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Sunday Morning News

What's Next For International Space Station?

Aired May 21, 2000 - 8:18 a.m. ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: As we told you, the Space Shuttle Atlantis and the International Space Station are linked this morning. The seven member crew will spend five and a half days attached to the station making some critical repairs. But fixing the $60 billion space station project is another matter entirely. Years behind schedule, billions over budget, the ISS is sending out an SOS. A congressional critic is calling the 16-nation effort a mess.

So what's next for the project? For some answers we turn to space policy analyst John Pike of the Federation of American Scientists. Good morning, John.

JOHN PIKE, FEDERATION OF AMERICAN SCIENTISTS: Good morning, Miles.

O'BRIEN: What is next for the ISS and how big is the mess?

PIKE: Well, the mess is, at this point, just normal in the sense that all space projects take longer, do less and cost more than they're originally planned. The space station has been unusual troubled, of course, because it started out as a Cold War project competing with the Soviet Union. It's turned into a project of cooperating with the Russians and now it looks like the Russians and the Americans may be having some second thoughts about that political cooperation.

But this project's been underway for almost 15 years now and surprisingly enough, they're only a few months away from getting a crew up there permanently.

O'BRIEN: Well, let's take a look at this key Russian peace, the so-called service module which is still on the ground at the Bikanor Cosmadrome (ph) in Kazakhstan. It's now two years behind schedule and it is a linchpin of the space station. Without it, further construction cannot proceed. What do you hear? Is it likely to be launched in July, as the Russians have promised?

PIKE: Well, there's one key flight that has to take place before that. Part of the delay has been that the Russians were just working slow on the hardware. The other part of the delay has been the launch vehicle that they're going to use suffered some failures and they want to have one more flight of that proton booster before they trust this very critical piece of hardware to it. Assuming that test flight goes OK, I think they actually are going to get this thing finally launched in early July and maybe we're going to have Russians and Americans permanently on the space station by October. But that's a lot of ifs between now and the end of the year.

O'BRIEN: A lot of ifs, indeed. It's very easy to blame the Russians in all of this for all the delays, but while the Russians have been busy trying to get the rubles together to build the service module and fix their proton rockets, as you alluded to, the U.S. side has been falling behind on their hardware development. Is, if the Russians had been ready earlier, would the U.S. side have been ready?

PIKE: Well, I think that there's more than enough blame to go around here for the delays. Undoubtedly there were certainly some Boeing engineers who breathed a sigh of relief that the Russians were taking the heat for the delay. Boeing's the prime contractor on the American side. Not surprisingly, as with any big complicated high tech construction project, they've had cost overruns and delays as well.

O'BRIEN: You know, when it was first announced seven years ago by the Clinton administration, this unprecedented 16 nation partnership, the U.S. and Russians leading the way, was billed as a way to share costs and thus reduce the burden to the individual countries' taxpayers. Just the contrary has occurred, hasn't it?

PIKE: Well, the cost reduction was certainly one of the rationales. Frankly, I never believed that. It was also a way, I think, of continuing piloted space flight which was really in danger of cancellation with the end of the cold war and it was a way of keeping Russian rocket scientists in Russia and out of countries like Iran and by and large that part of the policy has succeeded.

We haven't saved money on the space station itself but it has had some other benefits that thus far have made it politically successful.

O'BRIEN: Well, and I suppose those other goals are worthy goals unto themselves separate from the cost issues, but I think many people in the American public are left with the question why? Why are we building a space station? For what purpose?

PIKE: Well, I think that we're doing it for several reasons. One of them is to explore as American and right now the space station is on that frontier. It demonstrates that the cold war is over, we're working with the Russians, and it's also laying the foundation for going further in space, eventually sending humans to Mars to look for life there.

O'BRIEN: John Pike is with the Federation of American Scientists. He looks at space issues for them. Thanks for being with us on CNN SUNDAY MORNING.

PIKE: Thank you.

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