Russia, U.S. uneasy allies in space effort - Column

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Jan 17, 1994 | by James Oberg

Vice President Al Gore and Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin signed a formal agreement Dec. 16 that has both countries, along with Europe, Japan and Canada, flying high: They win undertake to build and launch a manned space station that could be orbiting the Earth as early as 2001. The two leaders reiterated plans for a Russian cosmonaut to fly in the space shuttle Discovery early in 1994 and for American astronauts to visit Russia's Mir space station.

Leaders here and in Russia made the political decision earlier in 1993 to merge their countries' space station projects. Enthusiastic space officials from both nations hugged and wept with joy like the victorious American and Soviet troops that met at the Elbe River at the end of World War II. Politicans are boasting that this revolutionary, post-Cold War unified program will set the tone for the next generation of space activities.

More cautious observers, while not disputing the theoretical merits of such a strategy, have counseled prudence and caution. A naive and headlong rush into this celestial alliance may sow the seeds of disillusionment and failure. If this project is to succeed, it must be based on facts, not faith, and on candor, not merely hope.

There are plenty of problems. For example, Russian space officials have told their U.S. counterparts that they do not like to deal with Americans who already speak good Russian or who are familiar with Soviet space technology. "The Russians assume all such people were associated with the CIA"' explained an American consultant to the Russian program.

In practice, if not in intent, the United States has gone along with this request, leading to ridiculous extremes of self-imposed ignorance. American officials even suggested naming the new space station Aurora, not realizing how insulting that would be to Russian President Boris Yeltsin: Aurora was the name of the warship that fired the first shot of the October Revolution in 1917, and it is a symbol of the communist regime that Yeltsin helped to overthrow.

Far more serious ignorance surrounds the Salyut tug unit that Russia intends to lease to America as the core module of the joint station. The vehicle is a leftover from a canceled Soviet program - a 20-year-old aborted spy platform designed to fly as a section of a larger spacecraft, not on its own. The Salyut tug had a central role in a 1987 Soviet space mission that was a hideous flop: The module together with a space station pinwheeled - payload and all - into the Pacific Ocean when its guidance system failed. Soviet officials vigorously covered up the incident. Evidently, the Russians remained less than candid when they presented their sales pitch for American money to lease another tug. Most American space officials appear to be ignorant of the failure.

Bitter controversy also surrounds the state of Russia's launching base, the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Public and private accounts strongly suggest that the base is decaying badly. Severe problems in staffing and logistics have threatened it with total collapse. American space officials promised Congress they would send their own experts to investigate the reports, but there just wasn't time before the joint space station was to be proposed to the White House. So instead, hired consultants went over to see what they could see, and to tell government officials what they wanted to hear.

After all, hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake. Both governments hear and speak only good news about the base's future. Consequently, there is no shortage of American consultants willing to please legislators, no shortage of Russian officials willing to swear to anything to keep the U.S. financial bonanza intact and no shortage of Western rocket firms selling launching services from the base.

Americans have made more focused inquiries about safety aboard Russian space stations, prompted by reports of two known fires and rumors of others. Yet when the Russian officials were asked to provide details, they announced that this subject was off limits.

Some vestiges of the Cold War remain. U.S. officials have expressed surprise that the Russian officials they are meeting with now are the same ones they dealt with 20 years ago. There has been no perestroika within the Russian space industry, no sweeping replacements of party-selected bosses with a new generation. Some former space industry managers played leading roles in the August 1991 anti-gorbachev putsch, and while they now are awaiting trial, the people they personally selected to run the industry are still in charge.

The most glaring example of the unreconstructed political nature of the Russian space hierarchy is that it keeps its space cities under the names of old Bolsheviks. Leninsk, where the space launch center personnel reside, still boasts a Lenin Square, and it is the largest city remaining in the Soviet Union to still bear Lenin's name. The notion of the United States spending money to improve municipal facilities of cities flaunting these blood-stained names is an insult to the innumerable victims of communism.