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NASA Defends Launch of New Crew to Space Station

Posted on: Friday, 24 October 2003, 06:00 CDT

Oct. 24--WASHINGTON--NASA officials on Thursday defended their decision to send a new crew to the international space station despite concerns about malfunctioning air and water devices and medical equipment, saying the problems pose no immediate threat to the astronauts on board.

But the equipment issue underscores the high-wire act being performed more than 200 miles above the Earth, with only small Russian spacecraft to support the orbiting laboratory for at least another year.

The Feb. 1 disintegration of the shuttle Columbia and the subsequent grounding of the remaining three shuttles has left the $100 billion space station with little margin for error. One serious problem and the crew would have to be sent home on a Soyuz, leaving the station empty -- and potentially ending the program.

If, for some reason, the crew had to evacuate the station, it could be difficult to rally support for sending people back -- assuming the station could even survive any length of time unoccupied.

"You're getting a glimpse of how difficult it is for us to fly the station," space-station program manager Bill Gerstenmaier said. "Sometimes it appears easy, but it's an extremely difficult thing that we're doing."

The orbiting outpost has been dependent on the shuttle for everything except basic food and survival supplies; the Russian Soyuz and Progress have much smaller cargo capacity. That's why the environmental monitors, as well as malfunctioning exercise and medical equipment, haven't been replaced.

Gerstenmaier's comments came after the disclosure, first reported in The Washington Post, that two NASA health and environmental officials had refused to sign off on last week's launch of a new two-man crew scheduled to spend the next six months aboard the station. The two said the lack of working monitors to detect contaminants in the station's air and water supply meant the safety of the crew couldn't be assured.

Gerstenmaier said those objections were fully discussed at the Johnson Space Center in Houston over several weeks, and continued after members of the team traveled to Russia for last Friday's launch.

Managers settled on bringing back samples of the station's air and water when the Russian Soyuz lands Monday night. The results of tests on those samples will not be available for several weeks, and the two people who balked at signing off on the launch said the problem can't be considered resolved until the results are in.

"The concerns that we had were with being able to sustain the whole operation, and that's still up in the air," said William Langdoc, head of the habitability and environmental factors office within the station's space- and life-sciences directorate and one of the dissenters. "That's why we need the data."

NASA officials, including Langdoc, said they have no reason to think there is any contamination of the air and water aboard the station, and equipment that monitors levels of oxygen, nitrogen and carbon dioxide is still working. But with the othermonitors acting up since July, officials cannot prove that everything is fine -- or that nothing will happen over the six-month tenure of NASA astronaut Michael Foale and Russian cosmonaut Alexander Kaleri.

Replacements for the monitors will not make it to the station until the next unmanned Russian Progress supply ship is launched, either in November or January.

During a news conference from space Thursday, Foale and American Ed Lu said all five people on board the station -- including Kaleri, Spanish astronaut Pedro Duque and Russian Yuri Malenchenko -- are feeling fine. Foale said the problem with the monitors had been discussed with him before the Soyuz launch.

Lu and Malenchenko have been aboard the station for the past six months and will return to Earth on Monday. Duque, who rode up to the station last week for 10 days of experiments, will come back with them.

The shadow of the shuttle accident -- and the harsh criticism of NASA's safety culture by the Columbia Accident Investigation Board -- is felt keenly by the station program, Gerstenmaier said. And some compared the recent launch debate to the questions, raised but ultimately dismissed, by engineers who suspected Columbia and its crew might be in danger from a chunk of foam that hit the wing during launch.

The station situation is somewhat different, mainly because the astronauts always have a Soyuz they can escape in.

And Gerstenmaier, Langdoc and others said the station discussion should be viewed as an example of the system working, because dissenting opinions were both heard and dealt with.

However, neither Langdoc nor Nitza Cintron, head of the space medicine and health-care system office, would say Thursday that their fears have been completely allayed. Langdoc did say the review process had worked.

"We all read the CAIB report. We certainly understood what the concerns were in the process," Langdoc said. "What I saw going on was not the process that had been reviewed and criticized [by the CAIB]."

Added Gerstenmaier, "We've still got work to do in improving, but I think this is a testimony that things are working the right way."

But critics said the situation raises new questions about how NASA makes decisions.

Howard McCurdy, a professor at American University and the author of several books on the space program, said NASA may be overly optimistic about possible risks to the crew members of the space station.

"I think that attitude got NASA into trouble on the shuttle, and it could get NASA into trouble on the station," he said.

On the other hand, said Seymour Himmel, an ex-NASA employee who served an extended term on the agency's safety advisory panel, some dissension is inevitable. "If you insist on unanimity, you'll never fly," Himmel said. "The thing is this: the term 'accepted risk' has such a negative aspect to it the way it's been used that no one wants to acknowledge that anymore. They say everything's going to be perfect. Well, there's no such thing as perfect."

Exasperated members of Congress demanded immediate answers from NASA about conditions aboard the space station.

Rep. Sherwood Boehlert, chairman of the House Science Committee, said the objections appear to have been handled properly but was clearly unhappy at being taken by surprise.

"The Science Committee has asked repeatedly whether the grounding of the space shuttle presented any threats to the ISS crew, and we were told that it did not. Clearly, that was not the case," Boehlert, R-N.Y., said in a statement. "NASA needs to be much more forthcoming and accurate with the information it provides to Congress and the public."

Sen. Sam Brownback, the Kansas Republican who heads the Senate Commerce Committee's space subcommittee, said safety on the station needs to be a major factor in the agency's long-term decisions.

"I have become more and more concerned that the decision-making process at NASA has not changed sufficiently since the Columbia disaster," Brownback said in a statement.

Brownback will chair a hearing next week on the space station and said he intends to make the safety of the orbiting laboratory a major topic.

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