The three astronauts aboard the international space station, in their first public comments since the break-up of the shuttle Columbia, said on Tuesday the isolation of space is making it difficult to weather the loss of their seven comrades killed in the accident. Compounding that grief, however, is a very real dilemma: They just lost their ride home, and what was supposed to be a four-month tour of space could be extended by a year or more.The three astronauts, who have lived on the space station since November, said in a tele-conference that they began that fateful Saturday the same way everyone back at mission control had: with the hope there would be survivors. When there were none, the morning ended in lonely silence, in guilt, in fear and in irrational anger.Space station astronaut Donald Pettit, an American, was in the midst of a very long-distance computer chess match with Columbia’s pilot when the shuttle disintegrated while re-entering earth’s atmosphere on February 1. Worst yet, being in space seemed only to compound their grief. Mission control officers in Houston have worked to give the crew time alone to grieve, even time to listen to a memorial service last week on the radio. When the service ended, the space station astronauts rang a bell seven times, once for each of the Columbia astronauts. Then they just stared off into space.‘‘When you’re up here this long, you can’t just bottle up your emotions and cope with it all the time,’’ Kenneth Bowersox, NASA astronaut and commander of the crew on the space station, said yesterday. ‘‘It’s important for us to acknowledge that the people on (Columbia) were our friends. We feel their loss.’’The astronauts’ remarks came hours before the board charged with determining what brought down Columbia introduced itself to the nation at a news conference. Retired Adm. Harold W. Gehman Jr., chairman of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, said his panel is already struggling with competing ‘‘imperatives.’’ The first, he said, is to arrive at cautious and accurate conclusions and the second is to complete that investigation quickly so that NASA can resurrect its space shuttle programme. The space shuttle is the primary provider of personnel and supplies to the space station, the semi-permanent spaceship and laboratory that the US is building along with 15 other nations.The space shuttle fleet has been grounded while officials try to determine the cause of the Columbia accident. In effect, the space station crew is temporarily stranded, because the shuttle Atlantis, which was supposed to pick them up on March 1, is not going to lift off anytime soon.The bewildering juxtaposition of sending humans into space could not have been illustrated more sharply than it was Tuesday, when Bowersox and the other two crewmen addressed the world in a teleconference. Shoulder-to-shoulder in matching blue uniforms, the astronauts were tethered to the wall to hold them steady in microgravity, as they soared about 394 km above Australia while orbiting in a half-built, $100-billion spaceship seen as the future of space exploration. Behind them, a sign read: ‘‘Exit.’’ When they will open that door again remains to be seen.Across the world, space administrators are scrambling to address the issue and are considering these possibilities, official said Tuesday: Russian space officials could hurry along their schedule for launching a Soyuz craft that could bring in the crew’s replacement, possibly substituting its three-man crew with just two astronauts to lighten the demand on supplies. Or NASA could complete its probe, fix the flaws and get a shuttle back on the launch pad, quite unlikely, say officials.The crew could abandon the space station, using a Soyuz craft that is docked there as an escape pod. This is considered a desperate measure at NASA, where officials still hope the coming year — the third year of occupation on the space station — will be the busiest and the most complex to date.Bowersox and the other two crew members, Pettit and Russian cosmonaut Nikolai Mikhailovich Budarin, said Tuesday they have offered to stay in space for another year if that’s what it takes. They have already spoken with their wives and relatives. ‘‘My sense of time has changed,’’ Bowersox said. ‘‘I don’t so much worry about weeks and months. I like life here on station..We feel comfortable that we have a way home.’’ The most pressing concern on board the space station is water, officials said. Pettit said the shuttle typically generated water through its energy production system. Other crafts have to dump that water into space, but the shuttle was able to transfer it to the space station when it docked there, increasing the supplies on board the space station. That exchange won’t happen again anytime soon, and it is very difficult to conserve water on board the space station.Pettit said he has launched a survey of potential conservation programmes while the world sorts out the space station’s fate. For instance, the astronauts had removed batteries from some tools and devices before the Columbia accident, though the batteries had some ‘‘juice’’ left in them, Pettit said. Those batteries will be retrieved and used until they are completely spent.An unmanned Russian Progress craft docked with the space station last week and delivered enough supplies to last the crew until June. The Progress also fired its thrusters on Tuesday to lift the space station into its proper orbit path. The space station falls more than 600 feet each day because of gravity and often relies on the shuttle to push it back up. (LA TIMES-WASHINGTON POST)
