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	Disaster May Be a Year Away if Crew Abandons Outpost By John Kelly and Todd Halvorson posted: 12:14 pm ET 07 June 2004

CAPE CANAVERAL -- Evacuation is the ultimate backup plan for the safety of an International Space Station crew

CAPE CANAVERAL -- Evacuation is the ultimate backup plan for the safety of an International Space Station crew.

Crews can board a Russian Soyuz space capsule -- the station's lifeboat -- and return to the Earth on short notice.

But that's not something NASA and its 15 international partners want to do. Studies reveal a 50 percent chance the station would be destroyed in the course of a year with no crew on board to handle problems. And falling pieces of the space station could pose danger on Earth.

Senior NASA managers said they would not hesitate to order a crew to bail out.

"If you've got to bring them down, you bring them down," NASA Safety Chief Bryan O'Connor said.

Decision-makers don't want to put the station at increased risk unless absolutely necessary. Sixteen nations are contributing $100 billion to the project, though the United States is shouldering more than half the cost. Beyond the money, however, station partners stress the importance of maintaining a permanent human presence in space.

If a micrometeorite punched a small hole in the station's hull, a crew could stop the air leak. With no crew aboard, all air could be sucked out, and the resulting depressurization could prompt a cascade of failures that could destroy the outpost.

Richard Blomberg, a former chairman of NASA's independent Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, said the escape option gives managers leeway to take more time to try to fix or work around glitchy systems -- as long as they don't wait too long.

"If you line all of the problems up and say you've got a higher risk of losing the mission, but the crew is safe, then you can live with that," Blomberg said.

But another former safety panel member said station managers have an even bigger concern: possibly losing control of the station. It could plunge through the atmosphere, and large fragments could land in populated areas.

Arthur Zygielbaum said station engineers raised the issue shortly after the Columbia accident, at a time when NASA and its partners were trying to decide whether to abandon the station or cut the crew to two.

"If it came down near a major city, there are some large chunks that would survive," he said. "That's a safety concern for people on the ground

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