The Buck Stops With Al Gore: Veep-Approved Rip-Off By Russia Of U.S. Taxpayer, Technology Now Threatens An American’s Life
(Washington, D.C.): The 10th
— and possibly final — major crisis to
occur on Russia’s Mir space station in
the past five years has brought into
needed focus a scandal of major
proportions. Unfortunately, it has taken
the drama of a disaster that is
jeopardizing the life of an American
astronaut and his two Russian colleagues
to precipitate widespread questions about
the wisdom of a dubious U.S.-Russian
space cooperation program that has been
personally and insistently championed by
Vice President Al Gore.
This program was addressed by the
Center for Security Policy in a February
1996 paper enumerating myriad ways in
which the Clinton Administration was
sluicing funds to Russia in support of
President Yeltsin’s then-faltering
re-election bid.
The Center observed that Vice President
Gore has, in partnership with Russian
Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, made
a number of “problematic decisions
with respect to American assistance to
Moscow’s space sector at the expense of
the United States’ interests and
Treasury.”(2)
The Decision to Put Another
American on a Dangerous Mir
Perhaps the most appalling decision of
all those taken by the Clinton-Gore team
in the interest of collaborating with
Russia in space was made last month.
Despite widespread misgivings, yet
another American — Michael Foale — was
placed on Mir when astronaut Jerry
Linenger’s 4 month-long tour came to an
end last month.
There were ample reasons for opposing
such a deployment on a space vehicle with
Mir’s recent record:
-
On 23 February 1997, a serious
fire broke out, triggered by a
chemical oxygen generator.
Although as the Washington
Times observed on 26 June
1997, at the time this incident
was “described as a minor
blaze, extinguished in 90
seconds, it actually burned for
fourteen minutes according to
astronaut Jerry Linenger who was
aboard the space station. He
compared it to the Apollo 11
blaze that killed three
astronauts on the launch pad in
1967.” -
According to Linenger, there
have been previous problems with
the docking operations on Mir.
Last March, station commander
Vasily Tsiblyev had trouble with
a faulty TV monitor at one point,
losing control of a cargo
resupply craft. (Tsiblyev also
had a close call in 1994 when a
Soyuz vehicle carrying a crew
back to earth “grazed”
one of Mir’s modules.) -
The primary oxygen generator
failed in March, according to the
Washington Post, forcing
the use of a back-up device
“of the same type that had
triggered the February
fire.” -
The Post reported
that a malfunction in Mir’s
attitude-control system also
occurred in March, causing it to
list until an alternate back-up
system was activated. -
In April, a failed cooling
device in turn caused a
break-down in a mechanism that
cleans the air in Mir’s cabin of
carbon dioxide. The crew’s
activities had to be restricted
to reduce the accumulation of
condensation. Further cooling
system leaks then caused
temperatures to rise sharply and,
in the Post‘s words,
“leaking antifreeze caused
the crew to suffer breathing
problems, allergic reactions and
swollen eyes.”
Even the cause of the present crisis
should have been anticipated from past
difficulties with the automated docking
system. James Oberg, an expert on the
Russian space program cited by
both USA Today and the Washington
Post told the Post: “The
automated docking system used in the past
was manufactured in Ukraine, which was
demanding payment in dollars from the
Russians. ‘So now [the Russians] are
testing a new all-Russian guidance
system….They’re shaving the margins. The
dice are getting more and more loaded
against us with every throw.’“
(Emphasis added.)
The choice of putting an American
astronaut in such a dangerous position
smacks of a politicized decision. It
threatens to add greatly to the already
enormous price the Clinton-Gore
Administration has been paying to prop up
the Russian space program.
Making the Lincoln Bedroom
Shakedowns Look Cheap By Comparison
According to the Washington Times,
NASA is paying Russia $400 million
through next summer for cooperative
Russian space station efforts, including
U.S. personnel use. (At roughly one
million dollars a night, this makes the
price charged for sleep-overs in the
Lincoln bedroom appear reasonable by
comparison — especially given the
increasing discomforts associated with
visits to Mir.)
The true costs, however, of the
various programmatic shifts,
reschedulings, work-arounds and
“borrowing” of funds from other
accounts (including the shuttle program)
to make whole Russia’s obligations on
joint space activities will be hard to
estimate. Sorting it out may take a team
of accountants months of sifting through
the various scams and sleights of hand
perpetrated by Mr. Gore and his
subordinates.
It is very much to be hoped that such
an inquiry will become an urgent priority
for conscientious legislators like Rep.
James Sensenbrenner, Jr. (R-WI)
— who chairs the House Science Committee
and who called, in the wake of the latest
Mir debacle, on NASA Administrator Dan
Goldin to conduct an immediate
“top-to-bottom” evaluation of
the safety of the Russian space station.
In the course of his remarks on 25
June 1997, Rep. Sensenbrenner scathingly
described the overarching financial
dimensions of the U.S.-Russian
cooperation:
“The Russians don’t want to
admit to a failure and have to
close down the Mir and lose a
huge source of hard currency. The
reasons the Mir has been kept
going five years beyond its
design capability is because it
is a huge foreign currency earner
for Russia. And a lot of that
foreign currency is dollars right
out of the U.S. taxpayers’
pockets.”
The Bottom Line
To be sure, the American people and their
elected representatives will face a
serious problem in getting to the bottom
of this story. The wired, secretive
nature of the Gore-Chernomyrdin meetings
is increasingly paralleled by what
appears to be a suborning of NASA,
leading to a systemic dissembling about
even the realities of technical
problems with the Russian space program
— to say nothing of their true
implications for programs like the
International Space Station. For example,
contrast the
“they-are-in-no-danger” line
being deployed by NASA to allay concerns
about the Mir crisis with Jerry
Linenger’s statement that “This
is a major emergency, about as serious as
you can have in space.”
The following are among the steps that
are clearly in order:
-
Account for what
Messrs. Gore and Goldin have cost
the American taxpayer to date
with their politically motivated
and ill-advised bail-outs for
Russia’s space programs and
performance shortfalls. -
Establish what it will
actually cost the U.S. taxpayer
to clean up the mess Mir now
represents. According to
USA Today, the Russian
space station “will probably
fall to earth in 4-5 years and
its orbit cuts across the world’s
most populated areas.” If
the space shuttle is required to
fly one or more missions to
dismantle and dispose of the Mir,
who will pay the $400-500 million
dollars required per shuttle
flight? Will funds that would
otherwise be earmarked for the
international space station be
diverted for this task? -
Come to grips with the
reality that the Russians are
clearly not equipped to handle
their role in preparing the
International Space Station —
a role that is currently part of
the “critical path” to
completion of this important
initiative. Immediate steps must
be taken to redesign the station
so as to ensure that it is no
longer susceptible to Russian
non-performance or extortion. For
the time being, Russia should be
scaled-back to the position of a
subcontractor. -
Act to equip the
Nation with ready, reliable and
inexpensive means of getting to
and back from space.
The present crisis underscores
the unacceptability of America’s
present limited, costly and
extremely time-consuming means of
accessing outer space. Toward
this end, an urgent effort should
be made to perfect and field a
vertical launch/vertical landing
reusable launcher that can
transform both military and
commercial uses of space.
At the end of the day, there will be
no hiding. The hundreds of millions — if
not more than a billion — of dollars and
the damage done in the process to NASA
and the U.S. space program arising from
the Gore space scam will be seen as yet
another instance of compromising the
integrity and effectiveness of an
American (and/or Western) institution in
the pursuit of a short-term and
short-sighted effort to pander to Moscow.
Other recent examples of such behavior
include the mutation of NATO with
Russia’s inclusion as a de facto
member and the explicit inclusion of
Russia in virtually all activities of the
G-7 and its formal membership into the
Paris Club and OECD.
What puts Mr. Gore’s folly with respect
to space cooperation in a class by
itself, however, is the fact that it has
very clearly put American lives in
jeopardy.
– 30 –
1. See the Center’s
Decision Brief entitled Clinton’s
Political Fundraising for Yeltsin Will
Entail High Costs for U.S. Taxpayers and
Interests (
9 February 1996).
2. These have
included:
- granting the Kremlin
greatly increased numbers of
launches of U.S. payloads — up
to 20 launches per year versus
the 8 it has previously been
allowed. This
arrangement has enabled Moscow to
make further inroads into the
Western commercial space launch
market by the heavily subsidized
(and, therefore, cut-rate)
services of what still amount in
this sector to command economies. - While American satellite
manufacturers expect to obtain a
short-term benefit from such
inexpensive launch opportunities,
the longer-term effect will be to
erode further the viability of
the U.S. commercial launch
industry. Even more worrisome
than the as-yet-undefined hard
currency windfall this deal
represents for a Russian industry
thoroughly embedded in the old
Soviet military-industrial
complex is the fact that the
Clinton Administration is so
blithely sacrificing capabilities
that may be essential to
America’s strategically vital
access to space. - Vice President Gore
offered — apparently without
congressional consultation, to
say nothing of approval — to
assume responsibility for
shuttle-launching at least three
payloads that Russia was supposed
to put into orbit as part of its
contribution to building the
international space station.
In so doing, the United States
bought into a total of nine joint
missions through 1998.
3. See the
Center’s recent papers on these subjects
entitled ‘Founding Act’ Or
‘Final Act’ For NATO? (
May 1997) and First, Clinton
Mutates NATO; Now, the G-7: Why Denver
Should Be The First — And Last —
‘Summit of the Eight’ (
June 1997).
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