From Reuters via The Telegraph:
"[Russian Foreign Minister Dmitry Rogozin] suggested Russia could use the station without the United States, saying: 'The Russian segment can exist independently from the American one. The U.S. one cannot.'"
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/10828964/Russia-to-ban-US-from-using-Space-Station-over-Ukraine-sanctions.html
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Tuesday, May 13, 2014
Wednesday, April 30, 2014
The known unknown, the unknown known, and the unknown unknown
In April, 1991, I came to work for Jim Sensenbrenner, a
Member of Congress from Wisconsin who just so happened to love keeping tabs on NASA.
By that December, my head down learning
orbital mechanics and the vulnerabilities of the Space Shuttle, the Soviet
Union had completely dissolved.
Surprisingly, nuclear-armed Ukraine was the first of 15
Soviet “Republics” in August, 1991, who voted to secede from the Soviet Union
in 1991, followed in alphabetical order by, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia,
Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Russia (itself),
Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.
As sure as Boris Yeltsin stood upon a tank in front of the Russian
Federation “White House” across a thoroughfare from the U.S. Embassy compound, the
end of Russian feudalism had finally come.
This was the proverbial Donald Rumsfeld “known unknown”
scenario: the collapse of the evil empire. We knew it would happen, but nobody
knew when it would happen, least of all the CIA.
NASA meanwhile was quietly ogling several inventions of the
Soviet space program, in particular the docking system that allowed Soviet
space capsules to mate autonomously with their Mir space station. Early in
1992, NASA discreetly sought the help of Congress to overcome the Bush Administration’s
reluctance to letting them “shop” for and eventually buy Soviet space hardware
that would advance America’s own cash-strapped space station program.
From February 1994 to June 1998, space shuttles made 11 flights to the Russian space station Mir. |
By August, as a reward for seizing upon their own freedom,
Congress passed the "Freedom for Russia and Emerging Eurasian Democracies and Open Markets Support Act" and signed by President Bush in October. Besides giving cash to dismantle Soviet nuclear
stockpiles and ease the conversion to market-based economics, Title VI of the FREEDOM Support Act made it legal for American companies and NASA to enter into
commercial purchases of formerly Soviet space hardware.
A great space partnership with Russia soon unfolded, first
with Shuttle docking visits to the Mir space station followed by integrating complete
“off the shelf” Russian modules into the U.S.-led space station. In addition to making Russia an indispensable
member of the space station partnership of Europe, Japan and the United States,
a variety of commercial sales envisioned by the Act and worth billions to
newly-private Russian and (notably) Ukrainian space technology enterprises went
forward, too.
Compared to 1992, when choosing the path to freedom quite literally
meant not even the sky would be the limit to America’s friendship, Russia is in
a severe retrograde orbit today.
Its seizure of the Crimean territory belonging to Ukraine
since 1954, deploying masked Russian shock troops to subvert eastern
territories of Ukraine that had voted 83-90% in 1991 for independence from Moscow, massing thousands of troops on its border, and President Vladimir Putin’s
sudden Czarist talk of “New Russia” have made a mockery of 22 years of American
friendship, partnership, investment and trade.
Since the Soviet Union collapsed, the “unknown known” has
always been the looming inevitability of a rogue in the Kremlin, like a Putin,
who would snatch the bounty of freedom’s prosperity from the people and use it
to rebuild the evil empire. We didn’t
know who, when, or how it would reveal itself, but the certainty of a neo-Soviet
Russia never went away.
With international sanctions against Russia now approaching
the space frontier, it is worth noting the International Space Station is
constructed much like Crimea. Most essential
systems for keeping astronauts safe and the space station in a controlled orbit
are Russian-made Soviet-era systems.
When NASA first proposed such obtuse reliance upon Russia, it was not lost on Congress that doing so could lead to loss of the program when U.S.-Russian
political winds changed.
Sadly, the space station agreement with Russian was negotiated
by then Vice President Albert Gore, who set aside Jim Sensenbrenner’s proposals
that any essential space station systems be U.S.-made, or failing that for
reasons of convenience, be purchased outright from Russia by U.S. companies, thus
freeing the space station of geopolitical strings.
Moreover, nobody, not even Putin, could have predicted the “unknown
unknown”— that the U.S. would ever ground its Shuttle fleet before fielding a substitute,
leaving the U.S. and its allies entirely dependent on Russian capsules for
access to the station itself.
When the space station is abandoned to Russia, perhaps in
months, we will need to thank Mr. Gore. Either
due to a boycott of resupply missions by Russia in retaliation for sanctions,
or more likely by some fanciful Kremlin declaration that says Western sanctions
inadvertently make operating it safely impossible, the space station is doomed
by an insidious political design flaw that was both foreseen and avoidable.
Labels:
Al Gore,
Congress,
NASA,
Russia,
Sensenbrenner,
Soviet Union,
space,
Vladimir Putin
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