Space Program for Sale

Sergei Krikalev got more than he bargained for when he rocketed into space last May from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, located in what was then still known as the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic. Krikalev was scheduled for a five-month stint as flight engineer aboard the Mir space station; his replacement was slated to arrive in October. Who could have foreseen that Krikalev's country would disintegrate before his mission was over? By the time October rolled around, the Baikonur facility was on the verge of belonging to Kazakhstan , rather than the Soviet Union. As a public relations measure, space-program authorities decreed that instead of a sending a replacement for the cosmonaut, a native Kazakh should go up for a short and politically expedient visit. Poor Krikalev got some fresh supplies but no relief. Ten months after his sojourn began, he's still circling the earth every 90 minutes, day and night, stranded 350 km above the planet. He may finally come down next week.

Krikalev's troubles are symbolic of what has happened to the Soviet space program. As recently as last year, 34 years after Sputnik, the U.S.S.R. was basking in its reputation as the premier spacefaring nation in the world. Now political fragmentation and economic upheaval are raising questions about whether the successor states will be able to support a viable space program at all. In the U.S., even as officials debate the larger question of whether the West should provide economic aid to these states, a more specific debate is under way over the wisdom of striking commercial deals involving their rockets and other scientific assets.

Looking for ways to keep working, Russian space-industry officials, as well as scientists of all sorts, have begun to market their most useful skills and services to the U.S and other nations. Last week Boris Babayan, who created powerful supercomputers for the former Soviet Union's space and nuclear- weapons programs, hired his entire Moscow lab out to Sun Microsystems of Mountain View, Calif., to develop computers and software. Also last week, the U.S. Department of Energy signed a one-year contract with scientists at Moscow's Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy to do research on thermonuclear fusion, a potentially limitless energy source that American physicists have been struggling with for decades. Both deals are tremendous bargains for the U.S. Sun is paying Babayan's 50 or so crack computer scientists just a few hundred dollars a year apiece. And the entire 116-member Kurchatov team is being hired for $90,000 a year -- roughly the salary of one high-level U.S. physicist.

But space scientists are having a tougher time marketing themselves to the U.S. Though officials at NASA have expressed interest in Russian space technology, a lingering cold war mentality, especially in the Defense Department, has kept any major deals from going through. Deputy Secretary of Defense Donald Atwood and other hard-line officials have argued that it would be a mistake to keep Russia's missile factories and space reactor plants in business. "We don't want to encourage them," Atwood told a congressional panel recently. After all, missiles can be used to launch nuclear warheads as well as satellites, and reactors could power space weapons.