has ordered the agency to finish the truss and stop. There’s too little money budgeted to sustain the additional four crew members needed to man the research labs. And since the three astronauts currently on board have their hands full running the station, all that fancy equipment could simply go to waste. Without the capability of doing science, the station would serve merely to establish a human presence in space. That may be good enough for space fans, but it would vaporize the station’s political support. “This is a station that promised to do eight different missions, and now it’s down to one,” says Indiana congressman Tim Roemer, who’s tried to kill the project several times. “Is that worth $125 billion?”
A halt in construction would be a drastic measure. It would outrage Europe and Japan. It would cripple America’s manned space program. But O’Keefe’s ultimatum–put the project under strict cost controls, or else–may be just the kick in the pants the agency needs. At a time when the CIA is scrambling to hire Arab-speaking operatives and the Defense Department is asking for billions to fight terrorism, the station has begun to seem like a luxury the country can do without.
Since the start of the ISS project, NASA has been burning through its budget. In 1993 the station was supposed to cost $17.4 billion. By 1998 it was up to $26 billion. To make up the shortfall, “the program engineers suck up all the money meant for scientific experiments,” says space-policy expert John Logsdon. The jig is up. A cost-containment task force said in November that the $5 billion NASA said it needs to finish the station by 2006 is “not credible.” And why should it be? NASA’s accounting is abysmal. Three audits in the past decade have failed to explain how much the agency spends, and on what. “If NASA is guilty of any sin, it is being overly optimistic and not realistic,” says Congressman Sherwood Boehlert. “They perform exceptionally well in technology. They have not done as well in management.”
Given NASA’s woes, is it really necessary to send people into space? Humans make difficult cargo: they need pressurized capsules and spacesuits, and endless supplies of oxygen and water. Proponents argue that human hands are needed to do zero-G research–like growing ultrapure semiconductor crystals or studying how the body ages. But if supporting research is already too pricey, the station’s only justification is to keep alive the dream of colonizing the solar system. For this enterprise, the station is a first draft–rough, inefficient and expensive–of a permanent, self-sustaining outpost in space. “There’s no other way to really understand the problems of long- duration human space flight than having people up there for long durations,” says Tom Young, former head of Martin Marietta and chairman of the task force. The ISS is already teaching lessons that would come in handy should NASA ever send astronauts to Mars. For now, that dream seems as earthbound as ever.
