WASHINGTON -- NASA International Space Station (ISS) officials are making plans for keeping the orbital outpost occupied in the event that the space shuttle fleet remains grounded for months to come.
"There is a lot of contingency planning going on on the ground for keeping people safely on board," Michael Kostelnik, NASA program executive officer for space shuttle and the international space station, said during a briefing at the U.S. space agency's headquarters here Feb. 4.
Kostelnick said that with Tuesday's successful docking of the Progress cargo ship, the two astronauts and one cosmonaut working at the space station have enough supplies to stay aboard through June. He also reiterated that the Soyuz docked at the station could bring the full crew home at any time.
Kostelnik said a fresh Soyuz would be launched to the space station in April as planned. As part of its role in the ISS, Russia launches several Progress ships and two Soyuz capsules to the station a year. A Soyuz is always docked at the station to serve as a crew lifeboat.
Because the Soyuz is only certified for a six-month stay on orbit, they must be swapped out twice a year. Normally, two cosmonauts deliver a new Soyuz to the station in what has come to be called a taxi mission and return to Earth in the "old" Soyuz several days later. Since 2001, two so-called space tourists -- American Dennis Tito and South African Mark Shuttleworth -- have paid the Russian company that builds the Soyuz about $12 million a piece to travel to the station in the capsule's third seat.
Kostelnik said that additional Soyuz could be used to keep the station continuously occupied if the rest of the shuttle fleet remains grounded beyond June.
How NASA and its international partners proceed, he said, depends a lot on what the Columbia investigation discovers.
"Obviously we will be looking over the next few months, trying to get a sense of when we will be able to get this problem recovered, the problem fixed, the shuttle fleet back on line and supporting assembly," he said. "In the interim we do have other international partner assets -- the Soyuz vehicle, Progress vehicles for re-supply -- that could be beneficial. So we will be looking at options as we get into spring for ways to perhaps swap out the crews."
Kostelnik also fielded questions from reporters about the pace of the investigation into the loss of Columbia and recent reports of debris in California and Arizona but largely referred detailed technical questions to Ron Dittemore, space shuttle program manager, who has been conducting daily briefings from the Johnson Space Center in Houston.
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