A visit to Peenemünde

Approaching the Historical-Technical Museum at the Power Plant in Peenemünde with full-scale V-2 rocket. Chris Gainor Photos

I enjoy visiting the launching sites and control and training centres associated with space travel, wherever they are. Like many people, I have visited the Kennedy Space Center and other NASA sites around the United States, and I have also been to the Baikonur Cosmodrome in the desert wastes of Kazakhstan.

In April I was finally able to visit the world's original space facility, at Peenemünde on the Baltic coast of Germany, where the German military developed the V-1 and V-2 "revenge weapons" of World War II. The V-1 was the "doodle bug" cruise missile, and the V-2 was the first long-range ballistic missile that was the forerunner of today's space launch vehicles.

A visit to Peenemünde is guaranteed to be different from any other space-related destination because of its dark association with Germany's Nazi regime. It is located close to the German border with Poland on the Baltic island of Usedom, which is known for its resorts along its beaches. 

German space enthusiasts began experimenting with rockets in the 1920s, and when the German army got involved in rocket research in 1932 just before Adolf Hitler took power, they tested rockets near Berlin. In 1936, the German army's team of rocket engineers headed by Wernher von Braun transferred their work to the seaside location of Peenemünde, displacing a sleepy fishing village.

There on October 3, 1942, a V-2 rocket became the first human-made object to escape Earth's atmosphere and fly into space, albeit briefly. Nearby air force experts were creating the V-1, and the area quickly became covered with test stands for the new weapons and gigantic production facilities for the V-2 rocket. The top leaders of the Nazi regime, with the exception of Hitler, came to Peenemünde to see the new wonder weapons in person, and slave labour began to be used to produce the rockets.

V-2 rocket motor in Peenemünde museum.

But the growing facility also began to attract the interest of the Allies, and on the night of August 17, 1943, massive waves of British RAF bombers did serious damage to Peenemünde. Most of the top people survived, but the feared SS or Schutzstaffel paramilitary force under the leadership of Heinrich Himmler used the raid as an excuse to wrest production of the  V-2 from the army. The SS won control, and production was transferred to an underground production facility in the Harz Mountains using labour from the notorious Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp. 

Von Braun and leading engineers remained at Peenemünde until near the end of the war in 1945, when they left to ultimately surrender to American forces in  the Bavarian Alps. Peenemünde itself came under the control of Russian forces, and the facility became a base for the East German air force and navy that closed not long after reunification of East and West Germany in 1991.  

While von Braun became a popular personality in Cold War America, the East German regime looked down on his Nazi links, as many more would also do after his death in 1977, so the damaged remains of the Peenemünde rocket facilities were neglected during the existence of East Germany. A plan to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the first successful V-2 flight in 1992 after reunification was halted due to what one writer called a "veritable wave of indignation." 

But finally in 2000 a "Historical Technical Museum" was opened inside the rocket facility's  power plant, which had remained in operation during the Cold War. It was the stark museum in the darkened power plant that I visited in April.

Peenemünde is nearly four hours by rail from Berlin, and while it is possible to stay in the town next to the museum, there is a greater variety of accommodations in the resort town of Zinnowitz, which is a 15-minute rail ride away.

The power plant contains two permanent  exhibitions - one on the development of rockets at Peenemünde and another on the power plant itself. Temporary exhibitions are also mounted - at present there is an exhibition on the British operations against Peenemünde and other rocket facilities known as Operation Crossbow.

Most of the exhibits are presented in German only, but there is enough information in English for an interested person. The museum contains artifacts from the rockets and from the people who built them, alongside photographs and models of the launch facilities. Outside the museum there are full-scale models of the V-1 and V-2.

The museum presents the successes of the rockets alongside the pain and suffering they also inspired - both that felt by the people targeted by this weapon and those slave and concentration camp labourers who gave up their health and their lives while building these rockets. The museum, in the word used in its website, explores the "ambivalence" of the technical breakthroughs of Peenemünde.

A museum presenting such "ambivalence" is not the largest tourist draw, and this has caused financial problems for the museum at Peenemünde. Moreover, the test stands where the historic launches took place are off limits due to the fact that those areas have not been fully swept for leftover ordnance.

I visited on a sunny Sunday afternoon, and the museum was nowhere near crowded, and neither were nearby private attractions, including a Soviet submarine.

Today the legacy of Peenemünde is looked at more critically than it was during the Cold War. A number of schools in West Germany, for example, were named after Wernher von Braun. Just a few weeks before my visit, von Braun's name was removed from the last German school to bear his name. Today the von Braun name is honoured only in his former American home of Huntsville, Alabama, and a lonely sign on the outskirts of Peenemünde notes its twin city relationship with Huntsville. 

My visit to Peenemünde was a fascinating and thought-provoking experience. Humanity's reach into space was opened in the service of its darkest regime, leaving a trail of "ambivalence" in its wake.

Inside the Peenemünde Power Plant.

Embattled Heavens: ICBMs and the Beginnings of Space Exploration

Launch sequence for Atlas ICBM. US Air Force photos

In recent years my historical research has focused on American military missile programs during the first decade after the end of World War II.

When this topic comes up, many people instantly think of Wernher von Braun and the rocket experts he brought with him from Germany after he surrendered to American forces in 1945. A decade later, von Braun and his team were in Huntsville, Alabama, building the Redstone missile for the U.S. Army. And while the Redstone did play an important role in the early space race, I would argue that the action was elsewhere.

The major missile program in the United States in the 1950s was the U.S. Air Force program to develop Atlas, America's first Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM). Along with the air force Titan ICBM and Thor missiles that quickly followed it, Atlas formed the centrepiece of America's nuclear deterrent in the early 1960s.

As well, Atlas, Titan and Thor carried the overwhelming majority of U.S. satellites and spacecraft into orbit and beyond from the late 1950s up to the late 1990s. Atlas rockets carried the first American astronauts into orbit, most of the American spacecraft that preceded Apollo to the Moon, and the first wave of spacecraft that explored the solar system.

Without the air force decision to proceed with Atlas in 1954, the U.S. would not have had much of a space program in the 1960s. Yet Atlas has been lost in the controversy that followed the Soviet Union's use of their own ICBM to launch the first artificial satellite, Sputnik, into orbit ahead of the U.S., and the historical emphasis placed on Wernher von Braun.

My work on Atlas was the topic of my address last month in Berlin to the Embattled Heavens conference on the military influence on space exploration - a conference I discussed in this blog last week. 

For many years, the U.S. Air Force was criticized for waiting until 1954 to start on Atlas. I found this idea of air force hesitation to be strange, given that the U.S. military during the Cold War was notorious for promoting almost any and all weapons programs. My re-examination of the early years of the Cold War suggests that air force behaviour with Atlas was consistent with its usual support of new weapons.

I argued that developments in nuclear weapons drove development of both Atlas and the first Soviet ICBM, the R-7, and that the  space race of the 1960s was a product of the race to develop nuclear weapons after World War II.

Many popular accounts have stressed the scientific roots of the race into space, along with the idea that going into space was hugely popular with the public. More recent research has pointed out that while space programs do have public support, many Americans felt that the massive sums spent on Apollo in the 1960s would have been better spent on other things, a fact that politicians picked up on when they curtailed Apollo after six landings on the Moon.

My own research shows that the infrastructure of early space travel was built first to support nuclear weapons. Historian Alex Roland, who also spoke at the Embattled Heavens  conference, has long argued that the controversy that followed the launch of Sputnik in 1957 was a turning point in the U.S. military's quest to mobilize the civilian economy in the service of military priorities.

The idea fostered by some historians that the U.S. Air Force dragged its heels on Atlas has been thrown into question, and I argue that this mistaken idea also fed into the military quest for more weapons.

To better understand how space exploration has evolved, we must look honestly at what was behind the development of the first space launch vehicles. I believe that it was nuclear weapons, not love of space travel, that drove their creation.

If the creation of nuclear weapons had not led to ICBMs in the late 1950s, the reach into space that followed would have been quite different. For example, we might still be waiting today for the first human footprints on the Moon. And there would also be many other consequences, both good and bad, including the state of technology in our society today.

Embattled Heavens: A Conference Report

Outer space is seen by many as a new arena for human endeavour, a place for a fresh start for humanity. Others who are less hopeful have looked to space for its military potential, and indeed the first human-made vehicles to fly through space were military in origin.

This duality has not often been explored head on by academics, but such a discussion was opened April 10 to 12 at a conference at the Freie Universität in Berlin entitled Embattled Heavens: the militarization of space in science, fiction and politics. 

My own historical research has focused on the intersection between military weapons and space exploration. So I was pleased to go to Berlin and take part in this discussion of what its organizers called "the military dimensions of astroculture in the period from 1942 to 1990," the period starting with the launch of the first human-made object beyond Earth's atmosphere, a German V-2 ballistic missile, and ending with the conclusion of the Cold War that drove the early exploration of space.

Here I will feature some of the many insights raised at this conference that caught my attention. There were many other ideas that I don't have room to discuss here, and I will explain my own presentation in a future blog entry.

The first day's keynote presentation was delivered by Alex Roland, an American historian who has gone from the NASA History Office to become one of the foremost critics of America's thrust into space. He noted that the 1960s space race that culminated in the first human steps on the Moon was a competition for prestige that substituted in some respects for an arms race during the Cold War.

Roland compared the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union to a Potlatch featuring conspicuous consumption of property to showcase the power and prestige of its superpower participants. 

The militarization of space during the Cold War was itself cold and passive in that spacecraft were launched that supported military operations, including weather, reconnaissance and global positioning satellites, he said. But at the same time no shots have ever been fired in anger in space during the nearly seventy years of the 'long peace' between the superpowers that included the Cold War and the quarter century since it came to an end. 

Smithsonian Institution historian Michael Neufeld noted the contrast between the reality of routinized military operations in space and the chaotic nature of space wars depicted in the science fiction that helped inspire space exploration.

German political scientist Bernd Greiner explained that the Cold War shaped the first steps into space in many ways, notably the Cold War's emphasis on permanent military preparedness that encouraged the routine nature of military operations in space. The space race was fostered in part by the Cold War's emphasis on fighting for the hearts and minds of civilian populations.

The conference took place in Europe, which was not involved in the early superpower space race but joined the ranks of space powers  during the latter years of the Cold War. In contrast to the superpower competition in space, Europe's role in space has featured cooperation between states in the European Space Agency and earlier efforts to develop a European space launch vehicle, according to Michael Sheehan, a professor of international relations at Swansea in Wales.

Sheehan explored a major conference theme - the influence of science fiction on space exploration and military operations - with his statement that the boundary between government policy and science fiction as it affects space exploration is not clearly delineated. The influence of science fiction has been apparent in many U.S. military documents, he said, notably those related to the so-called Revolution in Military Affairs of the 1990s. Social unease related to the Cold War, on the other hand, permeated U.S. science fiction movies in the 1950s, he added. 

In spite of differences between Europe and the United States, for instance in the more dystopic flavour of European science fiction, the differences between Europe and America are not as great as is sometimes believed. Europe's space program, for example, has taken an increasingly military orientation over the years, similar to the American emphasis on military space, Sheehan said.

One area where Europe has followed the United States is in navigation satellites, where Europe's Galileo satellite network is following the U.S. Global Positioning System. Smithsonian historian Paul Ceruzzi explained how European concerns arising from American control of GPS during the 1998-99 conflict in Kosovo caused European officials to create their own navigation system in spite of its great expense. Today military-operated navigation systems have become an integral part of civilian infrastructure and economies.

Several presenters raised new research tying space research to military origins, including Jordan Bimm of York University in Toronto, who told how the "Mars Jar" simulations of the martian atmosphere originated with U.S. military experts rather than astrobiological researchers, and Isabell Schrickel's work relating space mirror proposals to science fiction, military applications, energy needs, and possible use to combat climate change.

Many other ideas and perspectives, including controversies over unidentified flying objects, and literary criticism of space efforts, were offered as part of Embattled Heavens, although one participant criticized the lack of feminist perspectives at the conference. 

The history of space exploration is being looked at in new and more critical ways. Embattled Heavens has broken new ground in this new critical examination of humanity's first push beyond Earth's atmosphere.

Early historical accounts of the Cold War space race emphasized interest in exploration for its own sake, an idea that has come under increasing question in recent years. I came away from Embattled Heavens with the belief that the military role in the early history of space exploration is greater than is generally acknowledged, for better or for worse.

Spaceport Vancouver Island?

Space Launch Canada graphic of possible launch trajectories from Vancouver Island.

To date, no satellite has ever been launched from Canadian territory, but for the past few years a group headed by a Vancouver astrophysicist has been trying to change that by promoting the idea of launching satellites from Vancouver Island.

Redouane Al Fakir, the driving force behind Space Launch Canada, first announced his idea in 2010, and he has been seeking financial and other support since then. In March, he told the Alberni Valley News that Space Launch Canada has reached an agreement with the University of Victoria Centre for Aerospace Research to launch three satellites.

It turns out that the negotiations are still going on. We will have to wait to see whether Dr. Fakir can succeed in getting a payloads and the finances he needs to change his hopes into realities. There are still many questions surrounding his scheme,  including what kind of rocket will be used, and where it would come from.

Dr. Fakir told the Alberni Valley Times that the first satellite will be launched from a site outside Canada, but he hopes to launch the second and third satellites from unspecified locations on Vancouver Island. In all likelihood, the rocket will be produced in another country.

In the past, Space Launch Canada has proposed launching from a headland on the west coast of Vancouver Island such as Estevan Point, just west of Strathcona Park. A rocket heading in a southerly direction from there would have thousands of miles of ocean to fly over en route to a polar orbit, much like satellites launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

If this proposal comes to fruition, it would mean a major change of direction for Canadian space efforts, because no satellite has ever been launched from Canadian soil, or on a Canadian rocket.

Canada does have a history in rocketry with the Black Brant series of sounding rockets that are still being made in Winnipeg, and the rocket range in Churchill, Manitoba, that operated from the 1950s to the 1980s, sending scientific payloads to the edge of space for a brief time before they fell back to Earth.

More recently, various private initiatives have arisen to promote Canadian launchers and Canadian launch sites. But up to now, none of these initiatives have met with success.

In 1967, a Canadian government report on space exploration written by a committee headed by John H. Chapman recommended that Canada purchase launch services for our satellites from other countries, but consider building a launcher for small scientific satellites. Since then, Canadian satellites have all flown on foreign-built rockets launched from sites in the United States, Kazakhstan, French Guiana, and India. There is no suggestion that the Canadian government has developed any interest in building Canadian launch vehicles or Canadian launch pads.

The space launch business has been very expensive, competitive, and prone to booms and busts. Canada is not a prime launching location because many satellites, notably communications satellites, are best launched near the equator to get into geostationary orbits. For satellites going into polar orbits, launch sites such as Vancouver Island offer good possibilities.

As mentioned, the U.S. Air Force launches spacecraft into polar orbits from a launch site at Vandenberg Air Force Base on a south-facing portion of the Pacific Coast between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Cape Canaveral on the Atlantic Coast in Florida is used to launch spacecraft into orbits closer to the Equator. 

And while Space Launch Canada's proposal is a first for Canada's Pacific Coast, the U.S. military did consider establishing a launch site nearby in Washington state. While researching at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., a few years ago, I came across some air force documents from 1946 suggesting that a "Guided Missiles Test Facility" be established about half way between Cape Flattery at the opening of Juan de Fuca Strait, and Aberdeen on the west coast of the Olympic Peninsula. 

Satellites were still more than ten years in the future, so there was no talk of launching satellites in those documents, but various flight paths for missiles, including routes along the B.C. coast, were considered. It appears that the proposal met a quick death due to tight budgets in the late 1940s and the superior attributes of the launch site at today's Vandenberg Air Force Base. 

Because the Washington State launch site would have faced west with limited southern exposure, its location would restrict options for launching satellites, a problem the proposed Space Launch Canada launch site doesn't have. 

Despite the possibilities offered by a Vancouver Island launch site, there are already many established launch sites around the world today. So it remains to be seen whether Space Launch Canada's proposal will make economic sense to potential investors and customers.

LNG and the Dreams of Wenner-Gren

B.C. Premier W.A.C. Bennett in 1955.

This blog so far has focused on outer space and space exploration, but my interests in technology go beyond that realm. Today politicians and voters are making choices that involve various types of technology. As someone who has worked alongside politicians, I am also interested in the interface between politics and technology.

Much of our politics today is bound up in the social and political choices we have made over the past century to base our economy on the use of internal combustion engines for our transportation needs. As a result, our economy is based on oil and other petroleum products, and to a lesser extent on other energy sources such as hydro-electric power.

Local and provincial politics in Canada are bound up with decisions over transportation systems, and today all levels of government are making decisions related to Canada's oil resources and the desire to move those resources to market by pipeline and rail.

These issues played a role in last year's provincial election in British Columbia, an election where I actively supported the BC New Democratic Party, which suffered an unexpected loss to Premier Christy Clark's BC Liberals. The reasons behind that surprising result are many, and a number of those reasons involve mistakes and miscalculations on the part of the NDP.

Here I want to talk about one aspect of that election campaign - Clark's decision to base her campaign on a promise to deliver 100,000 jobs and wipe out the province's debt with the proceeds from development of Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) exports.

That promise and the electoral success Clark enjoyed in part as a result of it give her a claim to a prize for the best new variation on an old play in BC politics - using promises of new technologies to conjure up visions of plenty in the minds of voters.

Clark's LNG promise reminds me of the great megaproject play made in the late 1950s by the Social Credit government of W.A.C. Bennett, who is widely regarded as BC's greatest premier. Bennett ruled for 20 years, and even the successors of his NDP opponents today salute his memory, in part because he was never afraid to steal ideas from the NDP playbook.

In 1957, Bennett announced that his government had signed an agreement with the Swedish millionaire Axel Wenner-Gren involving the construction of a gigantic resources project that would include construction of a $1-billion, 160-mile-per-hour monorail running along the Rocky Mountain Trench up through the Peace River to the Yukon Border, development of a land area the size of Nova Scotia, and creation of a pulp mill and hydro-electric developments.

While many of these ideas, notably the monorail, quickly fell by the wayside, the idea of developing the Peace for hydro-electric power eventually took centre stage. Together with other schemes to dam the Columbia river, this developed into the Two River Policy that Bennett is remembered for today.

Bennett won the 1960 election after a difficult and hard-fought campaign, and the Wenner-Gren scheme, having served Bennett's political purposes, died within weeks of the votes being counted. Bennett's biographer David Mitchell wrote: "In the end, the Wenner-Gren scheme was nothing more than a fantasy - the Wizard of Oz approach to economic development." But the Peace River power idea gave Bennett leverage in the difficult Columbia River negotiations with the federal government and the U.S. government.

The 1960s would be the decade where Bennett developed his power plans, starting with the Columbia River and the government takeover of BC Electric. And Bennett's efforts eventually led to hydro-electric projects in the Peace River. Today Clark's government is considering a long-proposed scheme to build a new dam on the Peace.

The dreams of Wenner-Gren were used to help bring BC voters to Bennett's side in 1960. Although those dreams were largely empty, Bennett was able to extract one idea that he put to use in building the province, and incidentally to help him win three more elections.

Bennett's son later used his own megaproject for coal near Tumbler Ridge to help win an election in 1979, and even the NDP's Glen Clark worked hard on his 1990s hope to exploit B.C.'s hydro-electric resources to create aluminum smelters around the province.

Now Christy Clark has done the same with LNG. Many critics have scoffed at her LNG promises, noting the heavy competition in this field and the volatile nature of energy markets. The premier responded in her throne speech this year with a defiant comparison of her hopes for LNG with President John F. Kennedy's challenge to America to put astronauts on the Moon in the 1960s.

Among the many differences between Clark's LNG promise and Kennedy's Moon challenge is the fact that Kennedy's criteria for success were much clearer and far easier to judge than Clark's LNG promises. It is likely that Clark will claim victory as soon as any jobs and and any revenue are created from LNG, regardless of whether or not they come close to the numbers she used in the 2013 election campaign. And her critics - including this writer - will hold her to a higher standard.

For today, it remains to be seen whether Christy Clark can deliver on her LNG promise. But it is a sure bet that future BC political leaders will use the lure of fantastical riches from high-tech resource megaprojects to win votes on the campaign trail.

The Canadian Space Agency at 25

The headquarters of the Canadian Space Agency, Saint-Hubert, Quebec. Chris Gainor photo

March 1 marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the creation of the Canadian Space Agency, a milestone that has gone almost unnoticed.

One reason for this lack of profile may be that the space agency was created in 1989, long after Canada had begun to make its name in space with satellites, the Canadarm and even its first astronaut. Another reason may have been the release in February of the Harper government's long-awaited Space Policy Framework at a moderately high profile event in Ottawa.

The CSA's birthday does call for some reflection, particularly as the agency undergoes change under its new president, Walter Natynczyk, and the new Canadian Space Policy Framework.

Canada's space program got under way in late 1958 when the Canadian government and the U.S. space agency NASA agreed to work together on exploration of the Earth's ionosphere. The result was the creation of Canada's first satellite, Alouette l, and its launch into orbit atop a U.S. launch vehicle in September 1962. Alouette was built by scientists who worked for Canada's Department of National Defence.

During the 1960s, Canada built three successors for Alouette, and then shifted into the field of communications satellites, which remains a focus of Canadian space efforts to the present day. More agencies got involved in Canadian space efforts, including the National Research Council of Canada, Telesat Canada, a Crown Corporation created for Canadian communications satellites,  and the Department of Communications.

Although several government reports and the Canadian aerospace industry called for creation of a Canadian space agency, the Trudeau government instead created an interdepartmental committee to direct Canada's space program. The unwieldy structure existed for nearly 20 years, even as Canada's space program continued to grow with the start of the Canadarm program in the 1970s and the Canadian Astronaut Program and the RADARSAT program in the 1980s.

Finally, in 1986, Brian Mulroney's Progressive Conservative  government promised a space agency, but controversy quickly followed. Most Canadian space programs were headquartered in Ottawa, but Montreal quickly mounted an aggressive effort to have the new agency located in that city. This question, along with growing concern over the costs of Canada's contribution to what became the International Space Station, put the promise on the back burner as an election approached in 1988.

On March 1, 1989, a little more than three months after the Mulroney government emerged victorious in that election, the government announced the creation of the CSA effective that day under the presidency of Dr. Larkin Kerwin, who up to then had headed the NRC. The government also announced that the new agency would be based in the Montreal area.

The location of the CSA headquarters in Montreal was controversial because many anglophone employees based in Ottawa did not wish to move, and because many people feared that an agency located outside Ottawa would have difficulty making itself heard in the nation's capital. But legislation formalizing the creation of CSA was passed later in 1989, and soon the new headquarters was under construction at a former military airport in the south shore suburb of Saint-Hubert, distant even from downtown Montreal.

While Canada's space program has achieved many things under the direction of the CSA, including the creation of the Mobile Servicing System for the ISS, many Canadian astronaut flights, the launch of two RADARSAT satellites, new scientific satellites, continuance of Canadian leadership in communications satellite technologies, and involvement in multinational research efforts on Mars and beyond, it has done so with flat budgets, a lack of long term planning, and an often low profile. These problems led to calls for new coordinating bodies to assist CSA, both in a recent review of Canada's aerospace industry and in the Space Policy Framework. 

The CSA has sometimes enjoyed strong leadership under people like Mac Evans, who led the agency from 1994 to 2001. Former astronaut Stephen MacLean resigned as president last year after failing to get his plans approved, and the Harper government turned to the recently retired Chief of the Defence Staff of the Canadian Forces, Gen. Walter Natynczyk, to take over the CSA. Natynczyk has had a taste of success with the new Space Policy Framework, but it remains to be seen whether he can maintain the momentum as the Harper government continues to call for austerity and NASA remains mired in the battle between the Obama administration and Congress over the future of the U.S. human space program.

The CSA has not met the hopes of its supporters, and some blame its location in Montreal for this problem. Certainly the fact that the status of Quebec has fallen off Ottawa's policy radar in recent years hasn't helped (although next month's provincial election there may change that) .

But it is also true that space has rarely been a big policy issue in Ottawa because Canada spends relatively little money on space - even on a per capita basis, our space program costs only a fraction of the U.S. space program. With limited government involvement, Canada has enjoyed a high rate of return on its investment in space in terms of international profile, jobs and export revenues. Canada's space program has rarely been the subject of controversy or partisan division, which may paradoxically lower its profile in Ottawa.

For the present, many observers continue to hope that Natynczyk, with his experience in Ottawa as head of Canada's military, will strengthen the CSA during his time as president. Given the agency's relatively low profile, a change of government may not affect its fortunes.

The Crisis in Ukraine and Canada's Space Program

The Soyuz spacecraft - made in Russia, with some Ukrainian parts. Chris Gainor photo.

The growing crisis caused by the Russian invasion of the Crimea and threats against other parts of Ukraine could have serious implications for the United States civilian space program - and Canada's.

The U.S. and Russia are partners in the International Space Station along with the European Space Agency, Japan and Canada. The station cannot operate properly without U.S. and Russian cooperation because the two countries account for most of the station infrastructure, and both countries are represented on board the station at all times.

While Europe, Japan and private American firms have launched robot vehicles to the station to replenish it, all personnel have been carried to the station on either the U.S. Space Shuttle or the Russian Soyuz ferry craft. The shuttle program came to an end in the summer of 2011, and since then everyone who flies to and from the station uses Soyuz. 

U.S. astronauts find themselves  in the unhappy position of depending on their former cold war rival to carry them into space, and this will remain the case for the next few years until a new generation of U.S. spacecraft is ready to carry human passengers. 

Even though some members of the U.S. Congress have made noises in the past about no longer paying the Russians for Soyuz, the only alternative is to give up America's massive investment in the ISS. Even if the U.S. decides to continue cooperating on the ISS as if there was no problem with Russia, the Russians have the option of impeding American or other nations' astronaut access to the ISS in response to political or economic actions the American, European, Japanese or Canadian governments take to sanction Russia over its actions in Ukraine.

Moreover, some components of the Soyuz spacecraft and its launch vehicle are made in Ukraine, and the growing breach between Russia and Ukraine could affect production of these vehicles and reduce access to the ISS.

This problem has its roots in the American government's decision to bring the Space Shuttle program to an end before an alternative American spacecraft was available. It has been deepened by the political gridlock in Washington.

Ten years ago, President George W. Bush announced that the shuttle program would be wound down in response to the loss of the shuttle Columbia and its crew the year before. He announced the beginning of an ambitious program to replace the shuttle with a new generation of spacecraft to carry astronauts to the ISS and eventually to the Moon and Mars. Unfortunately, this new program was never adequately funded.

When President Barack Obama took office in 2009, he instituted a new space policy that called for private contractors to build new spacecraft to carry astronauts into low Earth orbit and the ISS in cooperation with NASA, rather than an old-fashioned program run by NASA as called for by his predecessor. 

But Republicans in Congress, who are officially in favour of private sector solutions to every problem, opposed the Obama policy and continued to insist that NASA continue to run the big government Bush-era space program in the form of the Orion spacecraft and the Space Launch System, known to its critics as the Senate Launch System. The Republicans have abandoned their free market ideology in space for the simple reason that most members of Congress from states and districts with big NASA facilities and contractors are Republicans, and accepting the Obama policy will cost them votes.

NASA is left trying to support two parallel human space programs at a time when cutbacks to its budget make it difficult for the agency to afford even one such program. The result is that the U.S. human space program is effectively held hostage by the Russian government. Another result is that Canada and other partners in the ISS also face being grounded without the goodwill of Russia.

The game of chicken being played between the Obama administration and the Republican-dominated Congress over space policy has complicated Canada's ability to plan its own space program because Canada's  partnership with NASA is so central to much of its space program.

In 2008 when Russia invaded the Republic of Georgia in the face of worldwide condemnation and threats of sanctions, cooperation in space continued without a pause. One reason was the short duration of that war before a ceasefire took the conflict off the front burner of international concerns. The conflict over Ukraine is much larger and will likely be more difficult to resolve.

In all probability, the cooperation between Russia and other ISS partners will continue for the time being as in the past. But if the crisis over Ukraine results in a serious breach between Russia and other countries, the result could be that American, Canadian, European, Japanese and perhaps even Russian  astronauts could be grounded. This would put the future of the International Space Station in jeopardy and with it, most of the world's human space programs, with the exception of China.