There are a couple of articles in this week’s issue of The Space Review that deal with some of the thorny issues of shuttle and station. Dwayne Day examines the plans for the shuttle in its final years, noting that squeezing 28 flights by the end of 2010 may prove difficult, particularly with only three orbiters available. This could force NASA to make some hard choices about the shuttle and the ISS, including offloading some station missions onto other launchers (which may not help much to solve schedule problems), delay the 2010 retirement date, or cut short the assembly of ISS.
Meanwhile, Taylor Dinerman explores some of the consequences of the standoff between the US and Russia regarding ISS access. Is the US Congress willing to continue spending billions of dollars a year on a station that will have a limited US role in the years to come? On the other hand, will it be willing to allow Russia to effectively control the station after already spending tens of billions on it already? (Not surprisingly, this gets entangled with the future of the shuttle and its own issues described above.) In a related MSNBC article, Jim Oberg explores the current state of the “game of space chicken” between the US and Russia on US access to Soyuz after this year. Among other things, NASA is turning the tables on Roskosmos, planning to charge the Russians if they want to fly a cosmonaut on the STS-121 shuttle mission later this year.
I have several problems with Taylor Dinerman’s article.
First, the idea that the Europeans or the Russians could be “given” the ISS is not feasible. Operational costs for ISS are higher than either can afford with their current budgets. And who will run the ground station in Houston or the American communications infrastructure? Would we charge for this? In addition, they would have to assume a much greater burden for launch and resupply.
Closely tied to this is the fact that under current international treaty, the state that _launches_ an object into orbit is responsible for it. That treaty currently contains no means for transferring control. If the US were to cede control to another party, part of the deal would have to include responsibility for de-orbiting it. Lacking that, the US would have to agree to remain liable for its portions of the ISS. This would be a very thorny issue.
Finally, the claim that the ISS hardware remaining in storage could be adapted for launch into equatorial orbit makes little sense. For starters, it assumes that the VSE even _requires_ an equatorial space station. Nobody with spacecraft design or operations experience has claimed that this is a good option.
The theoretical advantage of an equatorial station is that it’s cheaper to get to, and it will have less variation in plane change with respect to the moon or the ecliptic. An advantage negated, of course, by the fact that we (the US) currently have no launch sites from which we can get to it…