Accessory to War
Page 41
Struggles also arose on other fronts. With the sudden end of the Soviet Union, Europe and Russia considered building a joint space station, but the United States decreed that Russia would become a partner in America’s space station. China has repeatedly been frozen out of participation. Cost overruns far in excess of the absurdly low early estimates caused components to be canceled and even threatened an early miscarriage of the project as a whole. And, of course, terrestrial politics acts as a permanent irritant. On the other hand, little things like dinnertime on the station—when Russians have been known to exchange their savory canned stews for American ice cream—regularly elicits a positive renewal of international relations.77
Back in the 1950s, American talk of a space station was heavily infused with inflammatory language. Conceived as a laboratory and weapons platform, it would be constructed as a strictly national asset. The first nation to build it would assuredly control all of Earth. US space superiority would be the only acceptable state of affairs. That vision was superbly conveyed in a popular 1952–54 eight-part Collier’s magazine series on the conquest of space, based on several workshops hosted by New York City’s Hayden Planetarium that brought together engineers, scientists, artists, futurists, and journalists. It wasn’t mainly pie-in-the-sky space enthusiasm, though. Rocket scientist supreme Wernher von Braun shaped much of the content. William E. Burrows notes that the series also includes “one of the earliest and most influential examples of boilerplate cold war space rhetoric.” Although these dramatically illustrated articles amounted to the public’s first glimpse at their spacefaring future, including trips to the Moon, Mars, and beyond, they were also seasoned with fearmongering:
A ruthless foe established on a space station could actually subjugate the peoples of the world. Sweeping around the earth in a fixed orbit, like a second moon, this man-made island in the heavens could be used as a platform from which to launch guided missiles. Armed with atomic warheads, radar-controlled projectiles could be aimed at any target on the earth’s surface with devastating accuracy.
The initial Soviet concept for a space station was only somewhat less terrifying than the American one. It was to have space for three cosmonauts, remote-sensing capabilities, capsules for sending imagery down to Earth, and a defensive cannon for use against an American attack.78 Fortunately, both sides eventually set aside their plans for a death-dealing version of a space station.
Enter President Ronald Reagan. Halfway through his January 1984 State of the Union speech, in which the words “free” or “freedom” occur twenty-five times, Reagan told Congress,
Tonight, I am directing NASA to develop a permanently manned space station and to do it within a decade.
A space station will permit quantum leaps in our research in science, communications, in metals, and in lifesaving medicines which could be manufactured only in space. We want our friends to help us meet these challenges and share in their benefits. NASA will invite other countries to participate so we can strengthen peace, build prosperity, and expand freedom for all who share our goals.79
It was to be an American-run project with some input from selected subordinates—not a partnership of equals. Proposed at a time of escalated Cold War tensions, it was at least partly motivated by an ungenerous agenda; as political scientist Michael Sheehan suggests, “Reagan was trying to bankrupt the USSR, not only by re-igniting the arms race with SDI, but by re-launching the space race through the space station.”
Soon the hypothetical space station would be named Freedom. Costs would soar, Congress would protest, reports would be written, plans would be revised, likely failure rates of individual components would metastasize, and predicted hours required for maintenance spacewalks would mount. In 1984 the estimated price tag was $8 billion; within a couple of years the National Research Council pegged it at $28 billion. Eventually the cost in billions would reach triple digits.80
With vilification raining down on the project, NASA and its contractors promised manifold scientific benefits and tens of thousands of jobs. Following the apparent end of the Cold War, the space station acquired its straightforwardly descriptive current name. The first component launched into space, in November 1998, was the Russian-built service module. The first American-built component went up early the next month. Canadarm2 joined the evolving station in 2001. The European Space Agency’s Columbus laboratory linked up in February 2008, followed in March by the first segment of Japan’s Kibo laboratory. More than once, Russia was bailed out by the United States so that it could deliver its agreed contributions. Today an elaborate web of intergovernmental agreements, memoranda of understanding, utilization rights, intellectual property rights, barter agreements, subcontracts, liability conventions, and public-relations campaigns more or less govern what takes place on, to, from, and around the International Space Station. Animating all that complexity, opines Joan Johnson-Freese, has been a two-pronged American agenda of nonproliferation and job creation. “If it had not been for domestic jobs and international politics,” she wrote in 2007, “there would be no ISS.”81
Truth be told, a number of people—including notable American scientists—would prefer that there be no ISS. They want space science, not space hardware, and especially not astronauts housekeeping the hardware.
In September 2007 Stephen Weinberg, a Nobel laureate in physics, declared during a workshop at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, “The International Space Station is an orbital turkey.” And that was just a warm-up. He went on to say,
No important science has come out of it. I could almost say no science has come out of it. And I would go beyond that and say that the whole manned spaceflight program, which is so enormously expensive, has produced nothing of scientific value.
This is at the same time that NASA’s budget is increasing, with the increase being driven by what I see on the part of the president and the administrators of NASA as an infantile fixation on putting people into space.82
These sentiments, held by many accomplished academics who were in fact deeply influenced in childhood by the manned missions to the Moon, is neither new nor recent. A similar dissatisfaction with the back-burnering of science is evident in an impassioned, frustrated resignation letter from Donald U. Wise, chief scientist and deputy director of the Apollo Lunar Exploration Office, sent to NASA Associate Administrator Homer Newell in August 1969, just one month after Apollo 11 returned safely to Earth:
I came to the Agency because the scientific advisory boards to NASA on which I sat seemed to have little influence on the manned lunar program. After working inside the system to give science a more effective voice, I became convinced that the system was equally refractory to internal scientific advice. . . .
Until such time as the Administrator, together with the Associate Administrators, determines that science is a major function of manned space flight and is to be supported with adequate manpower and funds, any other scientist in my vacated position would also be likely to expend his time futilely.83
Some forty years separate those two critiques. Yet during that entire time, science averaged about 25 percent of NASA’s budget, despite considerable variance from year to year. Two things are certain: when NASA is healthy and well-funded, so too is the agency’s science portfolio; and money not spent on the International Space Station does not automatically flow into the science budget. Given the Cold War underpinnings of NASA’s very existence, no astrophysicist should see NASA as our personal science-funding agency. We are the wagging tail on a large geostrategic dog, which makes decisions without direct reference to the desires of astrophysicists. Hegemony drives science because science piggybacks on geopolitics.
Collaboration and its slightly less demanding cousin, cooperation, are fundamentally hard to achieve. If achieved, they can then be stonewalled, unembraced, sabotaged, or used as a bargaining chip, which, for the ISS, could threaten its image, mandate, operability, and life span. For the United States, official manager and “
hegemonic partner”84 of the space station, to collaborate or not to collaborate is a highly politicized question. And usually the questioning involves either Russia or China.
On the morning of April 2, 2014, two weeks after Russia’s annexation of Crimea, NASA issued an internal memo stating that the agency was suspending “all NASA contacts with Russian Government representatives.” This struck some commentators as a risky move, because Russia could simply cut off US access to the Soyuz shuttle service, which had been the United States’ only way of reaching the space station following the shutdown of its own shuttle program. Later that same day came another statement: “NASA and Roscosmos will, however, continue to work together to maintain safe and continuous operation of the International Space Station. NASA is laser focused on a plan to return human spaceflight launches to American soil, and end our reliance on Russia to get into space.” Soon the United States and the European Union levied a range of sanctions against Russia, including the supply of certain high-tech US components important to Russian industry.
In mid-May 2014 Russia retaliated. Prior to this freeze, the United States had planned to keep the ISS operating until 2024, four years longer than the previously agreed mission end of 2020. Now Russia’s deputy prime minister announced that his country would not only not collaborate on the ISS past 2020 but would also, in certain instances, stop exports of Russian rocket engines to the United States—a potentially crippling move that would ensure Russian space dominance in decades to come.
US Atlas III and Atlas V rockets use Russian-made RD-180 engines. US Antares rockets use Russian-made RD-181 engines. Dozens of important US missions, from deep-space probes such as the Mars Curiosity rover to spy satellites and early-warning satellites—as well as ISS cargo shipments—were boosted to their destinations by Atlas or Antares rockets. US military reliance on Russian rocket engines had become a dependency, a collaboration of sorts: United Launch Alliance, a partnership of Lockheed Martin and Boeing that in 2014 held a near-monopoly on launching US military satellites, manufactures the Atlas V rocket. Under the letter of Russia’s new export restrictions, only rockets for military launches would be prohibited. But in practice it would become hard for the United States to import any rocket engines at all.
Congress responded to the 2014 Russian engine ban with an engine ban of its own. Although the ban was lifted in December 2015, certain members of Congress continued to press for its reinstatement. As of early 2016, according to the website NASASpaceflight.com, those who contended that Congress was “placing Russia’s economy ahead of U.S. military and national security interests” were decrying those who wanted to guarantee “launch-market redundancies” until a US-made successor to the Atlas V’s engine was truly ready for prime time. The pro-ban forces lost. By the end of 2016, Russian sales of rocket engines were back on track. TASS, the Russian news agency, announced that Russia would be delivering nineteen engines to the United States in 2017, pointing out that “the US Congress [had] imposed a ban on the use of these engines after 2019 amid deteriorating relations with Russia but later lifted it when it became clear that the United States would be unable to develop engines of its own in the next three years.” All those threats, counterthreats, accusations, and grandstanding served only to temporarily rattle a billion-dollar agreement signed twenty years earlier for delivery of 101 RD-180 engines.
As for US–Russian issues around the ISS, the grandstanding has come to naught there, too. Russia’s threat in 2014 to cease collaboration as of 2020 would have meant, in practice, that the United States would have to abandon its own part of the station. Why? Because the Russian part (specifically the service module Zvezda) includes systems used by the entire spacecraft, notably for life-support functions such as cooling, dehumidifying, and separating oxygen from water. Back in 2014, Russia’s straight-talking deputy prime minister had said, “The Russian segment can exist independently from the American one. The U.S. one cannot.” By the following year, as space journalist Anatoly Zak writes, “cooler heads in Moscow prevailed.” Russia would stick with the ISS collaboration all the way through 2024.85
At no point during all these tensions did Russia stop ferrying astronauts to and from the ISS via its Soyuz capsule. Maybe, just maybe, it’s because NASA pays Roscosmos $82 million per seat for a round trip in 2018, up from $21 million in 2006.86
As the world’s most ambitious space power, the People’s Republic of China presents the United States of America with unique conundrums. To policymakers who are committed to American global dominance, China is an adversary, a threat—not an ally or potential partner. Collaboration, in their view, is unwise.
China is the twenty-first-century economic powerhouse. For 2016, the World Bank ranked China number one in a nuanced version of gross domestic product (GDP), based not simply on the total market value of all the country’s goods and services but on the relative purchasing power of its currency. By that measure, the United States ranked number two. The economic fallout is telling. For eight years, until it began to dump US Treasury bonds in late 2016, China was the USA’s biggest foreign creditor. In 2017 the United States ran a balance-of-trade deficit—far more imports than exports—of $375 billion with China, exceeding the $350 billion racked up in 2016.87
As for space power, Joan Johnson-Freese contends that “the potential for China as a peer competitor to the United States is a consistent concern of those who view zero-sum competition as inevitable.” Michael Sheehan contends that China “has no reason to accept America’s self-appointed hegemonic dominance of space” and has “sought to negate it through a policy of encouraging multipolar modifications to the international space regime.” The 2016 annual Department of Defense report on Chinese military capabilities states that although during 2015, “China demonstrated a willingness to tolerate higher levels of tension in the pursuit of its interests, [it] still seeks to avoid direct and explicit conflict with the United States.” Longer-term, however, “China’s military modernization is producing capabilities that have the potential to reduce core U.S. military technological advantages.” One example of that modernization is a new branch, the Strategic Support Force, created by the People’s Liberation Army on the final day of 2015. Its focus is space, cyber, and electronic warfare capabilities. Another aspect of the modernization, according to the 2017 version of the report, is China’s increasing interest in missions beyond its periphery, including power projection, disaster relief, and the building of foreign bases. China’s leaders, states the report, now seek stable relations and want to be seen as pursuing policies of peaceful development. But China is also increasingly assertive and “sees the United States as the dominant regional and global actor with the greatest potential either to support or disrupt China’s rise.” As for the Strategic Support Force, it’s going great guns on counterspace capabilities, the manufacture of spacecraft and space launch vehicles, human spaceflight, and the in-space assembly of its very own space station.88
Unlike Europe, the United States has persistently opposed Chinese participation in the International Space Station. In the early days of space station planning, before China was seen as a real or imagined threat to US space dominance, the denunciation of Chinese human-rights violations was an easy way to exclude the People’s Republic from America’s space sandbox. The year the Berlin Wall fell, 1989, was also the year of the student-led Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing, which snared global headlines, ended with the shooting of both students and workers, and engendered an international outcry. The noisier the professed outrage against “Red China” and the cruelties of Tiananmen Square, the less likely became any invitation to participate in the ISS. Yet during the next decade, as space writer Brian Harvey recounts, “China made several pitches to join the ISS project, dropping heavy hints to visiting journalists and officials of other space programs, especially the Europeans.” The US response was “an uncompromising brush-off.”
That brush-off stemmed from the Cox Committee in the House of Represent
atives. Formed in 1998, the committee was driven by US readiness to view China as a malicious global actor. Its mandate was to investigate “any transfers of technology, information, advice, goods, or services that may have contributed” to the improvement of China’s weaponry or intelligence capabilities. Its approach had the flavor of 1950s-style McCarthyism.
Johnson-Freese calls the Cox Committee’s efforts “melodramatic,” “sensational,” “technically challenged and politically trumped-up.” “Seemingly overnight,” she writes, communication satellites “were described as threats to U.S. national security,” and “as dual-use technology, [they] became subject to the same government controls as military satellites, tanks, or guns, for purposes of sale overseas.” No longer was civilian space technology impressive, multipurpose engineering. Now it was potential armaments, subject to AECA, the Arms Export Control Act; USML, the US Munitions List, and its definitions of sensitive US technology; COCOM, the Coordinating Committee on Multilateral Export Controls; the Wassenaar Arrangement on Export Controls for Conventional Weapons and Dual-Use Goods and Technologies; and especially to ITAR, the International Traffic in Arms Regulations, which, when broadly implemented, thwarted the free exchange of scientific and technological ideas in the name of national security. A curious portfolio of political posturing, given that various other countries, aided by US efforts that had begun in the 1960s, were quite capable of producing that technology by the 1990s, and large swaths of relevant engineering advances were already in the public domain.89