U.S.-Russian Relations on The High Frontier

Source: THE MOSCOWTIMES

In the summer of 2000, a Soviet-designed Proton rocket was rolled out to its launch pad at Site 81 of the Baikonur Cosmodrome, a former military black site hidden on the sprawling steppes of Kazakhstan from which the Soviet Union embarked on its conquest of space in the late 1950s.


Rockets like this one, and a myriad of others designed by legends of the Soviet military-industrial complex, had illuminated the Kazakh desert for decades — propelling amazing feats of Soviet engineering into space under the crimson banner of international communism.


But times had changed. The space race was over.

All In It Together 

NASA and Roscosmos exchange personnel, ensuring that their respective mission control centers have the human and technological resources available to smoothly handle daily operations as well as the occasional problem — sometimes things go very wrong.
When emergencies arise, it is the job of Keith Zimmerman and his NASA colleagues rotating in and out of Russia's Mission Control Center, to help facilitate communication and coordinate responses from the U.S. and Russian sides.
“In the event that problems occur, it helps to have someone locally to explain what the problem is and what we're doing about it, and here's what you [Roscosmos] can do to help. And that's why the Russians have a team in Houston as well,” he said.
One such emergency — one of the more dramatic in the history of the U.S.-Russia space partnership — took place in June 1997, when the Mir space station was hit hard by a Russian resupply spacecraft with two Russian cosmonauts and one NASA astronaut aboard.
The collision punched a hole in the space station's hull, destroying a solar panel. As air hissed out into the void, the station's crew felt their ears popping as a result of the rapidly falling air pressure, and the station itself was sent into a dramatic spin.
Mission control was unaware that anything had gone awry, as the station was beyond the range of Russia's communications coverage — which at that time was limited to a period of 5-10 minutes every 90 minutes.
Zimmerman had been preparing to touch base with the NASA astronaut, Michael Foale, before attending meetings with a senior Russian official, so he had his interpreter in tow. As Mir came into range, the control center was flooded with the sounds of alarms — never a good sign.
“The Russians were talking so fast that I couldn't catch any of it,” Zimmerman said. “My interpreter just had this funny look on his face, and said 'uhhh, they hit something.' It was a very crazy 10 minute communication pass while they were trying to find the leak, seal it, and save the station.”
The crew struggled to seal the hatch. The doorway was blocked by a series of electrical cables, feeding power to the station from the solar panels attached to the damaged module. These cables would need to be cut before the hatch could be closed, but this would kill Mir's power.
“At the end of the communications pass, they were just starting to seal the hatch, and before they did that the comms pass ended,” Zimmerman said. No one was sure if the crew was dead, if they abandoned ship, or sealed the hatch and saved Mir.
The crew saved the station, and managed to close the hatch. Meanwhile, NASA increased communications with Mir — thus allowing Roscosmos to work faster to help the crew in space — by activating three ground stations across the world, crucial assets that Russia had lost with the fall of the U.S.S.R.
“This was Mir, and it was their ship, so it was their responsibility to figure out what had gone wrong and what the problem was, and we helped out where we could by providing extra communications assets. Our sites were in the gaps where theirs weren't, so we gave them more opportunities to talk to the crew,” Zimmerman recounted.
The 1997 Mir incident was perhaps the most dramatic in the history of the partnership. But space exploration is a series of inevitable pitfalls, and collaborative problem-solving has been necessary throughout the course of the ISS program. When the U.S. space shuttle Columbia disintegrated upon reentry in 2003 — killing the seven NASA astronauts aboard — Roscosmos helped NASA send people and supplies to ISS via its Soyuz spacecraft.
And NASA has returned the favor when things go wrong on Russian missions, allowing cargo to be ferried up on U.S. vehicles if need be, and always assisting with its expansive communications system — something Russia lacks to this day. When a construction worker severed a cable connecting Russia's mission control to its satellite dishes in 2012, causing Roscosmos to lose control of very single satellite and spacecraft it had in space, their ability to use U.S. communications was crucial.

The Proton rocket set to launch that summer was plastered with a large logo advertising the American fast-food giant Pizza Hut, which helped finance the mission.
Its cargo was Zvezda, a space module in which Russian cosmonauts and American astronauts could cohabit while orbiting Earth.
Zvezda was the third piece of the International Space Station (ISS), a massive facility in space designed and constructed by NASA and its Russian counterpart, Roscosmos, and its long-awaited launch allowed the station to be officially opened for business.
Fifteen years later, ISS has the distinction of being the largest ever collaboration between nations during peacetime — a feat that earned a Nobel Peace Prize nomination.
The cost of the ISS project had been valued at up to $150 billion, and today is a partnership of 16 nations operating under the umbrella of NASA and Roscosmos — making the station one of the final frontiers of U.S.-Russian relations following almost two years of political animosity.
Sean Fuller, NASA's top official coordinating work with Roscosmos, said the ISS program's significance in U.S.-Russia relations has been its ability to draw on different approaches and experiences to find the best common path to overcome various concrete challenges.
“The strength of the program is that all of the partners have previous experiences and expertise in different areas, and while the United States and Russia have very strong histories of spaceflight, we tackle problems differently,” explained Fuller.

U.S.-Russia Cooperation in Space: A Brief History

In 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the world's first artificial satellite, kicking off the famous Cold War space race that continued until the mid-1970s. After the United States beat the Soviets to the moon, the U.S.S.R. shifted their focus to building space stations.
As part of the policy of detente pioneered by U.S. President Richard Nixon and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, the two sides decided to use their space programs as the symbol of a new era in their tepid bilateral relations.
The product of this effort was the 1975 Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, a rendezvous between a U.S. Apollo spacecraft and a Soviet Soyuz capsule above the Elbe River in Germany. It showed what was possible, but was a one-off. Superpower tensions flared not long after and the space programs again went their separate ways.
Twenty years later, after the fall of the Soviet Union, senior leadership on both sides saw an opportunity to use their space programs as tools of reconciliation and cooperation rather than of political competition.
This was pursued in two phases. Phase One, launched under a protocol signed at the 1993 summit between U.S. Vice President Al Gore and Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, initiated a program known as the Shuttle-Mir missions.
Over the course of the decade, NASA would fly 11 space shuttle missions to dock with the Soviet-built Mir space station so that the U.S. space agency could gain vital experience in long-duration stays in space.
Shuttle-Mir was an important step towards the larger vision of the Gore-Chernomyrdin agreement, known as Phase Two: the construction of a massive international space station, adapted from plans for Russia's proposed Mir 2 space station and the U.S. Space Station Freedom, both projects that were stalled in the 1990s amid post-Cold War budget cuts.

Snapshot of a Partnership

NASA's Fuller joined the U.S. space agency out of college in 1996, and has made a career of working with the Russians following his first visit to Moscow in 1997 as a NASA space shuttle mission planner.
“It was a new experience,” he said, “I still remember that first time I walked onto Red Square thinking 'by golly, I never thought I'd be here.'” Over the last two decades, Fuller has worked at various levels of the partnership, fostering deep relationships with his Russian counterparts.
Fuller describes his bonding with Russian space officials in a similar way to other NASA officials who have been living, working, or traveling to Russia since the mid-1990s: things were awkward at first, but people quickly warmed up to each other.
For Fuller, it began in 1997 at a picnic with a few Roscosmos officials in Alexandrovsky Sad outside the Kremlin. “We really got to know each other on the personal level, about lives and families … it really created a good bond that continues to this day.”