For now, astronaut David Wolf doesn't know whether he will spend the rest of the year on Earth or on Russia's decrepit space station Mir.
NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin was expected to decide no later than Thursday morning whether Wolf will spend the next four months on the aging station. Either way, the space shuttle Atlantis likely will leave for Mir as planned Thursday night.The agency is under increasing political and public pressure not to put another American aboard Mir. Even some of NASA's own people have questioned Mir's merit in recent weeks, making it one of the most agonizing debates in the history of the space program.
"The whole country was behind us in Apollo," said Christopher Kraft, retired director of the Johnson Space Center and a key figure in the development of the Apollo and shuttle programs. "Today we live in this world of `what have you done for me lately' business. That makes it very tough, particularly for NASA."
NASA insiders were divided right before the 1986 Challenger accident on whether to launch that morning, but that debate didn't become public until after the ugly fact. One of the biggest previous disputes came before the triumphant Apollo 8 flight to the moon during Christmas 1968, when some argued that the Saturn 5 rocket needed more testing.
There have been other debates along the way - whether to replace John Glenn on NASA's first orbital flight in 1962 because of the perceived psychological toll of his numerous launch delays, whether to send men to the damaged Skylab station in 1973 and whether to risk astronauts in 1981 on a space shuttle protected from the fiery re-entry only by fragile outer tiles.
In every case except for Challenger, NASA was confident of its technical know-how and was proved right.
This time, NASA is forced to rely on another country's expertise. And that country's space station is breaking down more and more.