February 3, 2003	Monday	Zilhaj 1,1423

PARIS, Feb 2: Already mired in delays, financial problems and a row over why it even exists, the International Space Station has been dealt a new and potentially crippling blow with the loss of the US space shuttle Columbia.

Not even one-third complete, mankind’s orbital outpost faces the grim prospect of being staffed by only a skeleton crew or even mothballed for long periods if NASA takes a long time to fix the shuttle problem, space experts say.

The three remaining shuttles have been grounded while NASA methodically investigates what went wrong.

No-one knows how long that will take. The consensus is that it will be months at least, and quite possibly a year or longer, before a shuttle takes to the skies again.

The loss of a quarter of the shuttle fleet strips the ISS builders of a vital taxi and heavy truck.

Only the shuttle can carry large or bulky parts like trusses and solar panels, for these components are too big to fit aboard Russia’s Soviet-era Soyuz rockets, the only other transport available.

The ISS programme “is going to be dramatically impacted,” Marcia Smith, space policy analyst for the Congressional Research Service, a study arm of the US Congress, told the news website space.com.

So far, only 20 out of the roughly 40 scheduled missions to assemble the ISS, transforming it into a dazzling laboratory in microgravity by 2006, have been completed. It now has a mass of 130 tons out of a scheduled 450 tons.

But 2003 was to have been the year in which it changed radically, with the assembly work shifting up a couple of gears.

There were to be six shuttle flights this year to haul up new units to attach to the station. Thirty-six astronauts were due to visit the station this year on five shuttle flights, and six on two Soyuz flights.

Maintaining that ambitious schedule now seems impossible, and delays will have a domino effect.

“There will definitely be changes in the launch programme,” Russian mission control spokesman Vcevolod Latyshev said on Sunday.

If the shuttle fleet is grounded for a long period, the ISS could be left unmanned “for an indefinite period,” a Russian space expert, who did not wish to be named, told Interfax on Saturday.

One option may be to operate the station in a “steady state” status, Smith said.

The ISS can remain functioning, utilizing only what capabilities are now onboard. Some modest resupply of the ISS can be accomplished through the automated Russian Progress vehicle. “But it will certainly limit what can be done,” Smith added.

Another problem is that Russia’s cash-strapped space programme cannot afford to send up more than two Soyuzes per year. One new spaceship with three crew is sent up every six months to serve as a lifeboat, replacing the previous one, which comes back to Earth with returning crew members.

The numbers are crude: if there is only one Soyuz lifeboat, the ISS’s crew is limited to three.

That means they are essentially working on maintenance, not on the scientific research for which the ISS — whose final bill is put at anywhere between 60 billion and 100 billion dollars — was designed.

That will provide fuel for the space station’s many critics, who already characterise it as either a cash gobbler or an orbiting white elephant.

Supporters of unmanned missions say robot probes, while less glamorous, offer far better value for money and are safer.—AFP