. At one point they were talking about a launch in August.Now, they have brought the launch forward for two months. That means the shuttle mission that was due around late April, early May would simply go in July, assuming shuttle doesn't get grounded. The American problem was that after the Chandra launch in July the whole of the shuttle fleet got grounded until December for the Hubble repair mission.
Statistically, I like to point out that since Yuri Gagarin's launch in 1961, the Russians have only had to take three crews out of a spacecraft due to a launch delay. How many dozens of times has that happened in shuttle program alone, never mind the early Gemini days? It didn't happen on Apollo or Skylab. But certainly with Mercury and Gemini you were getting lots of delays and with the shuttle program it's routine to get at least one delay for flight.
Throughout the Mir program, once a crew has gotten on board a Soyuz it has been launched. No delays due to mechanical problems. No delays due to weather. From my point my view, the Russian launch system is far more reliable than the shuttle is.
SPACE.com: So what is behind Dan Goldin's critique of the Russian space agency last week?
CLARK: Goldin wants the Russians to get rid of Mir. They want the International Space Station to be the only space station up there. So long as Mir is up there, if something goes wrong with the International Space Station, then the Russians always have the option of going up and reviving Mir and maybe even offering that to the Europeans or Japanese.
Say there's another shuttle accident: the Russians could start occupation of Mir again.
SPACE.com: So they just don't want the competition?
CLARK: This month it's 14 years since Mir was launched and it was designed for a five-year lifetime. If Mir were an American space station, NASA would be promoting it as a major technology success.
SPACE.com: There is a meeting between Russian space officials and NASA this week regarding the International Space Station. What will happen then?
CLARK: I expect the Russians will formally say they have target date for latter part of June for launching Zvezda. NASA was only going to bring in the Interim Control Module if the Russians were going to be delaying beyond August/September time. If the Russians can get Zvezda off the pad, then there is no need for the control module.
SPACE.com: NASA is saying also that it will put up the Interim Control Module in any case.
CLARK: If Zvezda goes up this summer, why launch it? It's only going to be duplicating what Zvezda can do. We've probably got a lot going on here that's for political consumption than to do with the practicalities of spaceflight.
SPACE.com: Are relations between NASA and Russian space officials any more or less tense then they have been in say the past 10 years?
CLARK: Once you get away from political posturing, then I don't think there's any real difference. I think it's just that [in] each country, for its own domestic consumption, there is a lot of political posturing going on. One has to say that if the Americans have always been critical of the Russians' shortfalls, the Russians have never criticized American shortfalls. It's not the Russian way.
SPACE.com: Do they have more humility?
CLARK: There was a comment last year from [Anatoly] Kiselev, the head of the Russian space agency: Once we get Zvezda launched, he said, the Americans will be free to continue launching, irrespective of the Russian launch schedule; then the world will then start to see that it's not just the Russians who have launch delay problems with the space station. That is, you'll see all the delays with the American program.
SPACE.com: Do you think there is anything behind Dan Goldin's critique last week of the Russian space program regarding the "delays" in putting up the Zvezda module? Is there a larger political context behind this disaffiliation with Russia and the implied threat to push them out of the International Space Station collaboration?
CLARK: I do not think that Goldin/NASA actually wants the Russians off ISS. Certainly I believe that NASA thinks it had got everything out of the Russians in terms of experience that it needs for ISS, and perhaps on one level thinks that they no longer need the Russian expertise. (Who are the only people with years of practical space station experience and how can you put a price tag on that?) Also, NASA does have the tendency to look upon international programs as "NASA plus a few foreigners," and having another space superpower (albeit a declining one) as a partner is a new experience for NASA. Once Zvezda is launched, NASA has no need to wait for the Russians, so after that they probably don't care if any further Russian modules are launched.
On the other hand, NASA needs the Russians for 50 percent of the resident crew launches and also the supply of the Progress M-1 cargo freighters. The U.S. has no capability to get cargo and supplies up there other than expensive shuttle flights. Without the Russians, ISS would be more difficult to operate, demanding either more frequent shuttle visits just to exchange resident crew and take up fresh sandwiches, etc., or alternatively have the crews stay in orbit for longer. And as we discussed, the shuttle is not very reliable at getting up there on time.
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