Russian Progress Launch Failure Raises Questions About Access to NASA's ISS (ContributorNetwork)
An accident has caused a Russian Progress cargo ship that was headed for the International Space Station to fail to reach orbit. The Progress subsequently burned up in Earth's atmosphere.
There will be no immediate effect to the crew of the ISS. Supplies on board the space station are always kept sufficiently to ride out one such accident. However the loss of the Progress may have profound implications for the future of the ISS, in only the second month of what the Russians once boasted of being "The Age of Soyuz."
Because of President George W. Bush's decision to end the space shuttle program, which occurred last July, the only method to send astronauts to and from the ISS is on board the Russian Soyuz, the launch vehicle for which has a lot in common with the one that failed with the Progress.
Russia will likely suspend further Progress flights, according to RIA Novosti. That leaves the European ATV, the Japanese HTV, and the coming commercial vehicles, such as the SpaceX Dragon, as means to resupply the ISS.
A Russian Soyuz is scheduled to arrive at the ISS with for a change of crews in about four weeks. The status of that mission as of this writing is unknown, but it would not be surprising if it were delayed pending an investigation of the Progress failure.
There has already been some second guessing about the end of the space shuttle program four years before the scheduled start of commercial crew operations. United Space Alliance Vice President and SSP manager Howard DeCastro has ruminated that ending the space shuttle program when it was, before an American alternative was ready, made on technical sense, according to NASA Spaceflight.
DeCastro is correct, but also irrelevant. The decision to conclude the space shuttle program was purely budget based. The funding this freed up were suppose to pay for the Constellation space exploration program to send astronaut explorers beyond low Earth orbit, starting with the moon, as well as to pay for a capsule spacecraft, the Orion, and a commercial alternative for resupplying ISS.
But President Obama abruptly canceled Constellation and went all in with the commercial option. Now there is some doubt that even the commercial option will get adequate funding as the budget deficit balloons long past $1 trillion.
The Obama administration, with a little help from the Bush administration before it, has stumbled and blundered into a situation in which the future of American space flight is in doubt. Congress seems unable on its own to address the problem. Will the next president be able to? Only time and the next election will tell.
Mark R. Whittington is the author of Children of Apollo and The Last Moonwalker . He has written on space subjects for a variety of periodicals, including The Houston Chronicle, The Washington Post, USA Today, the LA Times, and The Weekly Standard.
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