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Space Station Crew Told of Equipment Woes

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

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) - The new international space station crew was told that some air and water monitoring devices and other equipment aren't working properly, but they aren't worried, astronaut Michael Foale said Thursday in an interview from the space station.

Foale said the concerns, initially raised by a NASA physician and scientists, shouldn't affect the six-month mission aboard the station for him and his crewmate, Russian cosmonaut Alexander Kaleri.

"They made a point to tell me that they saw no reason to believe that the actual quality of the air was bad or that the water we were drinking was bad," Foale said. "But they wanted to make sure the program committed priority to continuing the monitoring of the environment here on the space station."

Astronaut Ed Lu, who is at the end of his six-month stay on the space station, said he and his crewmate, Russian cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko, have had no health problems. When asked if he thought there was a safety threat, he said, "Absolutely not."

The malfunctioning devices test for the concentration of tiny contaminants that can get into the air and water and possibly poison crew members. They stopped working during the past two months.

"We can still measure the concentration of important things - oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide and so on," Lu said. "But the very trace things ... you can't measure them with the instruments we have working. We do know that those levels were low the last time this equipment was working and had been low."

Some exercise equipment, needed to help crew members maintain their muscle and bone mass, also is malfunctioning. In addition, the station is running low on some medicine and intravenous fluids.

An air sample will be brought back when Lu and Malenchenko return to Earth. In addition, spare parts and exercise equipment were scheduled to be sent on the next cargo ship.

"We may have to return the crew if we can't provide the proper exercise, but again, we're multiple failures from being in a situation where we would have to return the crew," said Bill Gerstenmaier, the station's program manager. "There's nothing of immediate concern- it's more of a long duration type of thing."

With the space shuttles grounded since the Columbia disaster in February, resupplying the station has become more complicated because Russia's Soyuz spacecraft have less room than the shuttles.

NASA concluded that sending a fresh crew to the space station was "well within the parameters of safety" despite the warnings, agency spokesman Robert Mirelson said.

There was a full discussion by mid- and management-level engineers before the decision was made to send the new crew to the orbiting lab, Mirelson said. That decision was preceded by several pre-launch meetings in Moscow, Washington and the Johnson Space Center involving NASA engineers and experts from the space station partner nations, he said.

The officials considered the concerns expressed by engineers about the malfunctioning equipment and concluded the launch would be safe.

Two dissenting NASA officials overseeing health and environmental conditions on the space station had warned about "the continued degradation" of the environmental monitoring and health maintenance systems and exercise equipment vital to the astronauts' well being.

Nitza Cintron and William Langdoc said Thursday that they still had concerns but believed they were being addressed by the space agency.

"They do not pose an imminent danger on the crew," said Cintron, NASA's chief of space medicine. "We would certainly state so if we thought so ... At the current time, we are 'go' for continuation of flight pending they resolve of all these issues and problems."

The Russian spacecraft filled in for the second time since the U.S. shuttle program was grounded, delivering a three-man crew Monday to the international space station.

Foale, Kaleri and Spain's Pedro Duque entered the space station after the autopilot docking of their spacecraft, two days after the Soyuz blasted off from Kazakhstan. Duque is to remain aboard the station for eight days before returning to Earth with American Lu and Malenchenko, who have been aboard since April 28.

NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe told the Washington Post that, as he understood it, there was no immediate hazard to the crew but that conditions could deteriorate in the next six months and force the crew to abandon ship.

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