"Jim Oberg"

Space station future adrift
By Philip Chien
27 November 2004 // SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES

Thanks for the interesting post. Chien restates a situation that the
Russians have been calmly reminding NASA about from time to time.

In the event that Shuttle remained grounded, RSA has said that it would
have to reconsider the nature of its ISS operations, which I took to mean
that it would essentially became the Russian Space Station.

Even when US funds were being sent to RSA, there were bureaucratic
malfunctions. Cash went from NASA to the Russian treasury and never made
it all the way to RSA. Arrangements were later made for direct payments.

I think that Russia has been diligent in its work on Soyuz because of the
not inconsiderable number of flight made by the Shuttle to the Mir
station. But it seems that the Russians have now paid off their account.

The Iranians aren't helping things at all on this front. While they have
apparently given some sort of agreement not to produce weapons-grade
uranium, they still operate a 40 MW plutonium production reactor. The
upside to this, such as it is, is that it takes longer to produce a
plutonium bomb than a uranium bomb, buying the diplomats a few years of
breathing space. The downside is that the plutonium bombs fit better on
top of intermediate-range ballistic missiles.

K.