Since the Columbia tragedy, only one US space vehicle has travelled to the station: Discovery, which was launched this July on a test mission.
WASHINGTON: NASA is trumpeting five years of human flight on the international space station, at a time when US astronauts need Russian vehicles to get there and space agency finances are under fire for mismanagement.
Former residents of the orbiting outpost gathered at NASA’s Johnson Space Centre in Houston on Thursday to reminisce about their voyages in a televised briefing featuring video clips of weightless astronauts caroming around with such props as bite-size candies, a guitar and Hawaiian shirts. The first station crew arrived at the complex on November 2, 2000.
Ed Lu, a member of the first two-person crew to travel to the station after the fatal disintegration of space shuttle Columbia in 2003, described his impressions. “We closed the hatch... Yuri (Malenchenko, Lu’s Russian crewmate) and I looked at each other and said to each other, ‘What have we gotten ourselves into? You’re stuck with me and I’m stuck with you for the next six months. I hope this goes well,” Lu said.
“As it turned out, it went extremely well. It went by much faster than I ever thought it would go.” The cost of the space station, including its development, assembly and operation, could well exceed $100 billion, shared between the participating nations.
Since the Columbia tragedy, only one U.S. space vehicle has travelled to the station: Discovery, which was launched this July on a test mission that led NASA to suspend shuttle flights once more.
Until those flights resume, Russian Soyuz space taxis must serve as the only mode of human transport to the station.
Congress has to pass legislation to ensure that Americans will continue to get rides aboard Soyuz craft until 2011, because of the Iran Nonproliferation Act, which bars the U.S. use of most Russian space technology as long as Russia exports nuclear and missile technology to Iran. Both houses of Congress have passed legislation that would allow NASA to pay Russia’s space agency for Soyuz trips despite the act.
First envisioned in the 1980s, the 16-nation project has been repeatedly scaled down as costs rose. At this point, NASA figures it will take 18 shuttle flights to complete construction.
No station construction flights will occur until after the next shuttle mission, while NASA tackles a persistent problem with falling debris on liftoff.
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