Where Is NASA in the U.S./Russia Spat?
Why Ukraine crisis won’t affect Russia, U.S. space collaboration, CNN
“We do not expect the current Russia-Ukraine situation to have any impact on our civil space cooperation with Russia, including our partnership on the International Space Station program,” said Allard Beutel, a NASA spokesman.”
Russia Preparing Response to U.S. and EU Sanctions, Moscow Times
“The Federation Council is drawing up a bill that would allow the government to confiscate the property of U.S. and European companies in the event of Western sanctions, though political analysts dismiss both actions as intimidating rhetoric unlikely turn into action. Further decreasing the possibility of asset confiscation is its violation of Russian and international laws, a legal expert said.”
U.S. prepared to place unilateral sanctions on Russian officials, businesses, Washington Post
“The Obama administration is prepared to take unilateral steps to sanction Russian individuals and business entities it holds responsible for corrupt and illegal behavior in Ukraine while it moves to persuade its European partners, some more reluctant than others, to consider more substantive sanctions to directly affect the Russian economy, according to senior administration officials.”
German Chancellor Merkel was quoted as telling Obama and Kerry that Putin “seems to exist in a different world”, out to lunch, so to speak. Sanctions will definitely involve tit for tat actions. Russia supplies about 30% of western European gas supplies. As for NASA, things would have to get pretty rough. Russia could refuse to fly some non-critical American astronauts to ISS. I would think it would be difficult for the Russians to boot out other partners, returning all but non-Russians to Earth. I doubt if they could manage ISS on their own. To force abandonment would be stupid for them to do. However, they could cause delays in sending up or down Americans and that would be enough to warrant ridding ourselves of dependence on them. Its just not worth it. Our dependence on Russia for human spaceflight is due to our own stupidity, that of our US government’s which really we as a society have lost control of. If Washington and government management functioned reasonably well, doesn’t have to be close to perfect, then the decisions that led to failures in Space Shuttle, in the design choices and development that were Constellation and then the decision to force SLS and Orion while never providing NASA with the requested funding level for Commercial Crew could have been avoided and we would not be in this predicament of dependence on Russia.
This might be the opportunity to force these congressmen to fund commercial space properly.
I think it was foolish to make ourselves dependent on the Russians. It was also foolish to hire out all our development and construction work to our other partners. It was foolish not to maintain an active program of DDT&E and instead try to make ourselves over entirely to an ‘ops’ organization. You don’t need much ops if you cannot do the rest. And it was foolish to fail to get a new US human space vehicle flying in the time we needed it. That was the top priority. The top priority was not trying to reinvent Apollo on a more massive scale.
NASA has been getting plenty of money to do it all-the DDT&E and the rest. They should have been focusing their energies and their people, but they were not. So apparently something happened to refocus all of the HSF energies on only only narrow aspect and forego much of the work of HSF. Maybe NASA’s HSF management needs to learn its lesson and try to regain and never again to give up the wider range of functions in the future. Or maybe it is too late and NASA needs to be rebuilt to do something different? Maybe their new focus ought to be the R&D of an earlier era. I am not sure which it ought to be but I would like to hear the discussion. So far I have not.
The NASA managers, many of them still in place today, did not think this through when they chose their directions over the last couple of decades. I recently heard a discussion in which it was said that the current management did not create the problem, but they need to take ownership of it and resolve it. However I think a lot of those people who made the poor decisions 10, 15 or 20 years ago are still there.
I hope the Russians do not take advantage of the current political situation and take it out on what remains of the US space program-but they might-and there is absolutely nothing NASA can do about it. Its the result of a feckless policy: weak of character, ineffective, irresponsible. Obama has been accused of this. But the term fits NASA’s recent programs and planning as well.
The CAIB report said in 2005 that NASA’s first priority in human spaceflight should be a system designed only to get people into and out of LEO. Period. The CAIB said any more ambitious plan would fail because the US taxpayers and Congress would not commit the necessary resources. They hit the nail on the head.
Unfortunately the current leadership (and Congress) still refuses to read the CAIB report. They have a simple answer. Everything bad is Obama’s fault.
For the record, Obama tried to accelerate Commercial Crew which would have reduced both cost and dependance on Russia. Congress responded by forcing NASA to cut Commercial Crew and increase funding for SLS and Orion.
I was always told that at NASA when your boss says “no!”, that’s just the beginning of negotiations. NASA seems to always be trying to prove people wrong. That trait is great when it’s a technical problem, but when it spills over to the political domain it’s a disaster. Couple that with NASA’s unwillingness to frankly express the cost and difficulty of doing these projects, enables Congress to believe it will all work out.
I find it hard to believe that NASA operates in such a vacumn. Senate and House aids are talking with NASA and deciding things long before we are treated with the kabuki theater of congressional hearings on what direction NASA will be taking on any given subject.
Call this strike two. Unless the Ukraine turns into a hot war the ISS will probably get by as a path to peace.
Strike one – Georgia https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…
Strike two – Ukraine
Strike three – TBD
Strike against who? If we cut off US-Russian collaboration on ISS and go back to the Cold War, we will have to spend hundreds of billions on arms – and maybe end up with a nuclear war.
‘Strike’ as in baseball.
Cold War #3 – This is a very dangerous situation.
It’s really not a good idea to have access to space controlled by insanely wealthy oligarchs.
And then when you add the Russians to that…
It is worth pointing out that the world is controlled by insanely wealthy oligarchs and that there is a trend to give them even more money.
This can end only well…
It, historically, always ends exactly the same way. When the income disparity reaches a certain point, a dominoe falls and then another …..
As Huey Long said, the reason socialism never took root in America is that the poor in America see themselves not as an oppressed proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
All the more reason to deorbit the ISS sooner rather than later.