NASA's Russian Payload

...Now the GAO estimates that space station delays are costing U.S...

...We could back away...and we could give the nationalists a self-fulfilling prophecy that will be a disaster to this world—or we can choose to try and support the flicker of democracy in Russia...

...The man, a high official in his country's space program, had approached me inside the employee cafeteria at the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas...

...Says O'Connor, who played a leading role in those negotiations, "Our conclusion was that we could do everything we needed in four flights...

...Three days later, at the Vancouver Summit, Clinton and Yeltsin agreed to the proposal, and officials in both countries were told to "make it happen...

...And when rocket problems occur—such as the failure of a Zenit booster with a spy satellite in May of 1997, which threatened some commercial flights planned for later this year—American rocket engineers have taken part in the accident investigations...

...When one of the mansion-owning officials, General Yuri Glazkov, visited Texas in early 1997, Harris was ready...

...It was the Russians who told the White House that the Indian deal would have resulted in their making several hundred million dollars profit (other observers considered that number highly inflated...

...Miscellaneous hardware purchases and extension of the Mir visits added another $100 million in U.S...

...zo million in sales of the Yamal communications satellite to a Russian bank...

...taxpayer one penny more—in fact I believe it will save us billions...

...They give me a pile of cash for the payroll," he began...

...Visitors to Russia's Russian reconnaissance, early-warning, and military communications satellites can be launched reliably from the same launching pads refurbished by U.S...

...They would develop a new heavy-class robot supply vehicle to support the new station...

...When Harris's report appeared on "Nightline" a few months later, a NASA spokeswoman gave the agency's official position on the mansions: "What Russia does with their own money is none of our business...

...Second, the alleged practical justifications for the partnership—that it would save money and time—were ludicrous from the start...

...Shown stills from the video, he kept up his bluff: "I don't know anything about it...

...Only now is the American public catching on...

...businesses as well...

...if NASA was going to pay the Russians $400 million, they evidently wanted it to look like they were getting $400 million worth of dockings, even if they had to halve the shuttle science flight program to do it...

...If six more shuffle launches were diverted to docking with Mir, their original science payloads would have to be canceled...

...their missions circled the Earth with a much steeper north-south range of 52 degrees...

...NASA's Goldin responded to the GAO report in a statement issued June 24: "The fact is every nickel is accounted for in the NASA budget, and Russian cooperation will not cost the U.S...

...zo million in sales of a commercial third stage used on "Proton" rockets for Western satellites...

...According to Aviation Week, they have provided crucial insights into solving and fixing some of these technical problems to clear the way for resumed commercial and military Russian space launchings...

...So in order to allow the Russians access to the new space station, NASA shifted its planned orbit northward...

...V 44 August 1998 • The American Spectator "Baykonur Cosmodrome" in newly independent Kazakhstan report on how tens of millions of dollars of commercial launch funds have totally rebuilt the payload processing and fueling facilities, as well as the equipment at launch pads and control bunkers...

...Omitting the shuffle costs also made possible the biggest budget deception of the ISS program: hiding the expense of changing the station's orbit...

...But many outside experts assumed that the linkage was direct...

...I didn't know where that idea came from...

...government, but from U.S...

...In Space News, Andrew Lawler reported that a NASA source told him, "We are just a pawn of the State Department," and that American diplomats were more concerned with political benefits than technical merits...

...Defense, State, and even Commerce Department officials, worried that India might be using hydrogen-fueled rocket engines in building surface-to-surface military missiles, had lobbied for two years against Russia's sale of the enabling technology...

...On paper, it was an impressive collection of hardware, and it looked like a bargain—if the Russian promises were to be believed...

...news media...

...Highly restrictive new badging procedures were immediately implemented for journalists, to make sure no visiting Russian space official ever had to go through such an ordeal again...

...The money's misappropriation has led to several trials...

...The administration thus echoed the comments made by the NASA spokeswoman when confronted with the evidence of massive space industry corruption: "What Russia does with their own money is none of our business...

...In 1992, President Bush mentioned the possibility of space cooperation in written testimony to Congress...

...It was agreed that they would host a series of practice space shuttle dockings to their Mir space station, where a few American astronauts would stay for months-long expeditions, and that NASA would pay for this service...

...With the extension of Mir manned operations, this opportunity for a useful joint experiment evaporated...

...At an esti42 August 199 8 The American Spectator mated half a billion dollars per flight, taking the Russians into the partnership will cost $20 billion...

...Over the planned 20-year life of the ISS, NASA expects to fly about 120 shuttle missions to it...

...Under protective cover of the government-to-government agreements in early 1993, a number of commercial space cooperative programs were also launched...

...Ironically, other efforts to justify the cost of the program only made it more expensive...

...For years, NASA had promised it had workable alternative plans for Space Station assembly and operations, in case the Russians reneged on The American Spectator • August 1998 their promises...

...diplomatic goals," the NASA official continued...

...But in that case, operational costs would have been charged to another program, whose cancellation to fly Mir missions was one more hidden cost of the Russian partnership...

...On top of this $400 million was another $200 million to pay for the first Russian-built space station module, the "FGB," in return for the right to call it an "American launch...

...40 August 1998 • The American Spectator and vice president, who were about to meet Boris Yeltsin for the first time...

...Fuhrman, the former House Space Subcommittee aide, recalls congressmen's frustration upon suddenly discovering that the Russian Space Agency was bankrupt, despite $loo million in NASA funds flowing into the RSA's New York bank account every year...

...Russian participation] should help us sell it"" The formal 7oo-page U.S.-Russia space contract was signed in June of 1994 at a White House ceremony symbolizing the Clinton administration's desire to take credit for it...

...I then must call in each of my employees one at a time," the official continues, "and we negotiate over how much money they really need to get by in the next two weeks...

...Agreements established without addressing these issues would be premature," he warned, "and could present problems during future negotiations, or result in a configuration that is complex to assemble and costly to operate...

...They would deliver a string of Soyuz manned space capsules to provide emergency-landing capabilities for the station crew...

...On May 25, Newsweek reported on the findings of Yevgeniya Albats, a highly respected Russian journalist and an expert on where Soviet-era KGB and military officials have wound up...

...Given the far lower operational costs within Russia (the result of low salaries and mass production) this meant that a torrent of extra Western overpayments would begin pouring into the Russian space industry and their Western industrial partners...

...Nonetheless, NASA recently acceded to Russian insistence that this "American launch" be renamed Zarya, after a classic Soviet space vehicle...

...It's good foreign policy, and it's good space policy...

...By 1998, the five-year-old partnership had seen the transfer of more than $z billion of American money (some from NASA but most from commercial enterprises) into the Russian aerospace industry, where most of it vanished utterly without a trace...

...NASA also agreed to pay Russia for two additional Mir visits, during which the shuttle would deliver enough supplies to relieve "a significant logistics shortfall" (in Goldin's words...

...Plans for a joint space suit were canceled and the old U.S...

...support for the Russian role in the International Space Station (ISS) would play into the hands of "radical right-wing Russian space industry" officials opposed to Yeltsin's reforms...

...I don't live there...

...As with so many other cases of government mismanagement, to trace the storyline of this folly it is necessary to follow the money...

...The price tag of $400 million for the 41 Mir visits alone was otherwise inexplicable...

...The change in orbital inclination had been a feature of the original Russian merger proposal of March 1993, but NASA officials had not drawn attention to it and Congress was caught by surprise months later...

...They had no money for the Service Module or any of the follow-on modules, and the proposed heavy supply ship Progress-M2 turned out to be only a designer's fantasy...

...Many parts of the station could easily overheat or freeze in the new orbit...

...Along with my descriptions of the poor treatment of Americans in Russia, and of NASA's poor knowledge of the Russian space industry, I had reported that JAMES OBERG is a former NASA rocket scientist and an internationally recognized expert on Russian aerospace mysteries...

...America's top space official promoted the arrangement, pointing to benefits that transcended science...

...Although at first the U.S...

...After the first brief flush of warmth and comfort, you realize you're worse off than before...

...The Russians have a pungent proverb that describes this arrangement...

...What has recently been discovered about the U.S...

...He then walked off...

...Finally, the tidal wave of American dollars into the Russian space industry—more than $2 billion to date—has had the same corrupting effect that Western money has had elsewhere on the post-Soviet Russian economy...

...NASA would pay the Russians to redesign their Soyuz space capsule so that taller astronauts could fit in it (only half of the American astronauts were short enough to use the capsule...

...The president himself had become enthusiastic about cooperation with the Russians...

...The Russians, with their far northerly rocket bases, simply could not reach this orbital path due to esoteric but immutable laws of celestial mechanics...

...They asked us why we were trashing our science program to dock again and again and again with Mir...

...They had worked out the logistics for four flights, and suddenly we told them we wanted to have people on board for two years," O'Connor recalls...

...His official salary was far out of proportion to the value of the house in question...

...taxpayers at least $loo million per month...

...Russian officials valued the Indian deal at about the same amount...

...In March of 1993, Russian space officials proposed a solution to this common crisis: merging their Mir-2 program with the Freedom, which they claimed could save billions of dollars for both nations...

...spacecraft...

...They would build the ISS's first module, the FGB (a Russian abbreviation for "Functional Cargo Block"), under contract to NASA's station contractor, Boeing...

...The same Gore-Chernomyrdin Commission that had been inaugurated at the April 1993 Vancouver Summit to oversee government space cooperation was also in charge of commercial ventures...

...Its 1997 commercial earnings were placed at $350 million...

...It— is — dangerous —for you—to write — about— this subject...

...version with new modules...

...The Russians' space program, too, was facing bankruptcy...

...Even by official Russian figures, hundreds of thousands of Russian space workers have been laid off...

...11 OS THE flussiRiis our 0 rill 11 0 By say ng the Russian space ndustry from collapse, Western money—both from NASA and from the private sector—was supposed to keep otherwise-unemployed Russian rocket experts from assisting weapons development programs in rogue states around the world...

...They would finance and build the second module, called the "Service Module," based on their own embryonic Mir-2 module, to carry the station's life-support and space-maneuvering systems...

...Congress also objected to a station design that allocated critical modules to the Russians, with no backup systems on the U.S...

...These payments were based not on any serious cost-benefit analysis, but on considerations of foreign policy...

...We wanted to get something out of it...

...The Wall Street Journal noted that "Washington's decision to conclude an agreement with the Russians to implement a project to create an orbital station is the basis of an ambitious and risky strategy aimed at consolidating Russia's orientation toward reforms after the U.S...

...From the beginning, the program has stumbled over the issue of money—how much the Russians will get, where (and to whom) it will go, and how much will actually be spent on the promised services...

...H MI [11 1. SES So what has fo low ng the money revealed so far...

...the Russian asked me...

...Lame-duck NASA Administrator Dan Goldin, reportedly fearing replacement at any moment by some "Friend of Bill," responded with enthusiasm...

...NASA implemented a number of design changes to increase the shuffle's payload, but since these would have been possible no matter which orbit was aimed for, there remained a one-third penalty for the Russian-compatible flight plan...

...loo million for sales of Space Station hardware, some paid by NASA and some still owed by the Russian Space Agency...

...And it stinks...

...House space subcommittee staffers urged their White House contacts to offer expanded cooperation to the Russians as a reward for political and economic reforms...

...Little wonder, then, that despite the Western money there are still thousands of Russian former rocket scientists looking for more reliable sources of income...

...But the United States had had no leverage with Russia until the space partnership emerged...

...and Western pattern by establishing ties with its military, scientific, and industrial elite...

...The money is intended for back pay, often months in arrears, and the pay rate —perhaps $200 per month—is half of what taxi drivers earn...

...and they would develop a heavy robot supply ship called the Progress-M2, twice the size of existing models, for frequent logistics missions...

...Shortly afterwards, the Russian government fired Oleg Soskovets, since 1993 the point man for negotiating the U.S.-Russian space partnership, based on accusations of massive personal corruption...

...Shortly thereafter Goldin made the same point in more positive terms: "While there are tangible benefits to Russian cooperation, auditors cannot put a price tag on the intangible benefits of international cooperation...

...money...

...The White House told us not to interfere in the internal workings of foreign governments," Fuhrman said...

...Yet the extra science missions were canceled in favor of repetitive dockings (at least seven and "up to ten," in the official announcement...

...TV newsman Byron Harris of the ABC affiliate KFAA in Dallas, 39 Texas, had seen my articles and set off on his own investigations...

...The Russians, too, were amazed by the change...

...to invite Russia into the space station redesign effort, even though it had been Russia's idea...

...Although it was the main basis for the promised cost savings, this dependency worried many members of Congress—on both sides of the aisle...

...Third, the strategic justification that the partnership would keep the Russian space industry intact and prevent an army of unemployed Russian scientists from going to work building missiles for rogue states has proved illusory as well...

...This was partly due to the U.S...

...If NASA was going to pay the Russians $400 million, they evidently wanted it to look like they were getting $400 million worth of dockings, even if they had to cut the shuttle science flight program in half to do it...

...Science Committee chairman Sensenbrenner himself had tried to find out where the money was going, but the Clinton administration sided with the Russians...

...One agreement called for exchanging astronauts and cosmonauts in orbit...

...45...

...It is still not widely known how, just five years ago, the Russians came to be given a controlling share of the multi-modular space station, and in effect, veto power over an entire project dependent on their vehicles...

...Two years after my ambush, by which time I had published another article on the subject illustrated with a photograph of some of the mansions, the tables were turned on the Russians...

...An example of what's really happening is the Energiya Rocket and Space Corporation, which builds and operates Russia's manned space vehicles and thus will play a crucial role in the International Space Station...

...The Russians wanted to be treated as full partners, but they also insisted on being paid as contractors...

...As the Russian and his interpreter approached, Harris asked him about the funding for the costly dwellings...

...Contemporary events suggest what the rationale was...

...Pressed as to how she knew this was really Russia's own money, and not diverted assets from Western-funded programs (as is commonly believed by workers at Star City, foreign and Russian alike), the official admitted she had no idea...

...In NASA's estimate, the net savings in construction and assembly costs came to $2 billion...

...GOING OE Of 00 II M1,1 Or'ginal plans ca ed for the Freedom station to be carried up in pieces by shuffles aunching due east from Cape Canaveral, taking full advantage of the eastward rotation of the Earth...

...Taken aback, I could only say, "People I trust...

...NASA's reaction was telling: It immediately clamped down on the U.S...

...But in late 1995 the Russians confessed to NASA that many of their initial promises simply could not be fulfilled...

...There is no event that can better define the coming of the new age than we joining with Russia and actually investing in technology instead of building weapons," Goldin told the New York Times in January 1994...

...The resulting evaluation described an aging space structure prone to breakdowns, noise, and vibration, starved for power, and totally inadequate to host any visits by U.S...

...As time would tell, this outside advice was right on target, but at the time NASA and the White House refused to consider it...

...It's easy to tally up the cost of doing it the Russians' way...

...In repeated testimony before Congress, NASA agreed not to put Russia on the critical path, then proceeded to do exactly that...

...He painted a grim alternative: "If we don't do this together, then Russia goes its own way and we go our own way...

...Sometimes he has money left over at the end, sometimes he runs out before everyone is paid...

...NASA did studies of alternate billion-dollar replacement modules, but when it actually tried them in 1997, all the highly touted contingency plans turned out to be useless...

...NASA also had to sacrifice some other high-utility plans...

...The controversial thing was changing the orbital inclination of the space station...

...In April of 1997, at a briefing by the economic crimes unit of Moscow's Internal Affairs Main Administration, specialist Timur Valiulin described a wide-scale pattern of top-level corruption in the aerospace industry...

...The books were obviously cooked...

...and their plans for a Mir-2 space station were also threatened...

...This was a charade...

...Fourth, the partnership has preserved the Russian space industry from total collapse and has enhanced both Russian civil and military space capabilities...

...We knew the administration wanted to send money to Russia," retired NASA official (and former astronaut) Bryan O'Connor told me not long ago, "but not just as sending dollars...

...NASA officials say this is legitimate since the shuttle flights, which come from another part of their budget, would have occurred anyway...

...Democratic Senator Barbara Mikulski told Goldin that Russia's role should be "enhancing" but not "enabling...

...Once the actual figure was set, the next step was to get enough services from Russia to make the price seem justified...

...THE Bbt CMS HE As envisioned in early 1994, before the signing of the partnership agreement, the Russians' contribution would be extensive...

...Eventually the Russians also began to acknowledge the out-of-control corruption within their space industry...

...payments, bringing the total NASA cash transfer to Russia to $7oo million...

...Confronted with the claim that he did, and that one particular house was in fact his, he changed tack: "This has nothing to do with the space program, and I don't want to talk about it...

...Recently, after more delays in funding their promised contributions to the International Space Station, Russian officials even claimed they didn't have enough money to safely dispose of the 12o-ton Mir space complex...

...The Cold War is over, and cooperation with the Russians demonstrates that former adversaries can join forces in a peaceful pursuit which will generate tremendous benefits for both nations...

...The Russians thought very highly of the science we were getting from the Spacelab flights, they had the highest praise for it...

...As most of it disappears (presumably diverted into private bank accounts), some current apparatchiks and officials become "bought friends" of the United States, but many thousands more come to feel insulted and resentful...

...In exchange for this expansion of the original contract (and the infusion of much-needed American cash), the Russians made a series of new promises: They would keep on schedule for their own modules, especially the FGB and the Service Module (April 1998 was the goal...

...NASA's experts recommended against any use of Mir for U.S...

...Another case involves $100's of millions paid by Germany to house former occupying troops withdrawn to Russia...

...But at that time, they were going to send the money anyway...

...THE CO The Russians ob ained money not only from the U.S...

...Although NASA publicly continued to express confidence in its Russian partners, in private NASA knew better, conducting contingency studies to anticipate Service Module delays of up to 24 months...

...This influx has largely restored many key components of the Russian space infrastructure, which had been deteriorating in the immediate post-Soviet years...

...such a design was "politically unacceptable to the administration...

...He called the case "merely an individual fact in a series of such outrages...

...Other deals saw the Russians selling their rocket engine designs to be incorporated in upgraded American launch vehicles...

...Gore uncritically accepted this rationale for the awkward northern orbit, but as it turns out, NASA has not funded any significant scientific research for the space station except a small instrument for watching sunrises and sunsets—which could just as easily have been hooked to an unmanned satellite...

...The American Spectator • August 1998 By this time, and considering such rhetoric, outside observers had developed a good idea about the actual purposes of the Russian space partnership...

...space cooperation with China may be only a sideshow to Russia...

...A prime instance was the excessive number of shuffle-Mir dockings prior to assembly of the space station...

...In June 1994, President Clinton assured Congress in writing that the agency would "maintain in-line autonomous U.S...

...And NASA's Goldin went along with pretending the Russian partnership had been Clinton's idea all along...

...In particular, I had mentioned the half-million-dollar mansions for top officials at Star City, the cosmonaut training center near Moscow...

...First, the Russian proposal to combine the U.S...

...Tony Lake, the president's national security adviser, endorsed this suggestion on April 1, 1993, and that same day officials presented it to the president By 1998, the five-year old partnership had seen the transfer of more than $2 billion of American money into the Russian aerospace industry, where most of it vanished utter y without a trace...

...But there were other factors, besides mere technology, to be considered in such a decision...

...This caused a number of operational difficulties, since NASA engineers had based their designs for the station on the low-inclination orbit...

...And by mid-1993 the directive was clear: the U.S...

...Said Vice President Gore: "After years of competition in space, which symbolized the rivalry between our nations, we have now found a common destiny in cooperation and partnership, a cooperation in space which symbolizes the cooperation we are building here on Earth...

...Reportedly hooked directly into the heating and electrical power net of the cosmonaut center, these houses were being built only half a mile from the main entrance road to the base...

...NASA assured Congress that the penalties for the change would be entirely offset by developing more efficient shuttle launch hardware...

...Follow-on modules would provide more laboratory, power, and operational capabilities...

...These included equipment for propulsion and attitude control, for life support inside the station, and for a spacecraft capable of evacuating the crew when the space shuttle wasn't docked...

...and Russian space station projects was accepted enthusiastically by American space officials anxious to keep their jobs in the new Clinton administration and shrewd enough to know that it would appeal to the ideological biases of Clinton and (especially) Gore...

...Rep...

...But while traveling from Washington to Moscow in late 1993, NASA administrator Goldin told his staff to make it ten flights...

...Because of this, the shuttle's payload carrying capability fell by one-third...

...But it was no loss, since despite all the costs allegedly "saved" through the partnership, NASA found that it was running short of money and could no longer afford to develop the new "solar dynamic" system...

...Yet not a penny of this appears in NASA's official space station budget...

...shuttle suit had to under43 Once the figure was set, the next step was making the price seem justified...

...0 131 S HI-If The idea of using the Russians to assist American space operations sprang naturally from the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991...

...life support capability during all stages of Station assembly...

...money., American rocket engineers have helped clear the way for resumed commercial and military Russian space launchings...

...In private briefings for employees at NASA, managers passed on the news: "The plan is to let the Russians out of most of their promises," one manager began, according to notes from a listener...

...It is dangerous for you to write about these houses...

...Several different American aerospace corporations signed agreements with Russian space factories to market Russian rockets to launch Western satellites...

...PHYLOM JAMES OBERG ho told you about those houses...

...They asked us what was happening to all the science missions that these flights would replace...

...insisted on a fairly restrictive quota for sales of Russian rockets, American space companies soon lost their fear of Russian competition and jumped on the bandwagon...

...Russian officials realistically expect that flow to reach a billion dollars per year within two years...

...The station's orbit would consequently range between 28 degrees North and z8 degrees South latitude (i.e., an "orbital inclination" to the equator of 28 degrees...

...On April 20, 1994, Skip Johns, associate director for technology in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, speaking at a meeting of the Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee, touted the president's support for the ISS: "I'm looking at a memo of just a couple days ago and he scratched a note on it relative to the station and Russian participation and his comment is, 'Great...

...My wife is a pilot, and we have saved up all our lives for this," Glazkov explained, walking off...

...One crucial gimmick was not counting space shuffle missions in the cost of the space station...

...The scandal of the Star City mansions and NASA's non-response to it perfectly characterize the U.S.-Russian space partnership...

...I never saw any results...

...Now, unsure whether this official's message was a threat or a friendly warning, I reported the encounter to NASA security...

...Let me start by saying that this is a presidential decision and presidential policy," he told Congress on April 13, 1994, "and it is viewed to be in the interest of the United States Government to do this in the broader sense...

...Of course, any money saved by Glazkov and his wife had been wiped out by the hyper-inflation upon the collapse of the USSR...

...We were completely baffled," recalls O'Connor...

...The controversial thing was not the docking program," recalled Nick Fuhrman, then an aide to the House Subcommittee on Space...

...In July 1993, Russia became one of five states (including China) in the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR), intended to prevent the spread of missile technology to Third World nations, and agreed to stop exporting cryogenic manufacturing technology to India...

...Further, despite the growing evidence for their unreliability, the Russians must be kept in the critical path "to support U.S...

...That was a cheap and unfair trick by NASA," recalls Nick Fuhrman, "taking advantage of Gore's well-known environmental inclinations...

...The warning was brushed aside, and within months Kranz was out of a job —a lesson not lost on other officials at NASA...

...There are important real benefits for each country," he later added, "in terms of bridges of understanding that develop when we work toward common goals...

...As NASA struggled with an out-of-control design for its grandiose Freedom space station, many experts looked longingly at Russia's decades-long experience with its own series of small space stations...

...A few months earlier, the Washington Times had published one of my articles on the Russian-American space partnership...

...Even worse, shuttles heading for the station no longer could fly due east from Florida, but instead had to head off toward the northeast, losing much of the boost from Earth's eastward spin...

...About 40 of these will be needed merely to match the amount of cargo that the first 8o would have been able to carry into the old west-to-east orbit...

...By June 1994, the Government Accounting Office had written: "Most of the savings from Russian participation comes from an optimistic schedule that may not hold up...

...Advanced Russian reconnaissance, early-warning, and military communications satellites can be launched reliably from the same launching pads refurbished by U.S...

...Then the promised new heavy supply ship fell into a black hole and vanished, while Russia told NASA that it could not on its own afford to build enough smaller old-style supply ships...

...He had been to Moscow and had found a way to visit and videotape the still-growing complex of space industry mansions...

...The American Spectator • August 1998 vast amounts of Western money meant for the space program appeared to be winding up in the pockets of top officials, while ordinary workers were severely underpaid, often months late...

...A few months later, at an aerospace forum, Goldin argued that withdrawal of U.S...

...The joint space program continued, and in Moscow the construction continued of the so-called "cottages" of the "big cones" (Russian for "big wigs...

...0 SIP IMG THE STS Not everyone at NASA shared Goldin's enthusiasm for the Russian partnership...

...Only now is the American public catching on to the costs of Russian delays, diversions of space resources to the military, andwidespread corruption —all of which the Clinton administration has covered up for the sake of its foreign policy, with the complicity of the NASA hierarchy...

...demand that the Russians not undercut "world market prices" for launch services by more than 15 percent...

...On August 27, 1993, the chief of Mission Operations in Houston, Gene Kranz (the charismatic hero of the Apollo-13 crisis), sent a memo to Washington describing significant safety issues "of particular concern" to his team...

...If the schedule slips, any savings will quickly evaporate...

...side...

...must find an alternative space agreement with Russia that will be worth the same amount to them...

...It was going to mount an experimental high-efficiency solar power module on Mir at the end of its manned operations, so that the unit could be flight-tested for eventual use on the ISS...

...It's like pissing in your boot to warm your toes on a cold day...

...One senior manager at the company recently told me how he has to pay the zoo workers in his section...

...He singled out the Lavochkin Bureau, where the Mars-96 probe had been built (it crashed in November of 1996 after tens of millions of dollars of European investment), and described how the bureau's general director and one senior associate had been arrested for embezzlement prior to the probe's crash...

...Almost all non-NASA specialists rejected these claims...

...Well, trust me," he replied, speaking very carefully...

...While certainly convenient for Western customers, these upgrades have proved crucial to Russian military space programs which use the very same facilities...

...Seeing that the White House was committed to keeping the Russians aboard at any price, NASA officials never seriously considered any other possibility...

...The argument was clearly designed with one target in mind: Vice President Gore...

...Totally new state-of-the-art communications links have been installed, and an entire airport has been upgraded to all-weather 24-hour capability, to support transfer of personnel and payloads...

...5o million from investment in "Sea Launch," a plan with Boeing to launch a Ukrainian-Russian rocket from a ship in the Pacific Ocean...

...And by 1997, the Russians were annually raking in more than $600 million (some sources say $800 million) in Western commercial contracts, accounting for two-thirds of the entire cash flow into the space industry...

...diplomats insisted there was no link between Russia's cancellation of the India deal and its acceptance of a U.S...

...Over the next two weeks, on Goldin's initiative, officials at NASA, the White House, State, Defense, and Commerce developed a plan for the U.S...

...NASA justified the new orbit by pointing out that it allowed observation of more of Earth's surface (even though the agency had earlier rejected all proposals to do Earth observation research from its space station...

...We had to cross out all the numbers on our charts and replace them with the new ones...

...I count it and The American Spectator • August 1998 sign for it, and it's never enough...

...To preserve the partnership, NASA agreed to shoulder significant new burdens, including two extra shuttle flights to carry up sections of a Russian-built module called the Science Power Platform, which Russia couldn't afford to launch on its own (a billion-dollar expense for the U.S...

...NASA's claim that the Russian partnership would make the International Space Station cheaper and faster to build was based on the assumption that the Russians would provide certain modules that NASA would otherwise have to build and pay for...

...Harris asked where he had gotten the money...

...They were far too expensive for the salaries of the officials involved...

...By the time of the first Russian commercial satellite launch in April of 1996, the cash flow from abroad already accounted for about 40 percent of the actual funds received by the Russian Space Agency, up from zo percent the year before...

...They were just drooling to get on board...

...Barry Toiv, then a spokesman for the White House's Office of Management and Budget, agreed: "We are confident in our estimate" of savings due to Russian participation, Toiv said in the Houston Chronicle...

...Using their proper press credentials, the reporter and his camera crew entered the Johnson Space Center and lingered outside of administrative headquarters, where Harris had learned that Glazkov was headed for a meeting...

...I have yet to see a joint international program that saves any money," noted aerospace industry leader Norman Augustine...

...In the early days of the Clinton administration, with political support for the troubled Freedom project plummeting, NASA faced devastating budget cuts...

...space deal with an equal dollar value, though they did admit that "things came together conveniently...

...NASA workers were told that the White House had directed NASA not to consider an "all U.S...

...go major (and expensive) modifications...

...There are no such houses at Star City," Glazkov answered through his interpreter...

...That same year, Congress directed NASA to evaluate using the Mir space station (launched in 1986 for a five-year mission) as a base for American experiments...

...James Sensenbrenner, the Republican chairman of the House Science Committee, developed "critical path" terminology to argue that successful completion of the design should not depend on Russian hardware...

...In Russia, the former defense industry council that ran the space program had recently been dissolved, and its function assigned to a new civilian group called the Russian Space Agency (RSA), deliberately modeled on NASA to facilitate cooperation with the United States...

...Yet during the last ten years, Energiya has laid off more than 40,000 space workers, and it pays the remaining 22,000 engineers and technicians less than generously...

...You know about the Russian mafia...

...Military units paid as subcontractors for commercial launch support are thus also available to perform parallel military duties without having to appear on Russia's military budget...

...It was early 1995, just before the first visit of an American astronaut to the Mir space station...

...She had talked to several former rocket workers who had secretly been to Iran to work on its missile program, and one told her of receiving envelopes of badly needed cash prior to making the trip...

...That broke down to: • $16o million for foreign guests aboard Mir, mainly NASA, with some French payments...

...The corporation privatized in 1994, with the government owning 51 percent of the stock (now down to 38 percent...