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Worth the Expense? : A New Era Dawning for U.S. in Space

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Times Staff Writer

American astronauts were on television again last week, live from space, doing their chores, cleverly improvising a crucial piece of equipment and then failing to rescue a wayward satellite, an uncommon misadventure in a program noted for its successes.

Yet the latest flight, like its 46 predecessors in the U.S. manned space program, was a link in an ongoing effort of exploration and exploitation that stretches back more than 20 years and beckons forward into an uncertain future.

Driven by a mixture of military, economic, geopolitical and scientific concerns, with a healthy dollop of national pride, the United States has spent more than $115 billion gaining knowledge, sending people to the moon and laying the foundation for what some predict will be a vast commercial enterprise in space.

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‘We Beat the Russians’

But has the civilian space program--particularly the manned space program--been worth the effort and expense? What has the United States gotten from space?

“We’ve gotten out of it exactly what we wanted to,” said Albert R. Hibbs, senior staff scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory near Pasadena, which developed, launched and directed the space agency’s unmanned explorations of the solar system and beyond.

“We got knowledge about the moon and planets,” he said. “We finally beat the Russians at something, namely putting a man on the moon. Now we have this marvelous machine (the space shuttle) that we see on television all the time. It takes people up and down.”

Among space enthusiasts, a group that includes the large, Los Angeles-based aerospace industry as well as millions of people thrilled by the adventure alone, there is no question that the program has been worth the cost, even if the full payoff is yet to come. Yet feeling persists on the part of others--less spoken now than it used to be--that the money would be better spent on Earth-bound problems.

“It is far too early to do a cost-benefit analysis of what we’ve invested so far in space because the whole purpose was long-term future payoffs,” said Geoffrey Kemp, senior fellow at the Georgetown University Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

“Every great historical exploration has very rarely brought home massive treasure in the first instance,” he said.

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Some people say that all America gained by sending astronauts to the moon were the moon rocks that they brought back. “What did Columbus gain when he first stumbled across ‘rocks’ halfway on the route to India?” Kemp asked. “Mighty little. I hardly think it’s worth debating now what flowed from that voyage.”

Practically everyone who speaks knowledgeably of the space program stresses that what has happened so far is a prologue to what is to come.

“We’ve opened up enormous potential new worlds for the possible future economic development and occupation of man,” said Thomas O. Paine, who was the administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration at the time of the first lunar landing in 1969 and now heads the National Commission on Space, set up by President Reagan last October to “formulate an agenda for the U.S. civilian space program.”

Supporters of the space program say it is a great national commitment in the tradition of all great human enterprises, which should be judged on its own terms and not by its rewards.

NASA’s Hopes for Future

When originally proposed in the early 1970s, the shuttle was supposed to pay for itself, including the research and development costs. Now NASA hopes the customers will someday pay the full cost of a launching. The cost of developing the shuttle will be borne by the government as a national resource.

But some people insist that the space program has already paid back its investment, judging by the spinoffs from the program, the limited space-based technology already in use and by the economic benefits that priming the aerospace pump has wrought.

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“The economic benefits are very strong, much stronger than you would expect,” said David W. Lippy, president of the Center for Space Policy Inc., a private think tank in Cambridge, Mass., that evaluates space projects.

Satellites Crowd Skies

The only mature space-based technology is communication by satellite, which has revolutionized the transmission of spoken and written information. The satellite that was lost last week was another in the growing list of communications satellites that are crowding the skies.

Satellite communication is a profitable business for its owners and for the government. “The amount of taxes so far paid by the companies that run communications systems and build them has far exceeded the amount the government spent to research and develop that capability,” Hibbs said.

But Earth-observation satellites have yet to pay off in the same way. And using the gravity-free environment of space to manufacture drugs or new materials remains an experimental program whose commercial benefits have yet to be proved.

The spinoffs from the space program are legion, and they extend far beyond Teflon, Velcro and Tang. Today’s microelectronics industry--and the plethora of computers and silicon chips that it produces--is a direct result of the need for small, reliable, lightweight systems to take astronauts to the moon.

“Most technologies that are associated with the advancement of computers can be traced back to the Mercury-Gemini-Apollo program as well as to the shuttle,” Lippy said.

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In addition, the space program has driven research in robotics, which is finding increasing industrial applications. And the demands of the space program have led to the development of new materials that have found important and profitable uses on Earth.

Every year, the space agency publishes a book describing all of the spinoffs of the space program. But do those spinoffs justify spending $7 billion a year on NASA?

“I’m not a great believer in the Earth-based spinoffs,” said Paine, the former NASA administrator whose business is a high-technology consulting firm, Thomas Paine Associates, in Westwood. “If you want to advance silicon-chip technology, the thing to spend your money on is silicon-chip technology, not on ventures to the moon.”

But as a practical matter, without the goal of a lunar landing, the impetus to develop silicon-chip technology would have been absent. “Unless you’ve got something to do, unless there’s some object out there, the industry somehow never gets built,” Hibbs said.

Shock of Sputnik

All of these developments stem from the civilian space program, which Congress created in 1958 in response to the Soviets’ launching the year before of Sputnik, the first man-made satellite.

The decision to make space exploration a civilian program continues to have ramifications today and for the future. After being relatively uninterested in the military aspects of space, the Pentagon more recently changed its mind. Since 1982, military expenditures in space have been greater than civilian expenditures, and the gap is growing.

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The shock of Sputnik fueled the nation’s commitment to a space program, but whether the civilian needs or the military needs drive that program remains open to debate.

“We are in space first and foremost and primarily still to this day for national security purposes,” said Lippy of the Center for Space Policy Inc.

But Hibbs of JPL insisted that NASA’s priorities have been set by the civilian space agency and not by the Pentagon. He noted, for example, that the military was never much interested in the shuttle from the outset of the program, and the Air Force remains a reluctant passenger, preferring reliable, expendable rockets to loft its satellites into space.

“I don’t think military space activities have had a very great impact on NASA space activities,” Hibbs said.

Kemp takes the middle ground. National security may not be the only impetus for the civilian space program, but it was an important factor. “Without the momentum of the Cold War and the arms race that resulted from it, the urgency to develop space for non-military purposes would have been much more protracted,” he said. “There wasn’t any overriding economic incentive to do it.”

But at least one benefit of the space program that is rarely talked about relates directly to national security: the ability to keep an eye on Soviet ICBM fields and to verify arms control treaties by so-called national means, that is, by reconnaissance satellites.

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“Every arms control treaty that we negotiate with the Soviets has a clause that neither nation will interfere with the national means of verification, which means looking down from orbit and checking up to see whether that treaty is being observed,” Paine said.

Just as U.S. satellites keep watch on Soviet missiles, Soviet satellites watch U.S. missiles. “The space program has been instrumental, crucial and critical to that process,” Lippy said. “It’s been very important in terms of stabilizing relationships between the two countries.”

One of the concerns of opponents of the Reagan Administration’s Strategic Defense Initiative, which seeks to develop space vehicles that could shoot down enemy missiles in flight, is that such a major new capability in space would destabilize the balance of power between the two countries.

The success of the American space program also had important geopolitical ramifications for the Soviet Union and the rest of the world. Just as Americans were startled in 1957 to find that Russian technology had beaten them to orbit, so the Russians may have gotten a heady misconception at the time about their strength relative to the United States.

“The space program has completely reversed that, not only in the eyes of the world but in the eyes of the leaders of the Soviet Union,” Paine said. “I would put that as perhaps the No. 1 contribution that we have gotten to date: putting the United States back into its very clear and internationally understood position of technological pre-eminence.”

Not only has the space program demonstrated that the United States has technological superiority, it also demonstrated that the country knows how to manage a very complicated problem involving thousands of technicians working on a wide variety of problems. This was no small management task.

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Although the United States continues to try to maintain a separation between the military and civilian space programs, increased commercialization of space--a prime goal of the Reagan Administration--may lead to a further breakdown in the distinction between the two. Current efforts on the shuttle are directed toward eventually launching small factories into orbit. If the military concludes that it, too, could benefit from manufacturing in space, it will feel the necessity for defending those orbiting factories from attack.

“If the arguments about the potential economic value of space are true, then no government can ignore the investment from a strategic standpoint,” Kemp said. “And it’s just as logical, therefore, to have a capability to protect your factories as it is to protect your communications satellites. The greater the value of your commerce, and the more military implications of that commercial enterprise, the greater the driving force is bound to be to have a constabulary capability to protect it.”

Very little thought has been given to this need, but the direction of current activity makes it seem likely that that there will be a military mission in space to protect activities in space.

Most of the many satellites--for communications, Earth observation, remote sensing and the like--were launched atop unmanned, expendable rockets. Only recently have satellites been put into the shuttle and become part of the manned space program.

Role of Astronauts

Despite last week’s failure, astronauts have demonstrated that they can play an important role in the satellite business. On previous shuttle flights, astronauts repaired one broken satellite and retrieved two others that had misfired and wound up in useless orbits. Both repair and rescue missions were harbingers of a new capability in space that promises longer life and greater flexibility for multimillion-dollar satellites that previously were discarded when they stopped working.

At least part of the justification of the space program--a small part, to be sure--has been the advancement of knowledge. NASA’s unmanned probes to the moon and the planets have sought to give scientists and all people a better understanding of the origin of the universe and the solar system. Breathtaking pictures have been sent back from the planets, providing mankind with its first close-up look at these other worlds, and a variety of sophisticated instruments have radioed back important data about conditions there.

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For the most part, however, the massive amounts of data that have been collected have outpaced the ability of scientists to fashion explanations. “Theoreticians are hard to come by,” Hibbs said. “It’s much easier to build instruments and get data than to create theoretical models.”

Extraordinary Views

Though spacecraft have given us extraordinary views of the rings of Saturn, for example, there is still no good explanation for the creation or continued existence of those rings. Nor is it known whether all planets--including the Earth--have rings of sorts of their own.

With regard to observations of the Earth, the space program has also provided much important data, some of which has already proved useful. Weather satellites provide pictures of vast areas. Meteorologists continue to hope that faster and faster computers combined with more and more data will enable them to develop models for improving their predictions of the weather. Oceanographers are using satellite-gathered information about the temperature, pressure and winds of the oceans to produce theories of the circulation of the seas.

Whatever the space program has achieved or not achieved, it remains part of the long human tradition of exploring the frontiers of civilization.

“This is the time to have lived,” Hibbs said. “We will never again have the evolution of the space program. It exists. We can make it bigger and better, but we can’t start it again. This was the time.”

Next: Future U.S. space missions.

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