The first three-man ISS crew had been planning to blast off in a Russian rocket in May 1999, a month after the service module attaches itself to the space station. With the module's delay, that crew may not fly until late in 1999, if then. NASA is developing about two dozen shuttle loads of hardware to complete the station, and the Russians had promised to deliver a dozen modules of their own, plus several dozen resupply flights. But at Monday's meeting, the Russians told NASA they had been forced to stop work on all of the pieces after the service module. Meanwhile, NASA has been quietly expanding its own shuttle schedule for the next two years to haul up equipment the Russians no longer could launch on their own.
Money remains the stumbling block.
At the meeting in Moscow, the Russians recited a list of debts to various subcontractors, including to the cosmonaut training center at Star City, where ground simulators for crew training aren't even expected to be ready until next summer. NASA has suggested slipping the Russian Space Agency several hundred million dollars a year to prevent even more expensive delays. So far, though, the Clinton Administration has refused to go along with any extra funding. Yet within NASA, and between NASA and its international partners, the debate rages over whether it would be a good idea to begin the assembly now while the future grows uncertain. The debate will grow louder and more public as the countdown at Baikonur clicks away.