Outside View: Partners in space -- Part 2

MOSCOW, Oct. 16 (UPI) -- The Russian LEND -- Lunar Exploration Neutron Detector -- instrument is in effect a cousin of the High Energy Neutron Detector -- HEND -- and designed to be carried aboard the American Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter -- LRO. Its mission is to find water in permanently shaded craters near the lunar poles.

Russia's DAN -- Dynamic Albedo of Neutrons -- instrument will take part in the American MSL -- Mars Science Laboratory -- mission, which is scheduled to kick off in 2009. A Martian rover will be landed on the planet's surface for its instruments, including DAN, to measure water content of Martian soil as it advances.

Other questions examined during the meeting were the functioning of the International Space Station and completion of its assembly by 2010.

In the view of Susan Eisenhower, the granddaughter of Dwight Eisenhower and president of the Eisenhower Institute, what occurred following the Columbia disaster demonstrated Russia's absolutely key role in the ISS program. If it had not been for Russian vehicles, she said, the station would have been stranded without any means of delivery, be it crew or cargo. Russia practically alone saved the project.

Today the ISS participants have different views on its operating life. The United States has already announced it will pull out of the program by the end of 2015. The European Space Agency has, in turn, stressed it is not going to subsidize NASA's portion of the project if that happens. Only Russia plans to run the station presumably until 2020.

Meanwhile, as with the Mir station, ISS developers were little concerned with wishes of the station's end-users, or scientists. The scientific community was served up with a completed project that, in expert view, was not fit enough for long-term use as a research platform.

Things have been made worse by the failure to bring up the crew complement to the planned strength of six, and spacemen are catastrophically short of time even to maintain the station's systems.

We now hear talk of using the ISS as a "jumping-off ground" for manned flights beyond the near-Earth orbit. If such a mission had been considered at an early stage in the station's construction, its history might have been different.

Currently, specialists are discussing a manned expedition to Mars and are even naming a date. In the view of Roald Sagdeyev, a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, who was director of the Space Research Institute for 14 years, no space power, however developed, would risk such a flight on its own. For it, this would be not only a costly project. Any failure, let alone death in orbit, could compromise the very idea of space expansion. In a multinational undertaking the participating countries can "hide" behind each other's backs and share responsibility.

On the other hand, despite the successes of recent years, Mars will remain a problematic planet for a long time to come and will have to be explored with unmanned devices and through wide-ranging international cooperation.

The cooperative efforts of the American and Russian space communities have already produced such scientific and engineering results as are unlikely to have been achieved within such a short space of time had they acted single-handedly, Sagdeyev believes.

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(Yury Zaitsev is an analyst at the Russian Academy of Sciences' Institute of Space Research. This article is reprinted by permission of RIA Novosti. The opinions expressed in this article are the author's and do not necessarily represent those of RIA Novosti.)

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(United Press International's "Outside View" commentaries are written by outside contributors who specialize in a variety of important issues. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of United Press International. In the interests of creating an open forum, original submissions are invited.)