Out of Orbit

fter 14 turbulent years of planning and replanning, the U.S.-led International Space Station has never been closer to reality. The first two pieces of the station-one American and one Russian-are at their respective launch sites waiting to be hoisted into Earth orbit in November and December. Factories around the world are building more than a million pounds of components, and half of all that hardware will be finished by the end of the year. At the same time, it seems, the notion of such a colossal science laboratory being open for business by 2004 couldn't be further from the truth.

In late June, just five months before a Russian rocket was set to blast off from Kazakhstan's Baikonur Cosmodrome to place the first building block into Earth orbit, NASA still had not decided whether the most complicated engineering project in its history could be completed as planned. The choices: Continue to stumble along with repeated delays and spiraling costs, or boot the cash-strapped Russian Space Agency off the construction path.

The space station has been NASA's ball and chain since 1984, when President Reagan proposed it and NASA promised to build it for $8 billion by 1992. Half a dozen redesigns and $10 billion later, in 1993, the Clinton administration scrapped Space Station Freedom. It chose a less grandiose design and capped the construction price at $17.4 billion, or $2.1 billion a year.

Adding Russia to the complement of international partners was supposed to save $2 billion and get the orbiting outpost open 15 months early, in June 2002. It has done the opposite, and worse.

In March, NASA owned up to a 22 percent jump in costs, saying its original estimate of $19.4 billion hadn't included $4 billion worth of expenses incurred mostly to keep Russia involved in the program.

Back-to-back independent audits in the following two months forecast $7.3 billion in cost overruns and a one- to three-year construction delay and pegged the station's 15-year lifetime cost at more than $100 billion. NASA's prime space station contractor, Boeing, was criticized for helping to run up the bill. But auditors put most of the blame on NASA for its incredible naiveté in estimating costs and setting deadlines, and on the Russian government for chronically mismanaging what little money it has.

"The problem is worse than it's ever been," Jay Chabrow, a former executive with aerospace giant TRW who led one of the audits, said in June as the House took up NASA's money matters. NASA had issued a plea for emergency cash to keep the space station on track through the end of the fiscal year in September. "This is come-to-God time, now," and not just for NASA, Chabrow said. "The administration itself is not really giving them any help."

'International Sucking Sound'

The space station has been in trouble since at least early 1996, when it became clear that Russia was having difficulty honoring its commitment to build hardware for the program. Boeing's cost overruns started in mid-1995. And to be fair, Russia isn't the first, the last or the only international partner with problems. Canada, for example, curtailed its robotics plan for the station when the country was having trouble paying its way-a decision that increased U.S. development costs by more than $200 million in 1994. Program managers expect additional snags as the time draws near for Japan and Europe to launch their contributions.

In a venture of this scope, "you can't avoid problems," says the European Space Agency's manager in Houston, Francesco Di Mauro.

Why the missed deadlines in Russia? Factory crews at the Khrunichev State Research and Production Center in Moscow couldn't do any work because their parts suppliers weren't getting paid. The suppliers' checks weren't coming because Khrunichev itself was waiting to get paid. The Russian Space Agency still owes the suppliers-not to mention the workers, who also weren't getting paid-the equivalent of hundreds of millions of dollars. The agency's revised budget of 2.7 billion rubles, or about $450 million, for fiscal 1998 sets aside only 1 billion rubles for space station activities. That's a mere 47 percent of the $340 million needed for this year, and the bills from last year still haven't been paid.

After an appraisal team reported in April that space station assembly and development will cost the United States almost $25 billion and take 10 to 38 months longer than planned, even NASA's strongest supporters in Congress were scrambling to tighten the purse strings. "When are Al Gore and Bill Clinton going to stand up and say this is not working out?" Rep. Dave Weldon, R-Fla., asked during a June 24 hearing held by the House Science Committee. Weldon's district includes Kennedy Space Center, where space station components are being readied for launch. "I can criticize the White House for their failure to lead," Weldon said, "but they know I'm going to continue voting for [the space station]."

The $25 billion cost estimate, put forth in April by Chabrow's Cost Assessment and Validation Task Force, didn't include the $1.3 billion a year it will cost U.S. taxpayers to operate the station from 2004 through 2013, the estimated $13.6 billion in space shuttle launch costs for 34 assembly flights, or the billions already spent on the defunct Freedom design. It also didn't include the $12 billion worth of hardware being contributed by the international partners.

In May, the General Accounting Office reported development costs had increased 20 percent in two years and estimated the total U.S. cost through 10 years of operation at $95.6 billion. The GAO blamed slipping schedules, rising costs at Boeing, NASA's low-balled estimate for a seven-passenger lifeboat for the space station and Russia's failure to deliver a crucial component on time.

That component will provide command and control for the station and double as a home for astronauts early on. Called the service module, it will be the third part of the station to launch, but the Russians say it must reach orbit within six months of the first two components to keep them from flying out of control. The service module has been built, but as of late June, the Russian government hadn't released money for final tests. And the space station's archenemy in Congress, Rep. Tim Roemer, D-Ind., who likes to joke that the International Space Station's acronym, ISS, stands for "international sucking sound," was out of patience. "Get the Russians out of the critical path before they kill the entire program," he said.

Stuck With Russia

Drastically downsizing or even ending Russia's participation would require yet another expensive redesign. Thunderstruck by the damning audits, NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin acknowledged that the space station is in serious trouble. Goldin did not respond to an interview request from Government Executive but wrote in a June 17 letter to congressional committees that oversee the space station: "We and the other international partners remain concerned about the impact of the recent economic and fiscal problems facing the Russian government."

Goldin seemed to be on the brink of a public admission that starting over might be the only way the long-awaited space station would ever get built, but he steadfastly refused to ask for the extra $130 million to $250 million a year the project is estimated to need.

The likelihood of a restart was slim, for many reasons, including:

• The project's managers are refusing to give up. "We will find a way. That's something I've learned from our Russian partners," insists Randy Brinkley, a former Marine colonel who manages the global effort from NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.
• In spite of its dire straits, the Russian government keeps promising to uphold its end of the bargain. "The International Space Station is a priority for us. It was confirmed on a very high level and this estimation did not ever change," argues Grigory Ossipov, the Russian Space Agency's representative in Houston.
• The space station plays a major role in continuing efforts to build a democratic, free-market economy in the former Soviet Union. "There is value in sticking with the relationship," says Jeffrey Hofgard, assistant director for space at the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy. "It's an important symbol of what we're able to do together."

Immense, Overwhelming Complexity

Fully assembled, with cylindrical modules clustered like Tinkertoys at the midsection of a long latticework truss and some two dozen power-generating "wings" outstretched to soak up solar energy, the International Space Station will cover one and a half times the expanse of an American football field. It will operate for 10 years at 250 miles above the planet, housing up to seven people in a pressurized living and working space roughly equivalent to the cabin volume of two Boeing 747 jetliners.

It will take 43 space flights spread across five years just to put all the pieces into Earth orbit. Of those flights, 34 will be space shuttle missions in which U.S. astronauts will spend 930 hours walking in space to assemble more than 100 major components. Another nine will be flights of Russian Proton and Soyuz rockets, one of which will deliver the first three-man crew. Altogether, 1,705 hours of spacewalks by astronauts and cosmonauts and 93 flights by seven kinds of vehicles will be needed to assemble, equip, fuel, supply and staff the space station just through opening day in January 2004.

The fact that 16 nations are involved only adds to the immensity and overwhelming complexity of the job. An estimated 40,000 Americans are affected economically by the program, including more than 10,000 who work for NASA or the U.S. prime contractor, Boeing, and its subcontractors and suppliers. Boeing is responsible for $7 billion in space station development contracts. In Russia, Europe, Japan, Canada and Brazil, thousands of workers are assigned to the project.

Sometimes, the most mundane conditions provide the toughest challenges. "Something as simple as the fact that there are so many times zones in this partnership is an additional burden and overhead to our whole management," says Kevin Chilton, Brinkley's deputy for space station operations until August. Sidney Clinton, a space station program analyst charged with making sure every partner toes the line on commercialization issues, recalls too many meetings "where you can't agree on whether it's a round or a square table you're going to talk about the subject on."

It's up to Craig Stencil, manager of the international partners office at Johnson, to sort out all the disagreements, trivial or not. "Usually, it's the same old answer-getting the communication going." And the talks often take twice as long as they should because of the need to interpret so many different tongues.

Clamping Down on Overruns

As vexing as the coordination can be, nothing tops cost and schedule growth on the frustration scale. It keeps the NASA contingent awake at night, literally.

"You can stand in line at the copier in the space station office at three in the morning, and we don't have a night shift. The pressure here is tremendous," says Clinton. "It's not from motivation that we're going to the moon, like Apollo. It's, 'We better build it as cheap as possible. We've got to stay at the current budget. Oh, we've slipped $800 million. We're going to get canceled by Congress.' They didn't have that pressure in Apollo."

NASA has shifted $662 million from other projects in the past two years to pay for cost overruns largely attributed to Russian Space Agency delays, and will shift another $97 million this year. However, as Russia points out every time its pride gets bruised, the United States isn't above reproach when it comes to deadlines.

NASA's Crew Return Vehicle, an escape craft that looks like a miniature space shuttle, is 10 months behind schedule and will cost at least $300 million more than the original $626 million estimate to develop, according to Chabrow. Fabrication of the U.S. habitation module has been stopped, and NASA in June was about to scrap the component in favor of an inflatable living quarters under development at Johnson. Whether the U.S. laboratory module would meet its August delivery deadline was unclear at press time; it reportedly was several weeks to several months behind schedule.

Hardware troubles aside, one of the biggest U.S. concerns is the computer software that will operate the space station. It is driving engineers buggy. The command and data handling system alone involves thousands of sensors and 700 processors manufactured in a variety of countries. Getting them to interface properly is a chore. By the time assembly is finished, the operating software will contain 1 million lines of code. Updating it will be a major challenge.

NASA estimates Boeing will have overspent its budget by almost $849 million when the station is complete, despite measures the company has taken to try to clamp down on costs and hold to schedules. The prime contractor implemented 24-hour work shifts at plants in Huntsville, Ala., and elsewhere and shook up project management in order to instill "the right level of realism," says Boeing's Houston-based space station chief, Douglas Stone.

As Stone explains it, the downsized space station's new look prompted a new way of doing business. The pressure to do things faster, better and cheaper left Boeing with no room for mistakes or surprises when NASA picked the company out of a stable of Freedom contractors to handle the entire job. "We believed that the work we had done since 1987 on the Freedom program was going to largely be directly applicable to what we were doing on International Space Station, and that we wouldn't encounter very many areas where we had to throw things away and start over again from scratch," says Stone.

But NASA has made significant design changes to make sure Russia stays involved. The changes include adding the U.S.-built truss to which the labs and power systems will be attached, and pushing up the launch of a massive U.S. solar array to substitute for a Russian one that couldn't meet its deadline.

Russia's primary contribution to the station is the service module, with storage tanks for propellants as well as life support systems and living quarters for the early crews. The service module is desperately needed to give the fledgling station an orbital boost before the first U.S. solar array is installed in August 1999.

The service module is hobbling the entire project. The severely underfunded component is now set to fly next April, more than a year behind schedule. It is the same component that last year forced NASA to delay the start of station assembly from November 1997 to June 1998. Because of the delays, the first permanent crew, commanded by NASA astronaut William Shepherd with two cosmonauts, can't move into the station until July 1999 at the earliest.

The service module was manufactured by the same company that manufactured the space station's first element, a 20-ton power and propulsion module called the FGB, a Russian acronym for functional cargo block. In December, shuttle astronauts will attach the FGB to the second space station element, a U.S. component called a node, which has six ports for a U.S. laboratory, an airlock and other elements that will be sent up later. Commanded from the ground, the FGB and the node are supposed to dock automatically with the service module whenever it arrives.

Russia was to have contributed the FGB, but to ensure U.S. ownership and control of the first station element, NASA bought it from Khrunichev through Boeing for $200 million. The FGB and the service module are a study in contrasts. "We do not have an element in the program that has been more successful [than the FGB] in terms of being able to stay on schedule and meet the technical challenges," says Brinkley. "In retrospect, it would have been cheaper to have paid for the service module, too."

NASA wanted emergency cash this summer to help pay for a less capable substitute for the beleaguered service module. Congress was expecting Goldin to determine by July 15 whether the Russian Space Agency could meet a final, June 1999 deadline to launch the service module. If not, then NASA could choose to fall back on a $200 million space tug manufactured by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. The so-called interim control module can propel and reboost the space station like the service module can, but it can't accommodate a crew.

In his June letter to Congress, Goldin asked to have until next February to decide what to do about anticipated shortages of Russian rockets that are promised to refuel and resupply the space station. "The question is, 'Are the rubles available, or are there higher-priority domestic needs?' " Joseph Rothenberg, NASA's associate administrator for space flight, said in a May interview. "I don't have any real warm feeling that the (Russian) funding will come."

'Swords to Plowshares'

Rothenberg is among the senior NASA officials who downplay the space station's problems, saying the program is "in far better shape than the popular press or the trade journals tend to portray it." Officials also say they are carrying out orders from Congress and the White House and complain they're being unfairly criticized for a situation that ultimately is out of their hands.

"If only we had acknowledged up front that a truly international space station is as much about 'swords-to-plowshares' as technology and science, we would never have had our current problems with Congress and the American people," says William Readdy, an astronaut who directed NASA operations in Star City, Russia, in 1994 and flew a shuttle to dock at the Russian space station Mir in 1996. "In that context, how could we not have included the Russians? Our biggest stumbling block is the fact that NASA originally sold this as a 'faster, better, cheaper' project. Usually you can only achieve two out of three."

In recent years, lawmakers have been reluctant to clip NASA's wings when it comes to the space station. Proposals to eliminate funding have been defeated every time. Roemer, whose latest space station killer amendment was due to be voted on on July 15, hoped to win this time. "In terms of faster, cheaper, better, this program is bloated, expensive and worse. Just because you call something 'swords-to-plowshares' doesn't mean you get a blank check."

Almost from the outset of Russian involvement, Congress instructed NASA to limit its dependence on Russian hardware and technology. Randy Brinkley says Congress' "enhance vs. enable" guidance was prudent but came too late. "When it's all said and done, when we're on orbit and we've got a space station that is operational and that brings to bear the resources as well as the tremendous experience that the Russians have, we will still find it very beneficial and a good investment," he says.

But Brinkley admits that if he had it to do all over again, he would make sure taxpayers understood the risks. "I think I would caution the American people to lower their expectations," Brinkley says, and tell them "that this was going to be hard, and we were going to have challenges along the way, and those challenges were going to have cost and schedule impact."

Ask just about any senior NASA official whether he or she would rather not be saddled with Russian participation, and in public or private, the answer is the same. "I can honestly say that, based on our experience with Mir, it was a wise decision to buy the Russians into it," says Gretchen McClain, deputy associate administrator for space station. "Yeah, we have frustrations. The frustration we feel is felt even more so by the Russians."

Russia is the undisputed world leader in long-duration space flight, and McClain says the nation's technological expertise-not to mention the occasionally life-threatening three-year apprenticeship of Americans on the Russian space station-is guaranteed to make the space station more robust.

It's been called a unique world-class laboratory, a beacon for education, a model for international cooperation, a force for peace and progress, a bridge to the future, a highway to the stars and an excellent return on investment. If the space station is good for nothing else, it will have served as a huge reality check for those who dream of more ambitious cooperative efforts-particularly a human expedition to Mars, a cherished NASA hope and a mission no nation could afford to mount by itself.

Beth Dickey is a freelance writer who has covered the U.S. space shuttle program since the maiden voyage of Columbia in 1981. She reports from Kennedy Space Center for national and international news organizations.