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.

While Mr. Gore was fighting for Russia’s space sovereignty against the pleas of U.S. lawmakers, one imagines Vladimir Putin quietly sharpening his fingernails in Lubyanka, thinking about the known unknown, the unknown known, and the unknown unknown.