DALederle wrote:The future of the International Space Station is now in grave doubt.
It really isn't as bad as all that, and anybody who says otherwise is fear-mongering.
Yes, the Russians experienced a failure of a Progress mission which flys atop the Soyuz rocket. These are highly complex systems, and things are bound to go wrong occasionally, but this:
There has never been a Progress loss during the International Space Station Program. As of August 2011, the Russian Space Agency had launched 745 Soyuz-U launch vehicles. There have been 21 launch failures and 724 successes.
from the linked NASA article gives an idea of the real statistics. This is a remarkable record. The Russians are delaying the next manned mission to ISS until they understand what went wrong with the Progress flight as the manned flights use the same booster system. The reliability of the Soyuz system is just mind-boggling; nothing else is even close.
The reason that the current occupants of ISS will have to come home soon is that the two Soyuz capsules that are currently docked at ISS have finite lifespans on orbit (a "best used by" date) and need to come back to Earth after about 200 days in space (compare to a ten to fifteen day mission timescale for the now-retired Shuttles). If not for this timing issue, there are enough supplies on ISS to support the crew for a number of months.
Regarding "abandoning" ISS, yes, there might not be any human inhabitants on it for a bit (just until the launch problem is understood and fixed), but the computers will be perfectly capable of dealing with the routine stuff like stability and positioning, and if anything really "interesting" happens the station can be flown from the ground. This is not the analogue to the
Skylab missions where the station was "mothballed in space" by the departing third crew; unlike ISS, that station was not designed to be resupplied and the abandonment made sense at the time. It's worth noting that once the oribital decay of Skylab was fully recognised and understood, ground controllers "woke up" all the needed computers and gadgetry required to reorient the station into a low-drag configuration to delay (with Shuttle being hopelessly late) the inevitable deorbiting.
So, it's nowhere near as bad as it's being portrayed; however, that won't stop rags the world over from screaming headlines of "The sky is falling!!!". That sells copy; rigourous factual examinations don't.
