NASA, Russia, and The Space Travel Dilemma

America's Orion Spacecraft; to launch in 2013 2014?
When the space shuttle fleet is retired in 2010, the Russian Soyuz spacecraft is supposed to be used instead, until the new American Orion ships are ready. But now that plan seems in jeopardy due to political concerns. Do we face having to expand our space program further... or even cutting it back?

Russia-Georgia conflict could affect NASA funding

WASHINGTON — Russia's military campaign in Georgia could have repercussions far beyond its borders, jeopardizing the U.S.-Russian partnership for manning the international space station over the next decade.

Lawmakers, including several from Texas, warned Friday that Moscow's air and tank attacks on its neighbor will likely prompt Congress to re-evaluate legislation allowing NASA to pay hundreds of millions of dollars for Russia to taxi astronauts to the space station.

The Soyuz spaceflights would span the five years between the shuttle's 2010 retirement and the launch of the new Orion spacecraft.

While some members predicted that Congress would eventually give NASA the go-ahead this year or next to work with Moscow's space program, others said they would rather see the retirement of the aging shuttle fleet put off a few years rather than rely on the Russians. [...]

Some people in Congress want to see our shuttle program extended, so we can avoid having to rely on the Russians for transport until our Orion spacecraft is ready (If it's completed on time, the latest estimate is September 2014. It's already been delayed one year).

The problem with extending the shuttle program would be that it's very costly, and would take money away from the building of the Orion spacecraft, causing even further delays. NASA would also like to stop using the shuttle, because of safety concerns inherent in it's design, and the age of the fleet. The Russian Soyuz spacecraft is known to be reliable, and seemed the ideal answer to the gap between the shuttle and the new Orion spacecraft. Too bad the Russian government isn't as reliable as the Soyuz.

Read the whole article for the details of the political debate. Some in congress are worried that opponents of the space program would use this as an excuse to de-fund it. Others are pushing for expanding NASA's budget to extend shuttle service AND keep the Orion spacecraft launch on schedule. I think that could be a tough sell in these budget-minded times. Yet at least the money spent wouldn't leave the country, but would be providing American's with jobs. And if the surge of the American dollar continues, that could also help economic concerns.

I think a lot is going to depend on the unfolding situation between Russia and Georgia in the coming weeks. But I don't doubt it's put a strain on NASA and their relationship with the Russian Space Agency. It's definitely dampened the enthusiasm of congress.


Orion spacecraft (right) docking at the ISS.


Related Links:

Surge for the dollar as global fears rise

Congress delays Orion Spacecraft launch date
     

The new Russia today: Is it just the old soviet KGB in charge, now unfettered by communism?

While it's great that Russia is no longer exporting a dangerous ideology, nor pointing nuclear missiles at us, things are far from jolly, and there are many reasons to be concerned.

I thought I read somewhere that Solzhenitsyn said about post-communist Russia, that the West mistakenly thinks of Russia as a "young democracy", when in fact it hasn't even become a democracy yet. That might go a long way in explaining what we are seeing there today. From Paul Jenkins, BBC News:

Russian journalism comes under fire

In April 2001, the previously independent Russian TV channel NTV was taken over by the giant Gazprom industrial conglomerate.

The protests by NTV's journalists and television employees against what they saw as the state clamping down on their freedom were dramatic and passionate.

Gazprom's replacement as chief of NTV, Boris Jordan (an American), has since been deposed, and all major television stations in Russia have been brought under state control.

TV news reports on Chechnya and President Vladimir Putin have to meet with the Kremlin's approval. Journalism is further undermined by the fact that powerful businessmen routinely commission stories in the press for cash.

[...]

The Glasnost Defence Foundation, a Russian NGO representing journalists under threat, claims that 130 journalists have been murdered in Russia since 1991. But, as Ivanov's case illustrates, proving conclusively that each and every one of them was murdered for their journalism is nigh on impossible in Russia.

Russia has more than 22,000 newspapers, but almost all are owned by pro-government or powerful business interests that constrain their reporting.

[...]

Valery Ivanov, the first murdered editor of the Togliatti Observer, wrote about the sacrifice some Russian journalists make.

"In this struggle, journalists are dying. Using every possibilities to compel independent professionals to write according to their wishes, corrupted power uses assassination," he said.

"This is the tragic price that Russian society is paying for freedom of speech and a free press."

Russia's Number One citizen, President Vladimir Putin, has a different perspective:

"Russia has never had a free media, so I don't know what I am supposed to be impeding," he said on 26 September 2003.

(bold emphasis mine) Read the whole thing for examples and case histories of murderous suppression. Shocking. True journalism has become impossible.


Without a free press to hold government accountable, what kind of government do you get? Edward Lucas at the MailOnline provides us a detailed look in his lengthy article, published in January of this year. Some excerpts follow:

Putin: the brutal despot who is dragging the West into a new Cold War

[...] The extraordinary thing is that Vladimir Putin hardly seemed worth a footnote to Russian history when the ailing Boris Yeltsin named him Prime Minister in 1999.

Few realised that the taciturn bureaucrat with a taste for judo was the harbinger of a silent putsch that would put the old KGB in charge of the Kremlin, with chilling consequences not only for Russia, but for the world.

The "siloviki" (literally "men of power"), as the spooks are called, have transformed Russia.

They took over a pluralist country with a lively Press and strong pro-Western orientation, though still reeling from the Soviet economic collapse and the looting and corruption that followed it.

Many at home and abroad hoped that a few years of heavy-handed rule by sinister strongmen would be the price of freedom and security.

They were wrong. The costs of Putin's KGB putsch have been colossal. Russia today is the epitome of bullying and crookedness.

The independent media have shrivelled, with television in particular coming almost completely under the authorities' control.

Almost every channel for complaint and dissent is blocked. Judicial and bureaucratic harassment, as well as physical threats, deter all but the bravest from speaking out. The authorities increasingly use forcible incarceration in psychiatric hospitals, the most loathsome weapon in the Soviet arsenal of repression, against their critics.

No wonder most international rankings no longer count Russia as a "free country"; no wonder they now list it as one of the most corrupt in the industrialised world.

That is a shameful retreat from the hopes of the 1990s.

Yes, living standards in Russia have soared under Putin, and most Russians believe they are living in a golden age.

This is hardly surprising, given that the price of oil - a resource the country has had in abundance - has risen some five times since Putin came to power.

And in a country where the media has been annexed for pro-Putin propaganda, is it not understandable that his regime has popular support?

In truth, Russia is being run by a corrupt, incompetent and despotic regime, and the huge windfall of high oil prices is being squandered.

Now is the time to modernise Russia, using the vast influx of petro-roubles, but there is no sign this is happening.

The oil and gas will not last for ever - their production is flat or falling and Russia is suffering power shortages; public services are a disgrace and the infrastructure pitiful.

Grand plans are everywhere: Russia says it will spend a trillion dollars on public investment projects in the coming years.

But the evidence so far is that this money is at best stolen, and at worst simply wasted.

After eight years of Mr Putin's rule, there is little improvement in roads, railways, power stations and pipelines.

Abysmal standards of public health, dangerous workplaces, endemic alcoholism and dreadful road safety make male life expectancy only 58.6 years - worse than in Laos or Yemen.

The so-called golden age is as phoney as Russia's elections that put Mr Putin and his cronies in power time after time.

When his hand-picked successor Dmitri Medvedev "wins" the presidential election next month, the nameplates on the doors may change, but the political system Mr Putin and his fellow siloviki has created will stay: impenetrable to outsiders, impervious to criticism and lubricated with vast sums of money obtained corruptly.

Mr Putin is reckoned to be worth $40 billion.

One source of this cash - though denied by all concerned - is an extraordinarily profitable Swiss-based oil trading firm that seems to have the miraculous knack of gaining almost limitless supplies of cut-price Russian crude oil to sell on the world market. [...]

(bold emphasis mine) There is much more, it's a long article, but worth reading for those who want to know more about Russia today. The author talks about the many new ways in which Russia today is a threat. But if it's a new Cold War, it's a different kind of Cold War, and a different kind of Russia. It's worth reading the whole thing.

There are those who are insisting that Russia is the enemy, and that we should go to war to defend Georgia. At this point I tend to agree with Joshua Trevino, who has said about War in the Caucasus:

[...] If there is a rationale for American action, it lies in American self interest in showing that America’s friends may count upon it. Georgia fought alongside the US in Iraq, and there is some debt owed for that. In that vein, America might commit itselve to resupply – though not direct to forces in the field – and it might guarantee Georgian sovereignty, though not Georgian territorial integrity. Short of a threatened extermination of Georgia (which does not seem at issue), there is nothing at stake here to justify a US-Russia war. Those accustomed to invoking appeasement and Munich at moments of foreign crisis may recoil at this – but that historical parallel is barely applicable here. Russian Putinism, for all it rightly repels our moral sensibilities, is not an existential foe of the West like Nazism, Communism, or Islamism. Its advance is not intrinsically America’s loss. [...]

(bold emphasis mine) I am not saying we should ignore real threats created by Russia, but neither should we exaggerate them. Joshua recommends a policy of containment towards Russia. At this point it seems prudent. Some people might call that a New Cold War; some aspects of containment might be like that, but lets keep it in proportion. And we must remember that Russia is still in the process of change. While trying to contain it's harmful actions, lets also give it some incentives to change for the better.
     

Georgia, Russia, USA and NATO; what's next?

What is America expected to do? What can it do, and why is it important? Joshua Trevino looks at these questions and more at the Brussels Journal:


Georgia’s Defeat and America’s Options

[...] The postwar settlement remains thoroughly opaque, even if, as the Russians report, the conditions of a ceasefire are agreed. The Russian war aim was never announced — or rather, it only announced itself on the ground — and its political end remains obscure. The formal disposition of the Russian-occupied secessionist regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia must be decided; the mechanisms of reparation, if any, must be agreed upon; and, most troublingly, the Russians are making noises about extraditing Saakashvili to the Hague. Here, a definitive settlement is to everyone’s advantage — not least the Georgians, who are ill-advised to act as if they are anything but beaten. Absurdities like putting Saakashvili in the ICC dock should be rejected, but otherwise, it is almost certainly best to let the Russians dictate their terms — and let resistance to those terms emanate from sources able to make that resistance count, like Europe and the United States.

With this in mind, the first task of America’s postwar policy in the Caucasus is distasteful in the extreme: pushing the Georgians to understand and act like what they are, which is a defeated nation in no position to make demands. This does not square easily with American sentiment — nor my own — nor with the Vice President’s declaration that Russia’s aggression “must not go unanswered,” nor with John McCain’s declaration that “today we are all Georgians.” Russia’s aggression and consequent battlefield victory will stand, and as the last thing the volatile Caucasus needs is yet another revisionist, revanchist state, it befits a would-be member of the Western alliance to make its peace with that. However inflammatory the issue of “lost” Abkhazia and South Ossetia are in the Georgian public square, it is nothing that the Germans, the Finns, and the Greeks, to name a few, have not had to come to terms with in the course of their accessions to the first tier of Western nations. We should not demand less of Georgia.

The second, and more enduring, task of our policy must be the swift containment of Russia. I use the term deliberately: to invoke another Cold War-era phrase, we’re not going to “roll back” any of Russia’s recent territorial gains, nor should we attempt to reverse what prosperity it has achieved in the past decade. (That prosperity, being based mostly upon transitory prices for natural resources, will itself be transitory in time.) Russia’s leadership has declared that it seeks the reversal, de facto if not de jure, of the “catastrophe” of the USSR’s end. Though not marked by any formal decision in the vein of Versailles, this is nonetheless a strategic outcome that America has a direct interest in preserving. That interest has only gone up with the admission of former Soviet-bloc states — and former Soviet states — to NATO. Inasmuch as Russian revisionism threatens the alliance that has kept the peace in Europe for generations now, it must be confronted and deterred.

The obvious question is how this may be done with the tools America has at hand. It is a media commonplace over the past several days that the United States has no leverage over Russia. This is false. American policy can and does tremendously affect several things of tremendous importance to Moscow. A brief (though not comprehensive) list of available pressure points follows: [...]

(bold emphasis mine) Yes, we do have leverage, but it's a delicate dance we have to do. Do read the whole thing, it makes a lot of sense.

Russia may not be our friend, but it's not our enemy either, and we don't want to needlessly make it into one. We have mutual interests, and reasons to form alliances on many issues. What leverage we have, we need to use carefully.


Related Links:

Georgia on my mind

Georgia Map at WorldAtlas.com

Russia, Georgia, and the Western Alliance

Russia, Georgia, and the Russian Question

Russia is a bully but Georgia is not blameless
     

Russia, Georgia, and the Russian Question

Here are two articles, the first deals directly with the new Russia - Georgia conflict, and the second touches on it in a relevant way.

Josh Trevino at the Brussels Journal gives us his assessment of the Russian VS Georgia situation:

War in the Caucasus

The first thing to understand about the war between Russia and Georgia is that Georgia has lost.

[...]

The real question for Georgia, then, is not whether is will win or lose – it has already lost – but how bad its loss will be. The worst case scenario is a Russian occupation and annexation. Fortunately for the Georgians, that’s also the least likely. Less unlikely is some sort of Russian occupation coupled with a Russian-driven regime change that puts Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili on the street – if he’s lucky. This might not be the tragedy for Georgia it seems, given Saakashvili’s rather astonishing incompetent gamble in leading the country into the present war. Most likely is that the Russians fully occupy South Ossetia, along with the other secessionist region of Georgia, Abkhazia; declare them both independent or somehow annexed; and thoroughly punish the Georgians with a countrywide air campaign targeting what meager infrastructure there is. Georgia at war’s end – which may well be mere days away – will be definitively dismembered, and smoldering in body and heart.

So much for the probable outcome. What remains is what, if anything, America should do. [...]

He doesn't see America getting involved in a war with Russsia over this, and neither do I. Georgia has been a coalition partner with the US in Iraq, so as an ally it can be argued that we owe them something, but it will probably be helping them to pick up the pieces when this is over. The Georgian President, I expect, will not endure much longer. I could be wrong, we shall see.


Another good article at the Brussels Journal that touches indirectly on this conflict, is by John Laughland, which looks at Western criticism of the recently deceased Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and finds it absurd.

Solzhenitsyn and the Russian Question

He maintains that Solzhenitzyn was always consistent and not irrational, unlike many of his Western critics. I leave you to read the article for those arguments, but I want to focus on one part, that I think relates strongly to the current Russia - Georgia conflict:

[...] After dealing with both the horrors of Communism, Solzhenitsyn of course turns his attention to the terrible chaos of the post-Communist period. Here again, his concern for the Russian people themselves remains consistent. He writes,

The trouble is not that the USSR broke up – that was inevitable. The real trouble, and a tangle for a long time to come, is that the breakup occurred along false Leninist borders, usurping from us entire Russian provinces. In several days, we lost 25 million ethnic Russians – 18 percent of our entire nation – and the government could not scrape up the courage even to take note of this dreadful event, a colossal historic defeat for Russia, and to declare its political disagreement with it.

Solzhenitsyn is right. One of the most lasting legacies of Leninism, which remains after everything else has been swept away or collapsed, was the decision to create bogus federal entities on the territory of what had been the unitary Russian state. These entities, called Soviet republics, contributed only to the creation of bogus nationalisms and of course to the dilution of Russian nationhood. They were bogus because the republics in question did not, in fact, correspond to ethnic reality: Kazakhs, for instance, are and remain a numerical minority in Kazakhstan, while “Ukraine” is in fact a collection of ancient Russian provinces (especially Kiev) and some Ukrainian ones. This bogus nationalism allowed the Soviet Union to present itself as an international federation of peoples, rather like the European Union today, but it was exploited by Russia’s enemies when the time came to destroy the geopolitical existence of the historic Russian state. This happened when the USSR was unilaterally dissolved by three Republic leaders in December 1991.

And this is the key to the West’s hostility to Solzhenitsyn. The man the West exploited to destroy Communism refused to bend the knee to the West’s continuing attempts (largely succesful) to destroy Russia herself. [...]

(bold emphasis mine) I believe this explains a lot about the current conflict we are seeing. Both the articles are worth reading, neither is very long, and both are very revealing and informative.