A Gamble we will come to Regret! Cunningham

NASA has been funding the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program in hopes of developing domestic space transportation services. Budding commercial providers hope to send cargo and possibly crews to the ISS after the orbiters are withdrawn from service. Without commercial providers, the United States will depend on the Russian Soyuz spacecraft to carry astronauts to and from the space station. And NASA has already signed an $800 million contract with Roskosmos, the Russian Space Agency, to continue servicing the ISS.

The COTS program is a long shot at best. Even the best commercial launch companies will encounter unexpected delays and, in the end, we will be dependent on the Russians. Is that the best we can do for the thousands of dedicated workers who have made America's space program the envy of the world?

A few congressmen and senators see the security threat posed by an American dependency on an increasingly autocratic and potentially hostile Russian government. Legislators like Congressman Dave Weldon (R), and Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R) are trying to appropriate an additional $2 billion to close the gap by extending the life of the shuttle; others favor moving the launch date for the Orion and Ares forward.

With tens of billions of dollars invested in the ISS, just the risk of it being held hostage by another country is a recipe for orbital extortion. Russian President Vladimir Putin is becoming increasingly hostile, and his influence could dominate Russian thinking for the next 10 years. The payoff for Russia not grounding our human access to space could very well come from U.S. concessions in economic, political, or military arenas.

I predict, leaving the ISS and our multi-billion-dollar space program hostage to a foreign nation, is a gamble we will come to regret.

What we should be doing is operating the space shuttle until development of the new Orion and Ares Launch Vehicle are well in hand. Shuttle retirement should be referenced, not to the arbitrary date of 2010, but to the first flights of Orion. It is not essential that the two programs overlap, but we need to shorten the time when no American spacecraft will be flying. Leaving a one or two year break between the Shuttle and Orion programs would hardly be noticed.

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