EMBRACE IN SPACE

By MICHAEL D. LEMONICK

Twenty years ago, two young cold warriors--one a U.S. Air Force fighter jockey, the other a Soviet test pilot--watched from opposite sides of the world as their countries staged a high-tech media event. The brief political thaw known as detente was in full flow, and high overhead the Apollo and Soyuz spacecraft were locked in an orbital tango. Their commanders reached through the spaceships' air locks for a symbolic handshake, amid much talk that the superpowers were going to move from the space race of the 1960s to a new era of space cooperation. Despite efforts in that direction, little availed, and shortly after the declaration of martial law in Poland in 1981 the joint space agreements were allowed to lapse.

It seemed inconceivable back then that those two fighter pilots would someday be on the same flight crew. Yet when the space shuttle Atlantis roared off the pad at Cape Canaveral last week in America's 100th manned launch, the two men, Robert ("Hoot") Gibson and Anatoli Solovyev, along with four other U.S. astronauts and Russian cosmonaut Nikolai Budarin, were both on board. Their mission was a more ambitious reprise of the earlier Apollo-Soyuz flight: rendezvous and dock with the Russian space station Mir, orbiting 245 miles above the earth.

Atlantis climbed quickly into a matching orbit with Mir and, over the next day or so, slowly closed a 4,000-mile gap with its target. Thursday morning, with the spacecraft 250 ft. apart and orbiting through space at 17,500 m.p.h., Gibson and shuttle pilot Charles Precourt began the delicate and risky maneuvers aimed at linking the two great ships. One careless burst of a thruster jet, and Mir's feathery solar panels could be destroyed; too forceful a bump from Atlantis, and either or both craft could be severely damaged. And if Gibson and Precourt couldn't align their 100-ton spacecraft to within 3 in. and 2 [degrees] of its assigned position before the final docking, the whole mission would have to be aborted.

Sighting through a camera mounted within the shuttle's docking assembly and aiming at a target in Mir's matching equipment, Gibson gently nudged Atlantis toward the Russian station, foot by agonizing foot. At 30 ft. he stopped to make sure the alignment was perfect. It was. As millions watched on live TV and listened to the terse, four-way conversation between the two spaceships and their ground controllers at Houston and Kaliningrad, Atlantis approached to within a few feet, then inches.

And then, as six sets of hooks and latches locked into place, an American spaceship and a Russian one were soaring through space together for the first time in two decades. The astronauts and cosmonauts checked to make sure the tunnel-like air lock linking the ships had no leaks. At length, the hatches swung slowly open. Mir's commander, Vladimir Dezhurov, floated through the lock and grasped Gibson's hand in joyous greeting.

For the next few hours, there was not much to distinguish this space spectacular from the dead-end Apollo-Soyuz mission. Astronauts and cosmonauts drank toasts, exchanged symbolic gifts (flowers, candy and fruit for the crew on Mir; the traditional Russian hospitality offering of bread and salt for the Americans), toured each other's spacecraft and issued properly portentous statements about cooperation in space--as did officials on the ground, including Presidents Clinton and Yeltsin.

This time, there is good reason to believe the talk is more than political posturing. Both Russia and the U.S. have powerful incentives to make a joint venture work. The Russians desperately need U.S. financial help to salvage their fast-crumbling space infrastructure. The U.S. wants to keep the attention of Russian scientists and rocket engineers focused on nonmilitary projects, rather than see them succumb to the lure of weapons work for other nations. Moreover, though America's manned space program is much healthier than Russia's, a tightfisted Congress keeps squeezing the agency's budget. The latest round of cost cutting will force NASA to eliminate nearly 30,000 civil service and contract jobs over the next five years. The message is clear, says space historian James Oberg: "Do it with the Russians or shut down."

The U.S. and Russian programs complement each other nicely. Russia has vastly more experience with long-term human space flight, and thanks to its unsophisticated but highly reliable boosters, its launch rate is more successful than that of any other country. The U.S., on the other hand, is better at electronics and engineering--which is why Russia's version of the space shuttle is rusting in a warehouse, never having carried a human into space.

As a result of the pressure to make space cooperation work, the Atlantis-Mir docking is not simply a one-shot space show but a calculated step in a series of missions that will take advantage of both programs' strengths. The goal: construction of a permanently manned international space station--an orbiting laboratory that, in various versions, has been on the books for a decade and that NASA administrator Daniel Goldin calls "the heart of the space program."

It is not the first step either; that was taken in February when the space shuttle Discovery tested its maneuverability by approaching to within 37 ft. of Mir. In March U.S. astronaut Dr. Norman Thagard, fresh from two months of training at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, zoomed into space aboard a Soyuz capsule to begin a three-month stay on Mir--a record sojourn for an American, though nearly a year short of the Russian record. The current mission is, among other things, a ticket home for Thagard and his two Russian companions on Mir; in exchange, Solovyev and Budarin will stay in orbit to maintain Mir's nine-year record of continuous habitation when Atlantis returns to earth this week.

But there was a lot to do before that could happen. Once the handshakes and photo opportunities were done, the 10 space travelers had to transfer food and water, which Atlantis had brought to replenish Mir's dwindling supplies. The astronauts and cosmonauts also had a full schedule of experiments that would occupy them for the next five days. Many of them involve medical tests on Thagard and the Mir crew to analyze the effects of long-term space flight on their bodies.

Similar tests will continue on a planned series of follow-up shuttle-Mir encounters over the next two years; the flights will also give astronauts and cosmonauts more practice at docking their craft and allow them to try out space construction techniques. Then, in 1997, they are scheduled to begin putting together an all-new space station, with modules supplied and assembled by both nations. Starting in 1998, they will bring in the European Space Agency, Canada and Japan to expand the facility into a permanently staffed station that will operate through 2012.

That's the plan, at least. In practice, merging two independent space programs will not be easy. Astronauts and cosmonauts have been training at each other's facilities for nearly a year, and differences in approach have forced both sides to adjust. Language has been one problem. Another, according to Brewster Shaw, NASA's director of space-shuttle operations: "We've learned that the Russians are not as schedule-oriented as we are. Our people stand around and feel they're being slowed down a bit. [The Russians] have a different way of viewing the world than we do. It's kind of like getting married."

While minor differences will undoubtedly be ironed out, more serious questions remain about whether both nations can sustain political and economic support for such an ambitious project. NASA originally estimated that working with the Russians would shave $4 billion off the space station's cost. Later the estimate was revised to $2 billion, then $1.5 billion. A recent report by the General Accounting Office put the savings at a mere $600 million.

Questions have also been raised about the Russians' ability to fulfill their part of the bargain. The Baikonur Cosmodrome is in Kazakhstan, once part of Soviet Central Asia, now an independent country. Although Russia has signed a 20-year lease for the Cosmodrome, overall relations between the two nations have been rocky.

The Cosmodrome, furthermore, is deteriorating rapidly from the harsh desert climate, from neglect and from outright theft and vandalism. Leaky roofs allow rainwater to flood the interiors of assembly buildings, and some of the launching pads are no longer usable. "People steal anything, even copper cable or sheet metal from the roofs of buildings," reports Sergei Leskov, a space correspondent for Izvestia. Last year a supply rocket reached Mir with part of its complement of food missing--evidently looted on the ground by launch crews. The danger is not so much of an accident, say U.S. space experts, as of a breakdown that could torpedo the schedule and drive costs up. That could prove fatal to a program many U.S. critics consider a scientific dead end and a huge waste of money.

The Russians have little money to repair or maintain Baikonur and are dependent on NASA payments--$400 million has been budgeted so far--for the use of their facilities. "The payment is not commensurate with Russian participation in the project," grumbles Grigori Khozin, director of the Center for Global Problems at the Russian Diplomatic Academy and an expert on his country's space program.

The successful completion of the space-station project also depends on U.S.-Russian relations remaining cordial for the next 1-1/2 decades, which is by no means certain. For all the potential pitfalls, though, the very fact that astronauts and cosmonauts were coasting together high above the earth last week, cooperating in a well-planned, tightly executed joint mission, is reason for optimism. Twenty years ago, says Gibson, the astronauts may have thought, "I'm shaking your hand but do I really trust you?" This time, there's no doubt that both sides are doing everything they can to make things work.

--Reported by Hannah Bloch/Washington, Jerry Hannifin/Cape Canaveral and Terence Nelan/Moscow

With reporting by HANNAH BLOCH/WASHINGTON, JERRY HANNIFIN/CAPE CANAVERAL AND TERENCE NELAN/MOSCOW