[FPSPACE] article about Star City in today's New York Times

[Peter Pesavento]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/14/science/space/14star.html?_r=1
<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/14/science/space/14star.html?_r=1&oref=slogi
n&pagewanted=all> &oref=slogin&pagewanted=all

 

The Long Countdown

For U.S. Astronauts, a Russian Second Home 

By JOHN SCHWARTZ
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/john_schwartz/
index.html?inline=nyt-per> 

Published: October 13, 2008 

STAR CITY, Russia - Garrett Reisman was on his way to this formerly secret
military base for several weeks of training, making his way through
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/k/kennedy_inte
rnational_airport_nyc/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier> Kennedy Airport,
when his cellphone rang. It was his boss, Steven W. Lindsey, the head of
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/nationa
l_aeronautics_and_space_administration/index.html?inline=nyt-org> NASA's
astronaut office.

"Come back to Houston. They've canceled your training - they're playing
hardball," Mr. Reisman recalled his boss saying. He was caught in a
momentarily important dispute between NASA and the Russian space agency,
Roscosmos.

Ultimately, Mr. Reisman's aborted trip was just a bump in the road on the
way to space: he spent three months aboard the International Space Station
earlier this year, performed a spacewalk and even traded jokes over a video
link with
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/stephen_colber
t/index.html?inline=nyt-per> Stephen Colbert. 

Everyone who works with the Russian space program has similar stories to
tell of implacable bureaucrats, byzantine rules and decisions that seem
capricious at best. And many of those stories are played out here in Star
City, where cosmonauts and, now, astronauts from all over the world train to
fly on Russian Soyuz spacecraft to go to the $100 billion International
Space Station. 

Star City has become an important second home for Americans working with
their Russian counterparts, and it is about to become more important still.
During the five-year gap after NASA shuts down the space shuttle program in
2010 and the next generation of spacecraft makes its debut by 2015, Russia
will have the only ride for humans to the station.

The gap, which was planned by the Bush administration to create the next
generation of American spacecraft without significantly increasing NASA's
budget, is controversial. But it is also all but inevitable, because much of
the work to shut down the shuttles is under way, and the path to the new
Constellation craft would be hard to compress even with additional
financing. 

Those who work side by side with their Russian counterparts say that strong
relationships and mutual respect have resulted from the many years of
collaboration. And they say that whatever the broader geopolitical concerns
about relying on Russia for space transportation during the five years when
the United States cannot get to the space station on its own rockets, they
believe that the multinational partnership that built the station will hold.


"It's an amazing political achievement," Mr. Reisman said. "We've gone
through so many different administrations," not just in the United States
and Russia, but in the dozen other nations that have taken part in building
the orbiting laboratory. "It survived all of that," he said. "It's held
together, and it's only strengthened over time as we've learned to work
together."

To understand why people like Mr. Reisman believe the next 7 years can work,
it is important to understand the previous 15, when the United States and
Russia joined forces, first putting Americans aboard the Russian Mir space
station and then building the International Space Station together. That
joining of forces occurred here, at Star City. And in some ways, it did not
have an auspicious start. 

In the earliest days of the partnership, in the mid-1990s, after the Soviet
Union had crumbled and the new Russia was struggling to be born, scarcity of
supplies meant real hunger. "There was no food on the shelves at all," said
Dr. Michael Barratt, who worked among the first crews to prepare astronauts
who would serve aboard the Mir. "Five nights out of seven, we had rice and
beans." John McBrine, the current director of American operations at Star
City, lost 30 pounds during his first stint, from July to October of 1994.

Those early days were also marked by wariness and distrust, and the first
Americans had a strong impression they were being watched. Mark Bowman, an
early contract employee in Russia who is now back in Moscow as deputy
director of NASA's human space flight program in Russia, recalled a weekly
teleconference with his boss in Houston. "Thirty minutes into the call the
line would go dead," Mr. Bowman said. "And that would happen every 30
minutes."

One day during the teleconference, Mr. Bowman warned 28 minutes in that the
line was about to go dead and said testily, "I sure wish these damned
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/k/kgb/ind
ex.html?inline=nyt-org> KGB guys would get longer tapes."

"The next telecon we had," Mr. Bowman recalled, "I swear to you, it went 45
minutes and then it went dead." Apparently, he said, his hosts had upgraded
to 90-minute cassettes.

Energia, the spacecraft manufacturing company near the Mission Control
Center in Korolev, near Moscow, would not let the Americans enter its
facilities. Instead, Energia rented part of a nearby engineering college to
prepare American hardware for the station. "The heat didn't work," Mr.
Bowman said, and the winter of 1994-95 was particularly bitter, he said,
with temperatures that reached minus-30 degrees. The workers wore gloves and
parkas indoors. Delicate biological experiments designed for use inside the
climate-controlled station froze and had to be replaced. 

Energia ultimately put a heating unit into the Americans' office: workers
wrapped a wire made from a heat-resistant alloy, nichrome, around an
asbestos-covered pipe and plugged it into the wall outlet. The exposed wire
was doubly dangerous, Mr. Bowman recalled: brush up against it, and "you'd
get a zap and a burn at the same time." The glow was warning enough; no one
touched it.

Beyond the lack of creature comforts, the high level of secrecy in the
Russian program troubled Americans even more deeply. The Russians did not
fully explain in June 1997, for example, how risky an attempted manual
docking with a cargo vehicle would be for the Mir and its crew. When the
rendezvous resulted in a collision that endangered the lives of two
cosmonauts and Michael Foale, the American astronaut aboard the rickety
station at the time, the Americans were largely in the dark. 

The next seven years look brighter, and warmer. "Things have improved so
much since then," Mr. Bowman said. The Russian system has become more open,
and the level of personal comfort and convenience has improved greatly.

Instead of the unreliable telephone service of the old days, Mr. Bowman's
digital phone system can be reached as if it were a local phone on the NASA
network. "It's just as if I was at the Johnson Space Center," he said.

The American offices at Star City are in a building known as the Prophy, for
Prophylactorium, where cosmonauts lived in quarantine before flights. Today
it is called the Apollo-Soyuz Hotel, in honor of the historic rendezvous. At
least the Americans call it that, Mr. McBrine said; the Russians, he said,
"call it the Soyuz-Apollo Hotel."

NASA rents the second floor, dull offices with wood paneling and greenish
fluorescent lighting. "We're not very aesthetic here," said Mr. McBrine,
apologetically. Here translators interpret the voluminous course materials
for the astronauts - who learn Russian and take their classes in the
language - and administrative assistants schedule the vans that ferry
visitors from the airports to Star City and into Moscow. 

All told, 7 NASA civil servants, 9 American contractors and 55 Russian
contractors are working in Russia for the American space agency. A steady
stream of astronauts, flight controllers, doctors, scientists, engineers and
officials cycles through - and many of them want to be taken to see the
sights and restaurants of Moscow.

"It's a work hard, play hard environment," Mr. McBrine said, but he added
that the play used to be much harder. Tales of excess from the early days of
the American-Russian partnership are legendary; many involve the Russian
hosts urging their guests into epic rounds of vodka toasts. Over time, Mr.
McBrine said, "The novelty has kind of worn off." Instead of testing one
another's ability to handle alcohol, he said, "we've become colleagues and
great friends. There's none of that pressure anymore." 

Many of the Americans live in a set of duplexes at Star City that look a
little like suburban condominiums that have been dropped, seemingly, from
space into this Soviet landscape of brick buildings, fences and barriers.
They were designed and built to United States standards so that visitors
could, for example, plug their laptops into the wall without having to dig
around for an adapter. 

Mr. McBrine and his staff work at building a sense of community. Each day
starts in Mr. McBrine's cottage with a gathering around a large coffeepot
for Americans who are working long term or just passing through. Regular
potluck dinners are an even larger part of fighting the sense of isolation.
On any given evening, Mr. McBrine's dining room might be crowded with
American astronauts, NASA staff members, Russian cosmonauts, spacefarers
from agencies in Japan and Europe, or the occasional multimillionaire space
tourist.

At a typical dinner in April, two astronauts, Dr. Barratt and Cmdr.
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/k/scott_j_kelly/
index.html?inline=nyt-per> Scott J. Kelly, were bantering about food. Dr.
Barratt had earned raves for a homemade Thai peanut chicken dish with a
surprisingly hearty burn and excellent smoked salmon from Pike Place Fish
Market in Seattle. Commander Kelly, taking a more Jersey Guy perspective,
extolled the virtues of Jimmy Buffs, a restaurant in West Orange where the
hot dogs are loaded with onions, peppers and potatoes. "Heart attack on a
plate!" he said with pride.

Downstairs, Shep's Bar waited for them. It is a dim basement room down a
flight of rough wooden steps, with a few couches and chairs, a big-screen
television, a pool table and tired bar decorations. Duck through a low
rectangular hole in one of the room's walls and there is the gym, full of
American-made treadmills and other exercise machines.

"Shep" is William Shepherd, the first commander of the International Space
Station, who set the place up with private donations. Mr. McBrine lauds the
gathering spot as "our own little Americana," a homey place in an isolated
location. 

These days, Shep's is a sensitive subject. NASA is still stinging from a
report in 2007 that suggested astronauts may have flown while drunk. The
report referred to two incidents in anonymous accusations from flight
surgeons, and no one was found to have actually piloted a shuttle while
drunk. And nothing in the report had anything to do with Shep's Bar. But the
late-night jokes and editorial cartoons created an image of a space agency
packed with boozers, and workers like Mr. McBrine remain a bit sensitive
about reinforcing that impression by talking about their modest clubhouse. 

"You know what we do in Shep's Bar more than just about anything else?" he
asked. "Just watch movies." 

"We should really change the name to Shep's Theater," he said.

Whatever it should be called, Mr. McBrine said, it is a comfortable place to
grab a beer and kick back on a slow night. "Or a Coke," Mr. McBrine said, a
little nervously. "Or a lemonade."

Significant cultural differences remain between the Russians and Americans
here. For example, working side by side with the Russians, the Americans
say, has helped them understand the nations' approaches to safety. 

Dr. Barratt said that when he first walked the grounds of Star City, he was
surprised by how uneven the sidewalks were. At NASA, he said, "there'd be
big red placards" warning people to watch their step. And if someone did
fall, a lawsuit would soon follow. In Russia, he said, people simply watch
their step. 

The underlying point, said Mark Thiessen, the deputy to Mr. McBrine, is that
"Russians accept risk." Americans try "to eliminate risk instead of minimize
it." The American approach is laudable, he said, but not always possible,
and Americans end up more cautious than Russians. "No one is willing to say,
'I accept this risk,' " he said.

Many who write about the Russian space program focus on the impression of
creaky age that the program can give - the abandoned buildings and rust at
the launching site in Baikonur, Kazakhstan, and the fact that the basic
design of the Soyuz spacecraft has not changed in some 40 years. 

But American experts suggest that the Russians' disregard for cosmetic
perfection and development is immaterial, and that the age of the design
shows a conservative approach to the risks of space travel that has served
them well. "They spend their money where they have to," said Philip Cleary,
a former director of NASA's human space flight program in Russia. "They're
not so much worried about splashing a new coat of paint on a building if
it's not required."

The Americans insist that, appearances aside, the Russians take safety every
bit as seriously as they do. The result, several astronauts said, is that
they have confidence in the Soyuz, which is as sturdy and dependable as a
Kalashnikov rifle.

"Its inherent design is very robust," said
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/l/edward_t_lu/in
dex.html?inline=nyt-per> Edward T. Lu, an astronaut who lived aboard the
station in 2003 and now works for Google. He has flown to the space station
and returned on a Soyuz, and he brought up two recent Soyuz re-entries, in
which the capsule malfunctioned and tumbled back to Earth in a steep
"ballistic" path that subjected those inside to G-forces higher than usual.
The astronauts were safe, however, because of the simplicity and strength of
the Soyuz design.

As Capt. Mark E. Kelly, an astronaut and the twin brother of Scott Kelly,
put it, "You could throw that thing into the atmosphere like a rock," with
its orientation "sideways and backwards," and "as long as the parachute
opens, the crew is probably going to live. You can't do that with the
shuttle, as everybody knows." 

But the shuttle will soon be out of the picture. Those who are most familiar
with the nations' joint efforts in space say that the controversial pause
between American flights can go smoothly, if the politicians would only stay
out of the way. 

The Americans say they have learned a great deal about getting things done
in Russia. They know that the first answer to any request is likely to be
no, but that negotiations can often bring things around to yes. Getting to
know the people you deal with is more important than the rules. "No
agreement is better than your relationship," Dr. Barratt said.

And none of them questions the dedication of the Russian counterparts. At
the worst of the Soviet economic crisis, Dr. Barratt said, workers "were
told to go on vacation" for a couple of months so they would not have to be
paid. "They showed up at work the next day," he recalled.

Michael Foale, who has lived aboard both the Mir and the International Space
Station, said, "Russia has always seen the United States as both Enemy No. 1
and Partner No. 1." The leaders take a very long view, he said, and "they do
not play chess badly." 

The most important thing to ensure future cooperation, Dr. Foale said, is to
firm up a strategy for international cooperation in getting to the Moon, so
that Russia will have a stake in the partnership and the outcome. "We only
have to hint at a strategy, and I don't think we'll have a problem," he
said. "But we have to have a strategy."

The American workers at Star City say that on a personal level, geopolitics
simply do not matter. Mr. Thiessen said that when such issues came up in
conversation with his Russian counterparts, they would say: "That's
politics. Let the government worry about the government. We're engineers.
Let's solve this problem." 

 

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