The Gore-Chernomyrdin Space Station Debacle

From the outset in 1993, Russian-American space cooperation was a key item on the Gore-Chernomyrdin Commission's agenda. Starting with the 1993 Vancouver Summit, the Clinton administration--under the direction of the Gore delegation to the Commission--undertook an ill-fated effort to integrate Russia fully into the International Space Station.

In 1993, Russia was economically and politically ill prepared to devote the necessary resources to completing the space station on the ambitious schedule then contemplated. Nevertheless, the U.S. staff of the Gore-Chernomyrdin Commission and others in the Clinton administration repeatedly asserted in 1993 that Russian involvement in the space station would actually accelerate its deployment. Even more improbably, they claimed it would save money for United States taxpayers.

The vice president estimated that Russian participation in the space station program would save U.S. taxpayers $4 billion and reduce the time needed to deploy the space station by two years. But the error in that optimistic estimate became apparent almost immediately. By April 1994, the savings promised by the Clinton administration had been reduced to $1.5 billion, and the estimated time savings had been cut to just over one year. By the end of 1994, the promised savings had vanished entirely. The actual result of the Gore-Chernomyrdin space station initiative has been not savings but added costs, and not early deployment but seemingly endless delay.

The space station was originally scheduled to begin operation in 2002. The most recent revised schedule calls for beginning full operations no sooner than 2006. Similarly, the original estimate of $4 billion in savings has been changed to added costs: whereas the 1993 price tag for the space station was $17.4 billion, it has since ballooned to at least $24.1 billion. In 1998 testimony before the House Science Committee, Joe Rothenberg, NASA's Associate Administrator for Human Spaceflight, conceded that Russian participation in the program is responsible for $1 billion of these added costs. The Johnson Space Center has estimated that Russian participation in the space station has added $5 billion in costs.

Under the original Gore-Chernomyrdin proposal, the United States was to have paid Russia $400 million for its role in the space station project. This money would take the form of direct payments from NASA to its Russian counterpart, Rosaviakosmos. But the United States has already paid nearly twice this amount to the Russian government, and further additional funds have been requested.

In the final analysis, these cost overruns and delays are neither unprecedented nor wholly unexpected. What is troubling about the Gore-Chernomyrdin Commission's role, however, is that it served chiefly to deny and cover up the delays and cost overruns when they occurred. Three years into the Russian participation in the space station program--and long after the rising costs and attendant delays had become self-evident--Vice President Gore announced "an ambitious future schedule of cooperation in space," as if the earlier schedule had never existed.

Disregarding both the escalating costs for the United States and the Russian government's failure to meet its commitments, the Commission has produced similarly glowing statements about the health and vitality of U.S.-Russian space cooperation throughout each of the past seven years.

When confronted with information that Russian participation in the space station was detrimental to the station's success, the Clinton administration argued that the costs and delays in the space station program might be justified as an effort to prevent a "brain drain" of Russian scientists to other countries seeking their expertise in rocketry and missile development. But in fact the Russian government had proved willing to provide these other countries with its scientists' missile and rocket expertise without the scientists ever having to leave their Russian research institutes. U.S. assistance on the space station, it was learned, actually subsidized the "brain drain" by supporting companies in the Russian military-industrial complex that were simultaneously engaged in both the space station program with the United States and missile proliferation to Iran.

The Commission's failure in this, its first assignment--and, in particular, its demonstration of a willful blindness to uncomfortable facts--would become symptomatic of its approach to the broad range of issues in U.S.-Russia policy, and a microcosm of the Clinton administration's approach to unpleasant realities in Russia.

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