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At the End of the Space Shuttle, the Russians Have the Last Laugh

Even for die-hard space patriots, it's hard not to appreciate the delectation Russia may be getting out of the end of the Space Shuttle program. Officially due in a little more than a month, the milestone won't just mark the end of the United States...

Even for die-hard space patriots, it’s hard not to appreciate the delectation Russia may be getting out of the end of the Space Shuttle program. Officially due in a little more than a month, the milestone won’t just mark the end of the United States’ domination of manned spaceflight. It will also mean that NASA will begin handing over 1.1 billion dollars to their former Space Race nemesis, the Russian Space Agency. That should about cover the cost of about 20 American trips to the Space Station through 2016 aboard Russia’s old trusty Soyuz spacecraft.

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That is: the United States is paying Russia $50 million for each astronaut’s round-trip ticket, four long decades after the United States beat Russia to the moon and blazed a trail that Moscow has struggled to follow ever since.

The Russian reporter in this Russia Today report paints NASA as a dream-killer along the now-under-employed Space Coast, and that’s without even touching the sticky question of the agency’s direction. She almost savors the general consensus: that the premiere American space program was killed by its own ambition. How do you like them moon rocks, comrade?

“… It’s safer and cheaper to send cargo and people separately – something that Russia has been doing for thirty years.”

While on Earth, Russo-American relations still involve spies and harsh words, in the rigorous environment of space, they’re mostly smiles and high-fives. Largely. After Russia began more carefully charging other space agencies for use of Russian resources on board the Space Station, other nations responded in kind, in the style of the reciprocity that makes travel by Russians and Americans to each other’s countries so hard. In 2009, the money issue manifested itself in the delicate issue of who could use the advanced but problematic toilet on the American side of the Space Station. “We are grown-up, well-educated and good-mannered people and can use our own brains to create normal relationship,” said Gennady Padalka, a veteran Russian cosmonaut. “It’s politicians and bureaucrats who can’t reach agreement, not us, cosmonauts and astronauts.”

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Fiscal tensions and insecurities aside, NASA’s transition away from a giant space travel program raises the specter of a different kind of trans-national quagmire. One of President Kennedy’s goals with NASA’s moon program was to demonstrate the superiority of the capitalistic, free-market system over the central planning of a giant state bureaucracy, and the Shuttle program is a costly reminder of the fiscal and political limitations of Kennedy’s vision. Then again, the free market system never really won in the Big Projects department: the U.S. made it to the moon, but thanks to the careful planning of a program that drew on tremendous national resources within a vast, centralized bureaucracy – something that looks more Stalinist than Jeffersonian.

The dream of rallying a nation’s many resources for big important things may be dead for now, and not just in the United States; which country has the money for anything akin to a Space Shuttle program? (High-speed-railed and centrally-planned China is a notable exception, and I haven’t even mentioned their space station plans). But the Shuttle’s demise – and the handing over of the reins to the Russians – also says something that both the Russians and the Americans and everyone should be smiling about: it may not be as attention-grabbing, but space exploration today is more about cosmic cooperation, not mutually assured destruction.

That’s not to say there won’t still be the occasional fight over the Space Station bathroom.

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