The New Moon Race
By Fred Guterl
Newsweek International
Feb. 5, 2007 issue - For a space hero, Sergey Krikalev is something of a grump. Krikalev holds the world's record for time spent in outer space—he has logged an incredible 803 days, including time on Russia's Mir space station back in the 1980s, when the International Space Station was still a distant dream. Between flights, Krikalev works at Energia, which makes some of the biggest and most reliable rockets in the world. Despite these accomplishments, however, Krikalev, like many of his colleagues in Russia's space program, seems to spend much of his time complaining about a lack of funds. He may have a point. Energia's glass and concrete offices outside Moscow are drab 1970s retro. Salaries at Energia average a mere $400 a month, though Krikalev, at the top of the scale, gets $1,000.
This legendary stinginess is the bane of Krikalev, and Russia's ace in the hole. Although it lost the moon race in the 1960s, since then Russia's space program has made a habit of performing heroic deeds on a shoestring—in many respects besting its well-heeled U.S. rival. While NASA struggled with its unreliable and fabulously complex space shuttle, Russia was racking up the mileage with its simple, durable Proton boosters—even during the chaotic years following the Soviet Union's collapse. Now, despite Krikalev's complaints, Russia's space program is emerging from the lean years. Last year the Parliament voted a 33 percent increase for Roscosmos, the Russian Space Agency, bringing its budget, including income from the sale of launch services, to $1.7 billion a year. That money has given Russia the luxury of once again turning its eyes to the moon. It plans to send the first of five robotic probes in 2010 and follow up with a permanent research base by 2012. "In spite of the fact that we have less money, Russia's piloted space programs are still more effective than America's," says Igor Panarin, a Roscosmos official.
Russia is not the only nation with renewed ambitions for manned spaceflight. China, a relative newcomer, has developed a booster capable of propelling a capsule to the moon and has now sent three astronauts into orbit. China plans to launch its first moon probe on April 17, NEWSWEEK has learned, and hopes eventually to follow up with a manned trip. Japan is moving ahead with a moon program. And last week an Indian flight successfully deployed four satellites, giving Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee's audacious promise in 2003 to send a spacecraft to the moon by 2008 at least a patina of realism.
Why, after so many decades, is everybody now interested in sending people to the moon? Prestige and the desire simply to explore seem to be what's motivating NASA. President George W. Bush set a goal three years ago to establish a permanent base on the moon and eventually send a manned mission to Mars (though many critics argue for heading straight to the Red Planet). Unprecedented worldwide growth has pushed formerly impoverished nations like China, Russia and India into the cosmic middle class. And although technological spinoffs have always been a weak justification for ridiculously expensive manned missions, Russia and China have designs to mine the moon for its resources—particularly helium-3, a rare isotope that some scientists think could fuel nuclear fusion reactors and provide a source of clean energy.
All this comes at a time when NASA, the world's premier space agency, is floundering. In December, NASA unveiled a more detailed map for reaching Mars via the moon. The Constellation Program, as it's called, would involve building a new booster rocket, Ares, capable of lugging all the gear needed for a moon trip, with a capsule on top to carry 4 to 6 astronauts. It would involve a lunar rendezvous—one ship waiting in lunar orbit while a second descends to the surface. If it sounds familiar, that's because the plan is strikingly similar to Apollo, last flown in the 1970s.
Some NASA officials argue that the plan is the next logical step in its exploration program. To be sure, the notion of establishing a permanent outpost on the moon goes beyond the mere planting of a flag. "A human presence has been expanded beyond the surface of the Earth for the first time in human history," says Scott Horowitz, NASA's associate administrator for exploration systems. "The next logical step is to expand that bubble to 200,000 miles." But NASA had the hardware needed to get there back in the 1970s, and chose to discard it. Now, after spending roughly $250 billion on the space shuttle and the International Space Station and other projects since the mid-1970s, NASA will have to spend another $200 billion to reinvent the Apollo program. The money will come, in part, from ending the shuttle program by 2010. The new plan could be read as an admission of failure. Indeed, NASA administrator Michael Griffin has said as much. "The period when the United States retreated from the moon and quite deliberately focused only on low Earth orbit will be seen, to me, a mistake," he recently told the New York Times.
The turnabout has cast a pall over the agency's international leadership in space. Although NASA still outspends every other country by far, its international partners—particularly Russia and Europe—will in the coming years have unprecedented leverage in bargaining for more say over what gets built and when. NASA's $16 billion budget, which dwarfs that of any other nation, will keep the agency in the driver's seat as far as international space projects go. But space programs in China and Russia are gathering steam. Eventually NASA could find itself just another player on the world stage.
NASA officials are now making a big deal of bringing the international space community into its latest venture. Before unveiling its new plan, it consulted 14 space agencies on what the goals of the new program should be, and held planning meetings. Experts say this is not just window dressing—NASA is serious about involving partners in the planning of the mission as never before. That's a change from the agency's tack with the International Space Station, in which NASA tended to make important decisions before consulting its partners.
NASA's new taste for diplomacy, however, may also be intended as a salve for past mistreatment. Europe, in particular, is miffed at NASA's abrupt abandoning of the shuttle and space-station projects. In recent years the European Space Agency has focused its manned program on the space station and on an eventual trip to Mars. Europe's launch of the Exomars Martian rover is planned for 2013 and its Mars Sample Return mission is scheduled for 2020 or later. NASA's turnabout means that Europe must now adapt its space program to include a moon plan if it wants to participate as a partner. In the meantime, its space station laboratory, Columbus, has been ready to fly for more than a year but will collect dust at least until the end of 2007, when ESA is expected to get a seat on the shuttle—a molar-grinding frustration to European officials.
Europe, however, has never had more options for space partners than it does now. Its relationship with Roscosmos has strengthened in recent years. When NASA's shuttle program shut down after the Columbia disaster, Russia provided a much needed ride to the space station for European astronauts. Europe is now moving ahead with a plan to collaborate with Russia's Clipper project to build a ship capable of ferrying astronauts to Earth orbit. The Russian resurgence "puts us, the Europeans, in a better position to negotiate with NASA by allowing us to say we might want to partner with the Russians," says Laurence Nardon, director of the space-policy program at the French Institute of International Relations in Paris. "Politically, it allows Europe to play both sides." ESA officials learned their lesson when the shuttle was grounded after Columbia: "You want to avoid relying on a single partner," says Piero Messina, an official at ESA's Directorate of Human Spaceflight, Microgravity and Exploration Programme. "In any market, if you don't have a monopoly, you can get better deals."
Had NASA done things differently back in the 1970s, its program today might have looked more like Russia's, minus fiscal and other problems associated with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Roscosmos never had the luxury of starting over from scratch. After the failure of the Soviet moon program, Roscosmos and Energia, the rocket maker, went on to develop a reliable and relatively inexpensive series of boosters that served them well for the next several decades. Its Proton booster—a heavy-load rocket similar in some respects to the Saturn 5—is perhaps the most successful rocket so far. Russia has launched it 324 times since 1965. "Russian launching systems are as simple as clockwork, so they work like clockwork," says Victor Savinykh, editor of Russian Space magazine and rector of Moscow State University of Geodesy and Cartography.
Not surprisingly, Russia's boosters and other space technologies are a hot commodity on the world market. In the last year Russia has raised its prices for launch services by more than 40 percent, to about $90 million. In addition to Europe, Roscosmos is in talks with China, a relative newcomer to manned spaceflight, on a potential collaboration. Russia will have to enter any arrangement cautiously, to keep China from copying key technologies, but the mere fact that talks are ongoing gives Russia leverage with NASA. "The Chinese are still some 30 years behind us, but their space program has been developing very fast," says Anatoly Perminov, head of Roscosmos. "They are quickly catching up with us."
The Chinese Shenzhou spacecraft, which flew China's first astronaut into orbit in 2003 and two others in 2005, closely resembles the Russian Soyuz for good reason: China bought the basic technology from Russia following a strategic partnership agreement in 1991. China also wants to send up a space station and land a robot probe on the moon by 2010. "We are ready to conquer the moon together with the Americans, but only on equal conditions," says Panarin of Roscosmos. "This is the only acceptable form of cooperation for us."
Beijing's late chairman Mao Zedong had complained in 1957—the year the U.S.S.R. launched its first object into orbit—that China was so undeveloped it couldn't even put a potato into space. Today Beijing has launched close to 100 satellites. In its ambitious lunar-exploration scheme, set to launch in April, China plans to put an unmanned probe in lunar orbit for a year, studying the terrain and geophysics. Beijing plans to put an unmanned moon rover on the lunar surface by 2010, followed by a craft to collect lunar samples and return to Earth by 2020. Later this year it will launch three astronauts into orbit, and it plans to complete its first spacewalk by 2008. Once these preliminary missions are accomplished, Beijing hopes to send astronauts to the moon.
These days the tense anticipation at Aerospace City, a restricted-access facility north of Beijing, is palpable. The sprawling compound houses the command center for China's manned space launches, as well as the astronaut training center, residential buildings and a gleaming exhibition hall. Two huge red banners flanking the doors to the command center exhort workers to "Fulfill the task for moon exploration in order to add another brilliant page for space aviation technology." New construction, enclosed by scaffolding, is still visible on both sides of the building. Inside, four long rows of computer terminals face four gigantic video screens. A fifth row of seating has just been added to accommodate influential members of the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee who are expected to witness this spring's inauguration of China's moon mission. Nearby, in the exhibition hall, lunar themes feature prominently. One of the highest-profile displays is devoted to three phases of the moon program whose price tag is estimated at $170 million: an animated video of a satellite in lunar orbit, a display of a Chinese moon buggy and a diorama of another moon vehicle scooping up rocks to whisk back home.
The chief motivation for China and Russia is energy. With demand soaring into the foreseeable future, Beijing's engineer-leaders are particularly keen to find alternative sources. One possibility is helium-3, an isotope of helium that is rare on Earth but abundant on the moon. Helium-3, scientists think, would make a clean source of nuclear fusion power—burning it would be nonpolluting and leave no residual radioactive waste. For years scientists have bandied about schemes to mine helium-3 on the moon and return it to Earth in cargo ships for use in reactors, but so far nobody has had the audacity to make plans. The Chinese and the Russians have now crossed that threshold.
NASA's technology lead is still formidable, but not quite as formidable as it used to be. The first mistake was seeing the Apollo program, based on the Saturn 5, little more than a necessary expedient to beat the Russians to the moon. Instead, NASA engineers held fast to the technological ideal of a winged ship that could take off and land like an airplane, but also operate in the vacuum of outer space. By the time this concept wended its way through the bureaucracy of NASA and the U.S. Air Force, it was severely compromised. In the end, the shuttle wasn't built to take off from a runway; instead it was strapped on the side of a booster with two solid-fuel rockets on either side. As the Columbia accident revealed, this piggyback arrangement turned out to be a fatal design flaw—it made the shuttle vulnerable to foam falling off the booster during takeoff. The shuttle, with a per-launch cost of at least half a billion dollars, failed to make access to space cheaper. "NASA did an appallingly bad job of the launch technology," says Bill Sweetman, a space expert at Jane's Defence Weekly. "The shuttle was a dangerous waste of money since the '90s and there has been a lack of will to change policy on the U.S. side." The decision to scrap the Saturn 5 has haunted NASA ever since.
The hugely expensive and troubled International Space Station was, in a sense, a compounding of NASA's error. Designed to take advantage of the shuttle capabilities, the station has proven hugely expensive—$200 billion and counting, even after downgrading its capabilities and crew size. Had NASA kept the Saturn 5 and left the shuttle on the drawing board, it might have succeeded in building a cost-effective space station. "You could have built it with Apollo hardware," says John Logsdon, a space-policy expert at George Washington University, "and it would have been a lot better." Thirty years later, there's nothing like a little competition to focus the mind.
With Anna Nemtsova and Owen Matthews in Moscow, Melinda Liu in Beijing, Tracy McNicholl in Paris and Sudip Mazumdar in Delhi
© 2007 Newsweek, Inc.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16840360/site/newsweek/
By Fred Guterl
Newsweek International
Feb. 5, 2007 issue - For a space hero, Sergey Krikalev is something of a grump. Krikalev holds the world's record for time spent in outer space—he has logged an incredible 803 days, including time on Russia's Mir space station back in the 1980s, when the International Space Station was still a distant dream. Between flights, Krikalev works at Energia, which makes some of the biggest and most reliable rockets in the world. Despite these accomplishments, however, Krikalev, like many of his colleagues in Russia's space program, seems to spend much of his time complaining about a lack of funds. He may have a point. Energia's glass and concrete offices outside Moscow are drab 1970s retro. Salaries at Energia average a mere $400 a month, though Krikalev, at the top of the scale, gets $1,000.
This legendary stinginess is the bane of Krikalev, and Russia's ace in the hole. Although it lost the moon race in the 1960s, since then Russia's space program has made a habit of performing heroic deeds on a shoestring—in many respects besting its well-heeled U.S. rival. While NASA struggled with its unreliable and fabulously complex space shuttle, Russia was racking up the mileage with its simple, durable Proton boosters—even during the chaotic years following the Soviet Union's collapse. Now, despite Krikalev's complaints, Russia's space program is emerging from the lean years. Last year the Parliament voted a 33 percent increase for Roscosmos, the Russian Space Agency, bringing its budget, including income from the sale of launch services, to $1.7 billion a year. That money has given Russia the luxury of once again turning its eyes to the moon. It plans to send the first of five robotic probes in 2010 and follow up with a permanent research base by 2012. "In spite of the fact that we have less money, Russia's piloted space programs are still more effective than America's," says Igor Panarin, a Roscosmos official.
Russia is not the only nation with renewed ambitions for manned spaceflight. China, a relative newcomer, has developed a booster capable of propelling a capsule to the moon and has now sent three astronauts into orbit. China plans to launch its first moon probe on April 17, NEWSWEEK has learned, and hopes eventually to follow up with a manned trip. Japan is moving ahead with a moon program. And last week an Indian flight successfully deployed four satellites, giving Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee's audacious promise in 2003 to send a spacecraft to the moon by 2008 at least a patina of realism.
Why, after so many decades, is everybody now interested in sending people to the moon? Prestige and the desire simply to explore seem to be what's motivating NASA. President George W. Bush set a goal three years ago to establish a permanent base on the moon and eventually send a manned mission to Mars (though many critics argue for heading straight to the Red Planet). Unprecedented worldwide growth has pushed formerly impoverished nations like China, Russia and India into the cosmic middle class. And although technological spinoffs have always been a weak justification for ridiculously expensive manned missions, Russia and China have designs to mine the moon for its resources—particularly helium-3, a rare isotope that some scientists think could fuel nuclear fusion reactors and provide a source of clean energy.
All this comes at a time when NASA, the world's premier space agency, is floundering. In December, NASA unveiled a more detailed map for reaching Mars via the moon. The Constellation Program, as it's called, would involve building a new booster rocket, Ares, capable of lugging all the gear needed for a moon trip, with a capsule on top to carry 4 to 6 astronauts. It would involve a lunar rendezvous—one ship waiting in lunar orbit while a second descends to the surface. If it sounds familiar, that's because the plan is strikingly similar to Apollo, last flown in the 1970s.
Some NASA officials argue that the plan is the next logical step in its exploration program. To be sure, the notion of establishing a permanent outpost on the moon goes beyond the mere planting of a flag. "A human presence has been expanded beyond the surface of the Earth for the first time in human history," says Scott Horowitz, NASA's associate administrator for exploration systems. "The next logical step is to expand that bubble to 200,000 miles." But NASA had the hardware needed to get there back in the 1970s, and chose to discard it. Now, after spending roughly $250 billion on the space shuttle and the International Space Station and other projects since the mid-1970s, NASA will have to spend another $200 billion to reinvent the Apollo program. The money will come, in part, from ending the shuttle program by 2010. The new plan could be read as an admission of failure. Indeed, NASA administrator Michael Griffin has said as much. "The period when the United States retreated from the moon and quite deliberately focused only on low Earth orbit will be seen, to me, a mistake," he recently told the New York Times.
The turnabout has cast a pall over the agency's international leadership in space. Although NASA still outspends every other country by far, its international partners—particularly Russia and Europe—will in the coming years have unprecedented leverage in bargaining for more say over what gets built and when. NASA's $16 billion budget, which dwarfs that of any other nation, will keep the agency in the driver's seat as far as international space projects go. But space programs in China and Russia are gathering steam. Eventually NASA could find itself just another player on the world stage.
NASA officials are now making a big deal of bringing the international space community into its latest venture. Before unveiling its new plan, it consulted 14 space agencies on what the goals of the new program should be, and held planning meetings. Experts say this is not just window dressing—NASA is serious about involving partners in the planning of the mission as never before. That's a change from the agency's tack with the International Space Station, in which NASA tended to make important decisions before consulting its partners.
NASA's new taste for diplomacy, however, may also be intended as a salve for past mistreatment. Europe, in particular, is miffed at NASA's abrupt abandoning of the shuttle and space-station projects. In recent years the European Space Agency has focused its manned program on the space station and on an eventual trip to Mars. Europe's launch of the Exomars Martian rover is planned for 2013 and its Mars Sample Return mission is scheduled for 2020 or later. NASA's turnabout means that Europe must now adapt its space program to include a moon plan if it wants to participate as a partner. In the meantime, its space station laboratory, Columbus, has been ready to fly for more than a year but will collect dust at least until the end of 2007, when ESA is expected to get a seat on the shuttle—a molar-grinding frustration to European officials.
Europe, however, has never had more options for space partners than it does now. Its relationship with Roscosmos has strengthened in recent years. When NASA's shuttle program shut down after the Columbia disaster, Russia provided a much needed ride to the space station for European astronauts. Europe is now moving ahead with a plan to collaborate with Russia's Clipper project to build a ship capable of ferrying astronauts to Earth orbit. The Russian resurgence "puts us, the Europeans, in a better position to negotiate with NASA by allowing us to say we might want to partner with the Russians," says Laurence Nardon, director of the space-policy program at the French Institute of International Relations in Paris. "Politically, it allows Europe to play both sides." ESA officials learned their lesson when the shuttle was grounded after Columbia: "You want to avoid relying on a single partner," says Piero Messina, an official at ESA's Directorate of Human Spaceflight, Microgravity and Exploration Programme. "In any market, if you don't have a monopoly, you can get better deals."
Had NASA done things differently back in the 1970s, its program today might have looked more like Russia's, minus fiscal and other problems associated with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Roscosmos never had the luxury of starting over from scratch. After the failure of the Soviet moon program, Roscosmos and Energia, the rocket maker, went on to develop a reliable and relatively inexpensive series of boosters that served them well for the next several decades. Its Proton booster—a heavy-load rocket similar in some respects to the Saturn 5—is perhaps the most successful rocket so far. Russia has launched it 324 times since 1965. "Russian launching systems are as simple as clockwork, so they work like clockwork," says Victor Savinykh, editor of Russian Space magazine and rector of Moscow State University of Geodesy and Cartography.
Not surprisingly, Russia's boosters and other space technologies are a hot commodity on the world market. In the last year Russia has raised its prices for launch services by more than 40 percent, to about $90 million. In addition to Europe, Roscosmos is in talks with China, a relative newcomer to manned spaceflight, on a potential collaboration. Russia will have to enter any arrangement cautiously, to keep China from copying key technologies, but the mere fact that talks are ongoing gives Russia leverage with NASA. "The Chinese are still some 30 years behind us, but their space program has been developing very fast," says Anatoly Perminov, head of Roscosmos. "They are quickly catching up with us."
The Chinese Shenzhou spacecraft, which flew China's first astronaut into orbit in 2003 and two others in 2005, closely resembles the Russian Soyuz for good reason: China bought the basic technology from Russia following a strategic partnership agreement in 1991. China also wants to send up a space station and land a robot probe on the moon by 2010. "We are ready to conquer the moon together with the Americans, but only on equal conditions," says Panarin of Roscosmos. "This is the only acceptable form of cooperation for us."
Beijing's late chairman Mao Zedong had complained in 1957—the year the U.S.S.R. launched its first object into orbit—that China was so undeveloped it couldn't even put a potato into space. Today Beijing has launched close to 100 satellites. In its ambitious lunar-exploration scheme, set to launch in April, China plans to put an unmanned probe in lunar orbit for a year, studying the terrain and geophysics. Beijing plans to put an unmanned moon rover on the lunar surface by 2010, followed by a craft to collect lunar samples and return to Earth by 2020. Later this year it will launch three astronauts into orbit, and it plans to complete its first spacewalk by 2008. Once these preliminary missions are accomplished, Beijing hopes to send astronauts to the moon.
These days the tense anticipation at Aerospace City, a restricted-access facility north of Beijing, is palpable. The sprawling compound houses the command center for China's manned space launches, as well as the astronaut training center, residential buildings and a gleaming exhibition hall. Two huge red banners flanking the doors to the command center exhort workers to "Fulfill the task for moon exploration in order to add another brilliant page for space aviation technology." New construction, enclosed by scaffolding, is still visible on both sides of the building. Inside, four long rows of computer terminals face four gigantic video screens. A fifth row of seating has just been added to accommodate influential members of the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee who are expected to witness this spring's inauguration of China's moon mission. Nearby, in the exhibition hall, lunar themes feature prominently. One of the highest-profile displays is devoted to three phases of the moon program whose price tag is estimated at $170 million: an animated video of a satellite in lunar orbit, a display of a Chinese moon buggy and a diorama of another moon vehicle scooping up rocks to whisk back home.
The chief motivation for China and Russia is energy. With demand soaring into the foreseeable future, Beijing's engineer-leaders are particularly keen to find alternative sources. One possibility is helium-3, an isotope of helium that is rare on Earth but abundant on the moon. Helium-3, scientists think, would make a clean source of nuclear fusion power—burning it would be nonpolluting and leave no residual radioactive waste. For years scientists have bandied about schemes to mine helium-3 on the moon and return it to Earth in cargo ships for use in reactors, but so far nobody has had the audacity to make plans. The Chinese and the Russians have now crossed that threshold.
NASA's technology lead is still formidable, but not quite as formidable as it used to be. The first mistake was seeing the Apollo program, based on the Saturn 5, little more than a necessary expedient to beat the Russians to the moon. Instead, NASA engineers held fast to the technological ideal of a winged ship that could take off and land like an airplane, but also operate in the vacuum of outer space. By the time this concept wended its way through the bureaucracy of NASA and the U.S. Air Force, it was severely compromised. In the end, the shuttle wasn't built to take off from a runway; instead it was strapped on the side of a booster with two solid-fuel rockets on either side. As the Columbia accident revealed, this piggyback arrangement turned out to be a fatal design flaw—it made the shuttle vulnerable to foam falling off the booster during takeoff. The shuttle, with a per-launch cost of at least half a billion dollars, failed to make access to space cheaper. "NASA did an appallingly bad job of the launch technology," says Bill Sweetman, a space expert at Jane's Defence Weekly. "The shuttle was a dangerous waste of money since the '90s and there has been a lack of will to change policy on the U.S. side." The decision to scrap the Saturn 5 has haunted NASA ever since.
The hugely expensive and troubled International Space Station was, in a sense, a compounding of NASA's error. Designed to take advantage of the shuttle capabilities, the station has proven hugely expensive—$200 billion and counting, even after downgrading its capabilities and crew size. Had NASA kept the Saturn 5 and left the shuttle on the drawing board, it might have succeeded in building a cost-effective space station. "You could have built it with Apollo hardware," says John Logsdon, a space-policy expert at George Washington University, "and it would have been a lot better." Thirty years later, there's nothing like a little competition to focus the mind.
With Anna Nemtsova and Owen Matthews in Moscow, Melinda Liu in Beijing, Tracy McNicholl in Paris and Sudip Mazumdar in Delhi
© 2007 Newsweek, Inc.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16840360/site/newsweek/