Shuttle’s Mission Remains Wreathed in Veil of Secrecy

The space shuttle Discovery completed another day in orbit Saturday, circling the globe in the silence of space rivaled only by the silence of the space agency guiding it on a mysterious mission.

Did Discovery and its five-man crew successfully complete their primary mission--said to be the launch of a new, highly secret spy satellite of enhanced capabilities?

Did the crucial new booster system, which failed in its only previous use on a shuttle mission, perform satisfactorily?

Did the ever-vigilant Soviet surveillance apparatus on the ground and in the sky pick up enough data to thwart the satellite’s efforts?

NASA Keeping Quiet

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the U.S. Air Force--uneasy partners in the joint venture pushing the United States into increased military use of the heavens--are not saying.

The new booster, known as the “inertial upper stage,” is made by the Boeing Aerospace Co. It is needed to propel the satellite away from the shuttle’s low orbit of between 120 miles and 200 miles and into its parking space 22,300 miles over the Equator south of the Soviet Union.

However, Boeing officials would not say whether their $50-million product had worked better the second time than it did the first. In April, 1983, overheating caused the first booster to send a tracking and data relay satellite tumbling into a wrong orbit, which was corrected only when tiny, built-in rockets were fired to nudge it into proper position.

In its report on the mission, the space agency said, as it has in each of its three-times-a-day accounts, that spacecraft and crew “continue to perform satisfactorily.”

NASA is operating under tight constraints imposed by the Air Force, which is contributing $31.2 million of the $125-million cost of the 15th shuttle trip. The space agency says that in keeping mum on the mission’s progress, it is only following the customer’s orders.

The Air Force fears that disclosure of the details of the project would make it easier for the Soviets to protect themselves from the satellite’s secret abilities to monitor, through two giant parabolic antennas, the radio, radar and other electronic emissions from the western Soviet Union.