IF Sean O’Keefe, the new chief of the world’s most powerful space agency, has never read Mary Shelley’s haunting Victorian novel, here’s a summary for him. When the young Swiss student Victor Frankenstein discovers the secret of life, he assembles a giant using body parts stolen from graveyards, dissecting rooms and slaughterhouses. But when he finally brings it to life, Frankenstein realises he has manufactured a monster and flees. The tormented creature pursues him onto the ice floes of the North Pole and Frankenstein dies with the monster standing over his body—destroyed by his outrageous creation.
For O’Keefe, the story may have a curious resonance. Imagine the US space agency NASA as the young Victor Frankenstein, and think of its progeny as the International Space Station, brought to life using parts gathered from space agencies around the world. If Shelley’s story is anything to go by, NASA will die a horrific death, with the monstrous spacecraft orbiting over the body of its creator.
A bit of fun perhaps, but the story is tinged with more than enough truth to make the blood run cold. In reality, O’Keefe joins a space agency in financial ruin. The ISS is a disaster. Plagued by political interference and by financial mismanagement on a gigantic scale, the ISS has brought a once proud space agency to its knees. While its relations with partners abroad have been pushed to breaking point, the US government at home has finally lost patience with the agency. NASA may never recover.
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So what has gone wrong? Like an insidious alien virus, the ISS has taken over its master and is slowly strangling the life out of other projects that compete for NASA’s lifeblood—its money and expertise. And as long as the ISS rules NASA from orbit, it will continue to dominate the agency’s agenda for decades to come. Yet NASA can’t cancel the project: it has too much to lose.
The future for NASA and O’Keefe looks bleak. At best, O’Keefe can rein in costs, turning the ISS into an orbiting tin can that will have no useful function for years to come. At worst, the space station will continue to drain its maker dry. Will NASA suffer a slow and painful death at the hands of its own preposterous creation?
The idea for a space station was born at the height of the cold war, when the Soviets’ clear lead in living and working in space became too much for the Americans to bear. In 1984, US President Ronald Reagan announced that America, together with Europe, Canada and Japan, would build an orbiting laboratory with a permanent crew who would develop new drugs, discover exotic materials and learn about the effects of weightlessness. The subtext, of course, was that the space station would demonstrate the technological prowess of the capitalist world. The plan was to have the station operating 300 kilometres above the Earth’s surface by 1992.
It would be costly, however. The $8 billion price tag was four times the cost of America’s previous space station, Skylab. As the cold war fizzled out, critics argued that expensive displays of technological machismo were no longer necessary, and the money could be better spent elsewhere. Problem was, NASA was already spending it, and fast.
In 1992, NASA admitted to Congress that it had already spent $10 billion on the design alone, more than the original estimate for the entire station, and yet it did not have a single piece of orbiting hardware to show for it. The entire project could have been halted right then, but for one event: the collapse of the Soviet Union.
With the former USSR’s economy rapidly disintegrating, US President Bill Clinton’s administration began to worry that unemployed rocket scientists would sell their expertise to rogue states such as Iraq and Iran. Clinton’s solution was to bring the Russians in on the project, hoping to keep idle hands busy while the Russian economy stabilised. Clinton named the spacecraft “International Space Station Alpha”, claiming it would be a symbol of post-cold war cooperation.
What’s more, Russia’s involvement would allow the US to get part of the station built on the cheap. NASA expected Russia’s contribution to be worth up to $10 billion, and this allowed Congress to cap NASA’s further spending on the station at just over $17 billion (ignoring what had already been spent). Many argued that if the project guaranteed jobs at home and stability abroad, it was money well spent. Others, such as Senators Dale Bumpers and Tim Roemer, claimed NASA had wasted too much cash already and it was time to pull the plug. When Roemer made a bid in Congress to kill the station in June 1993, it survived by just a single vote. NASA promptly announced that the projected costs had risen to $25 billion, but by then there was no turning back.
Work on the space station was divided among almost 100 contractors and subcontractors in more than 20 US states. It’s not clear whether that was by accident or design. Rich Robins, a NASA observer who runs the website, says this was done so that the station would never again come close to being cancelled, despite drawing flak from all quarters. He says NASA was able to guarantee support by “sharing the pork”: ensuring that contracts to build the station were spread around the country. NASA was well aware that congressmen and women from these states would be unlikely to vote against the station because of the jobs it guaranteed back home, Robins argues. NASA denies this, saying that any big project has to be divided up among many contractors, and these will inevitably be spread around the country.
Whatever the reasons, since the 1993 near miss the station has survived similar debates more comfortably. Whether NASA intended it or not, cancellation was never again a politically viable option. The station had become too big to kill.
But Clinton’s plan to involve the Russians had unexpected consequences. First, the station’s orbit had to be altered to accommodate them. The Baikonur Cosmodrome, where Russia launches its spacecraft, is at a significantly higher latitude than the US spaceport at Cape Canaveral in Florida. If the Russians were to take part, the space station would have to pass over Baikonur.
That’s harder than it sounds. NASA’s original plan had been to launch the station into an orbit at an angle of 28° to the equator. But to allow the Russians to reach the station, this had to be increased to 58°, which was bad news for the space shuttle. A spacecraft launched into a highly inclined orbit gains less of a boost from the Earth’s rotation than one travelling due west along the equator. Reaching the modified orbit would require more thrust than the shuttle’s engines could provide, so NASA had to fit lighter, more powerful engines and a lightweight fuel tank at a cost of more than $1 billion. A pattern was set: the tail was beginning to wag the dog.
At about the same time, NASA’s chief Dan Goldin was developing a new vision for the agency. NASA had recently suffered a number of embarrassing failures, such as the disappearance of the $1 billion Mars Observer spacecraft. So Goldin decided that NASA would no longer invest in big projects. “I don’t want any more billion-dollar, multi-year programmes where you lose everything if you lose the launch vehicle,” he told New Scientist in 1995 (24 June, p 27). “We will have lots of smaller craft. We will make it affordable.”
He touted his vision as the “faster, better, cheaper” philosophy. Critics pointed out that it was possible to get faster and better, or cheaper and faster, for example, but never all three. Goldin’s vision just didn’t add up, they said. Nevertheless, he set about cutting large projects, opting instead for smaller, cheaper missions.
The real reason for the cuts was the huge cost of the space station, reckons Harrison Schmitt, former astronaut and congressman and now a seasoned NASA commentator. “The ‘faster, better, cheaper’ strategy was a consequence of the cost pressure that everyone was feeling because of the problems of the space station,” he says. Keith Cowing, a former NASA scientist who now runs , agrees. “It’s clear the station drives everything NASA does,” he says. Yet the station itself was never subject to the streamlining that was paying for it.
Meanwhile the space station was running into a serious problem of its own: the Russians were falling badly behind schedule. Part of the Russian role was to build two sections of the space station and place them in orbit. The first, the functional cargo block, was built and launched without a hiccup. However, the service module, which houses the crew’s quarters and controls the station’s altitude, immediately ran into trouble. With the Russian economy failing and the ageing Mir space station eating up funds, the Russian authorities simply didn’t have the $230 million needed to build the module. Its 1998 launch date began to slip.
For NASA this was disastrous. Without the service module, the station would fall slowly back to Earth. NASA, its contractors, and international partners would have to wait for the Russians to finish their part of the project before doing anything else.
Then other problems loomed. The station was designed to operate with a crew of six, who would need an escape route in an emergency. The Russians had agreed to provide the lifeboats—two Soyuz return vehicles which can each carry three people. These would have to be replaced at six-month intervals because of their limited battery life. But with return vehicles also needed for Mir, demand for the capsules was threatening to outstrip supply.
As the service module slipped behind schedule, the situation became increasingly desperate. After a year had passed, NASA began to suspect the module would never fly, so it started work on its own version and accelerated development of a craft to replace the Soyuz capsules. But these projects would take time, and time was money. Stuck between a rock and a hard place, NASA stumped up $600 million to fund the Russian contributions. “Putting the Russian technology into a critical path to success meant they could drive the schedule,” says Schmitt. “That’s where the error was made and it cost us a great deal.”
Things were going just as badly for NASA at home. The agency’s main contractor, Boeing, had run into serious problems when the station’s computer wiring had to be redesigned. A section of the station designed to join modules together failed a pressure test. And NASA had seriously underestimated the amount of computer software it would need to run the station. But while the media spotlight focused on the Russians, these problems went largely unreported.
NASA believes they were only to be expected. “These kinds of problems are typical for this sort of research and development work,” says Mike Hawes, who heads the ISS project at NASA. Typical or not, NASA clearly didn’t budget for them. These setbacks alone cost another billion dollars, money that NASA could hardly afford to lose.
Things eventually began to look up. The delayed service module was launched in July 2000 and construction of the station in space began in earnest. And in March 2001 the Russians sent the Mir space station plummeting back to Earth and began to concentrate their resources on the ISS.
Then disaster struck. In June 2001, NASA announced it was a further $5 billion over budget, the result of an accounting practice that allowed managers to carry over costs to the next financial year. An independent committee chaired by Thomas Young, former president of Martin Marietta Corporation, examined the fiasco. Its report, released in November 2001, was damning. It concluded that NASA did not have the financial expertise to manage a project of this size and could not rule out the possibility of further budget shocks.
Just weeks before the committee released its report, Goldin resigned. A furious US government refused to bail out the project, leaving NASA in dire straits. “It’s akin to being in a state of bankruptcy,” says Cowing. To claw back the money, and with Goldin gone, NASA finally started cutting costs.
First it drew up a new plan that uses fewer shuttle missions per year to build the station. And until the core of the station is complete, it will operate with a crew of only three. No one knows exactly when this construction phase will finish.
For NASA’s long-suffering partners in the European, Canadian and Japanese space agencies, this was the final straw. They had been attracted to the project because it would allow them access to space at a reasonable price. The deal was this: build sections of the station and you can use its science facilities for experiments. Now the prospect of payback seemed to be evaporating. A crew of three wouldn’t have enough time to maintain and operate the station, and do experiments as well. And with NASA committed to a three-person crew for the foreseeable future, the partners began to realise they would never get the return on their investment. NASA, they felt, had stabbed them in the back.
The European Space Agency, for one, is furious. “The Americans have an obligation under an international agreement and we expect them to honour it,” says Jörg Feustel-Büechl, who heads Europe’s efforts on the project. “We want a full crew as soon as possible.” Feustel-Büechl is working with other international partners to devise a revised plan that would allow the station to become fully crewed and operational by 2006, and will put the plan to NASA later this year. Whether NASA will accept it is debatable. “We are still involved in intense discussions,” says Hawes.
Just how useful this orbiting lab will be is another sore point. NASA has consistently overhyped the station, says Cowing. If the agency is to be believed, there are few great mysteries facing humankind that the space station will not solve. At a press conference in May 1998, NASA claimed the station will throw light on the origin of the Solar System, the formation of the Universe and how life began. According to Cowing, one press release even suggested that experiments performed on the station could help cure AIDS.
Even NASA’s more realistic ambitions for the station have drawn fire. One claim is that the microgravity conditions on board will allow scientists to make exotic materials that cannot be made on Earth, such as the crystals required to understand complex protein structures. But NASA’s record in this area isn’t good, despite numerous experiments on the space shuttle and Mir. In 2000, a damning report by the influential US National Research Council concluded that “one cannot point to a single case where a space-based crystallisation effort was the crucial step in achieving a landmark scientific result”. Neither is the space station likely to change this, since the knocks and bumps from astronauts will destroy the vibration-free conditions NASA hopes to exploit. Many scientists believe NASA would be better off using automated satellites to do the same thing at a fraction of the cost.
And a mammoth, mind-boggling cost it is too. The station has cost $40 billion so far. Each shuttle flight costs another $400 million, and since the station will require another 60 flights or more over its 10 to 15 years of operation, that’s a total of about $25 billion. Running costs are estimated to add up to $40 billion. That’s at least a cool $100 billion altogether—about two-thirds of which has still to be spent. By contrast, NASA’s entire budget for 2003 is $15 billion.
So who is to blame? Much of the responsibility lies with Goldin, who ran the agency throughout the 90s. Schmitt, who was a candidate to take over as chief, says the symptoms of dysfunctional management were obvious to anyone who bothered to look. “Goldin just couldn’t bring himself to delegate,” says Schmitt, pointing to the 22 senior managers who reported directly to Goldin. “That violates all rules of good management practice. No individual is capable of making all the decisions in an organisation like NASA.”
So what’s next? The experience has clearly been a sobering one for the US. “If anything, it has taught the country never to trust NASA with a project of this size again,” says James Oberg, a former NASA engineer turned space commentator. And that is bad news for Sean O’Keefe, who has the unenviable job of clearing up the mess.
O’Keefe’s background as a bean counter will help him with the task ahead. He was deputy director of the US government’s Office of Management and Budget and spent three years as comptroller and chief financial officer at the Department of Defense. O’Keefe recently told an audience at Syracuse University that from now on NASA’s mission “will be carried out in a new commitment to fiscal responsibility and wise use of our assets”. He has started by reforming NASA’s management structure, resurrecting nuclear power for future space missions, and is pushing to develop a business plan to evaluate whether shuttle operations could be completely privatised.
Now that many of NASA’s problems have been identified, the mood inside the agency is becoming more positive. “The station may have brought NASA to its knees, but that doesn’t mean it has to stay on its knees,” says Schmitt. These are admirable sentiments, but they are no guarantee that NASA will recover. O’Keefe, only six months into the toughest job in the business, has one almighty monster to tame.
