It’s been an exciting week on the International Space Station. On Monday, it had to dodge an old upper stage that was in danger of colliding with it. Then, yesterday, a reaction-control thruster unexpectedly fired for half a minute, causing a sudden unplanned shift in the facility’s attitude. Fortunately, the system reacted well overall, and things were restored to normal within a couple hours.

The misfiring thruster was on the Russian Soyuz capsule currently attached to the ISS. This is the vehicle in which it is planned to bring three crew members back to earth later tomorrow morning.

This is just the latest problem with Russian space hardware. The reason that the crew are coming home this month, instead of the originally planned return in May, is that there was a failure of a (Russian) Progress cargo ship at the end of April. As I wrote at PJMedia this past weekend:

This was, sadly, not atypical. Just in the past six years, the Russians have now had sixteen space mission failures, one of which had NASA actually contemplating temporarily abandoning the ISS in 2011. Their industry is beset by strikes, underpaid workers, and the need to rapidly reproduce hardware that in the past would have been acquired from Ukraine, the flow of which has been interrupted by Russia’s ongoing war on that nation. In addition, as reported in a story this past weekend, there is also massive corruption. With each failure, there is a management shakeup, but the underlying systemic quality problems never seem to get fixed. These most recent failures should be the last straw in demonstrating the immediate need to free the nation’s civil space policy from dependence on the dysfunctional Russian space industry. But Congress continues to misprioritize the budget and the direction to NASA necessary to do so.

The only way to end our dependence on the Russians for access to the ISS is to accelerate the commercial crew program but, every year, Congress refuses to provide it with the funds that NASA requests to just keep it on schedule, let alone accelerate it. In the House appropriation this year, the budget was cut by almost a quarter of a billion dollars, twenty percent below the request of $1.243B. Worse, in the mark up today, the Senate appropriations committee is even worse, cutting the budget by over a third of a billion. This, despite the fact that in hearings in March, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden told the committee that, while they could not accelerate the program with additional funding, they could further delay it with cuts. The current schedule is for 2017 for first crew flight. These cuts will likely extend our dependence on Russia into 2018.

Previous concerns with Russian dependence were geopolitical; as I’ve noted in the past, it prevents us from sanctioning them under the Iran/North Korea/Syria Non-Proliferation Act (INKSNA). Under the act, we should not be purchasing goods or services from Russia, because they have been aiding Iran (at least) with missile and nuclear-weapon development for years, but every year or two, Congress has to waive the act in order to purchase more Soyuz rides to get our crew to and from the ISS. But now, we have a new concern: Is the hardware even reliable?

But there is no backup plan. When pressed on it, General Bolden said he “didn’t even want to think about” the eventuality that he couldn’t use Russian services. Here is his quote from the March hearing: “Our backup plan…would be to mutually agree that the space station and space exploration is coming to an end. We would make an orderly evacuation….”

If only we had some sort of…I don’t know…national space agency whose head was paid to think about things like that.

As I wrote this weekend:

Ignoring the self-serving fecklessness with which Congress is dealing with the issue, the real problem is pusillanimity. There was an answer to Chairman Culberson’s question to General Bolden. There is one way, and one way only, to accelerate Commercial Crew and end our dependence on the Russians; and that is, to recognize the importance of human spaceflight, and be more accepting of risk. The Commercial Crew schedule is driven by NASA’s traditional mission-assurance process, with its lengthy reviews and milestones. This in turn is driven by continual lectures by Congress that “safety is the highest priority.” But that means that actually accomplishing things in space (such as research on potential life-saving technologies), and ending our dependence on the problematic Russians is actually a lower priority. A different way to phrase that would be, “What we are doing in human spaceflight isn’t very important.” If safety is “the highest priority,” we might as well just stay home. As is, with their almost flawless mission performance, Falcon/Dragon are probably already safer than anything we flew in the sixties, even with an untested flight-abort system. If it were important, really important, to get someone to the ISS this month, a life-support system could be quickly cobbled together and even allow crew to go on the currently scheduled cargo Dragon. The previous arguments against the safety of Commercial Crew rested on a comparison with the “reliable” Soyuz. Recent events suggest that argument no longer applies. We have no “safe” ways to head to the high frontier, and frontiers have never been safe. We have only two realistic options at this point. Abandon the ISS in which we have invested so much, for so many years, or recognize its importance and act accordingly.

But space, and accomplishing things in space, is never important to Congress, nor (apparently) is reining in the Russian bear.

What do they want instead? In the same budget in which they slash funding for commercial crew, they want to increase the budget for the Space Launch System (aka “Senate” Launch System) by a third above NASA’s request, to around $2B. As I pointed out at Ricochet Monday:

As with all else with SLS, this is programmatically insane. As I note in the video for my new Kickstarter project, adding that money to the budget will do nothing to accelerate the program, and no program manager knows what to do with a sudden half a billion dollars in the budget. Assuming this nonsense doesn’t get fixed in a conference with the Senate appropriators, it will probably be spent in the states and districts of the committee members, as desired, but in a very wasteful way.

Of course, the likelihood of fixing it just plummeted with today’s Senate mark up. And the most frustrating thing is that the vehicle is not even needed to go to Mars. The purpose of the aforementioned Kickstarter (more than half the funds have been raised, with a little less than half the time remaining, hint, hint), is to show more cost effective ways to do human spaceflight, if only Congress gives up its infatuation with unnecessary “monster” rockets. But it will likely take a new administration (as it did the last time) to set a more useful course for the nation’s space agency. It will also take a White House and Congress, that take space seriously. But based on history, we shouldn’t hold our breath.

I would note that, in light of all this, there is an update to yesterday’s Space Access Society’s legislative alert:

This is an urgent followup to yesterday’s Commercial Crew Funding Alert. This morning’s Senate Appropriations CJS Subcommittee markup of the bill that funds (among others) NASA for the fiscal year starting this October did not go well for Commercial Crew. The program was cut a further $100 million from the House Appropriation of $1 billion, itself a $244 million cut from NASA’s request. There is reportedly an amendment in the works for tomorrow’s full Senate Appropriations Committee markup to plus up the overall NASA budget by $500 million, $300 million of that to go to Commercial Crew. This amendment is a long shot. If it is to have any chance at all tomorrow, a significant show of constituent support is needed. That means you need to care enough to take ten minutes to do this: If one of your Senators is on the Appropriations Committee (check the list) and you haven’t already contacted them, we ask you urgently to contact them before Thursday morning via one of the methods described at the alert. If your Senators aren’t on the Committee, it still can be helpful to contact them. Senators do talk to each other about what they’re hearing from back home, and even if it doesn’t affect tomorrow’s markup, it can help whenever the next step takes place, consideration of the bill by the full Senate. Thanks for your time, and good luck to us all.

Yes.

[Update a while later]

Senator “Monster Rocket” Nelson responds.

[Thursday-morning update]

Full appropriations committee marked up the bill this morning, no amendments for NASA. Only way to fix this now is on the Senate floor. But at least the Soyuz had a successful landing this morning.

[Bumped]