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Why NASA and Congress Spent Four Hours Shouting At Each Other About Russia

Congress won't accept 'business as usual' as a contingency plan should Russia cut off access to the International Space Station.
NASA Administrator Charles Bolden Image: NASA

If nothing else, NASA administrator Charles Bolden made one thing clear over the course of a nearly four hour, extremely contentious hearing on Capitol Hill Tuesday: The agency has a contingency plan for the International Space Station should American-Russian relations worsen over the crisis in Ukraine, and he doesn’t care if Congress doesn’t like what he’s drawn up.

Actually, Bolden has drawn up a number of plans, but none of them extend beyond “business as usual.” Which is to say, Americans—including Rick Mastracchio and Steve Swanson, who are currently aboard the ISS—will continue to reach the space station by riding in the Russian Soyuz spacecraft until an American company can take over a crewed mission sometime in 2017.

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Asked to speculate about dealing with Russia should they decide to abandon the station sometime before then—a resolution one way or another in Ukraine will probably happen before 2017, after all—Bolden said he didn’t want to talk about it.

“That’s not my job. That’s a flip response—I don’t want to say that, but I try to stay out of diplomacy and politics,” he testified before the House Appropriations Committee’s subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies. “Our contingency plan is to keep working to maintain that partnership as vibrant as it is while we allow the State Department and the National Command Authority to work the political and diplomatic issues.”

Rep. John Culberson (R-Texas) quickly pointed out that US-Russian negotiations haven’t been going so well, and that maybe he should have a better plan than that: “This is a very very important question, not because of the concerns of Congress, but, frankly, out of concern for astronaut Steve Swanson and Rick Mastracchio and their families. What is NASA’s contingency plan?” Culberson asked.

Even when lawmakers asked him, no really what is the plan should Vladimir Putin decide to strand the Americans up there, Bolden didn’t budge. He said that America can run the ISS by itself if Russia abandons the station, and that the only thing Russia provides to the ISS is propulsion aboard the ISS should it need to avoid space junk and, umm, “access,” which is a not-so-veiled way of saying that a Russian Soyuz is, realistically, the only ride home.

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The discussion quickly devolved into a shouting match, with Bolden, Culberson, Andy Harris (R-Md.), and Frank Wolf (R-Va.) all talking over each other—the lawmakers kept rephrasing their questions, asking for any sort of indication that NASA might be thinking about getting astronauts home in some other way if necessary, Bolden kept telling him he’d already answered their questions.

"Realistically here, we have the best contingency plan of anyone. Our contingency plan has a three-year time horizon.”

Here’s what the plan is, at least for now: Bolden says Russia won’t abandon NASA up there because Americans essentially run the station. So, the plan is, there's no plan.

“The big thing the Russians [rely on America for] is day-to-day operations: the environmental control, life support, access to laboratories,” he said. “The people that would be hurt by a break in our relationship with Rescosmos are the Russians.”

But Putin hasn’t exactly acted rationally so far and relying on the Russians forever isn’t a great way of doing business. What would make NASA abandon the ISS, Culberson asked?

“I cannot foresee of any circumstances short of the national command authority directing NASA and all government agencies to curtail all activities with any branches of the Russian government. That’s the only reason,” Bolden said. “That could happen, but the station is too valuable to too many nations for us to sit around and think about how to abandon it. We need to think about how we maintain our ability to operate there. My answer to you will be the same until the cows come home.”

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The “contingency plan is to take $858 million dollars to give to an American company over the next three years. That is a defined period of time for a defined amount of money that is in the President’s budget,” Bolden said. “Realistically here, we have the best contingency plan of anyone. Our contingency plan has a three year time horizon.”

Not good enough for Culberson: “What about short term contingency plans? That’s what we’re driving at—all we’re looking for is we want to know you’re thinking about this.”

Bolden cut him off: “I’m working really, really hard on this,” he said. “You’re not accepting my answer. You may not like it, and the answer may be unacceptable to this committee, but that’s what it is.”

Bolden sat before the committee to discuss the budget for the 2015 fiscal year, but much of the hearing focused on Russia and the fact that NASA recently said it was cutting off all communication with the country’s space agency unless it pertained to the operation of the ISS. Last week, spokespeople for the agency told me that there’s no way to speed up the timeline of a commercial company developing a crewed ISS mission and that they don’t foresee Russia cutting off American access to the station.

For now, as Bolden said, the plan is to incentivize one or more American companies to take over manned missions to low Earth orbit, including to the ISS. Meanwhile, NASA is focusing on deep space missions. Bolden said that, under no circumstances should funding for commercial space operations be cut—if they are, Bolden warned that the timeline could be pushed back further and NASA may be forced to rework its Orion space capsule to run missions to the ISS, which could completely kill commercial spaceflight.

“If NASA decides to do it, why would any commercial company try to compete with us?…We try to take government out of the competition. I don’t have a capability to get cargo to low Earth orbit except with Orbital Sciences and SpaceX, and I think that’s the way it should be,” he said. “Give me [the money] I’m asking for with commercial crew, and in 2017, when you go to the Yellow Pages and say ‘I want to get a crew anywhere in low Earth orbit,' you’ll have at least one American company.”

And that’s the plan.