Economic ‘Disaster’ : As Shuttle Flies High, So Do Costs

Today’s scheduled launching of the space shuttle Discovery will start the 20th flight of the shuttle program, half the number that the U.S. space agency had projected as recently as five years ago.

Despite its much-heralded successes, the space shuttle remains far more costly and its flight schedule far less reliable than Congress and the nation had been led to expect when the project was approved in the early 1970s.

About $25 billion has been spent developing, building and launching the fleet of four reusable spaceplanes. But something has gone wrong on almost every flight, including a dramatic engine shutdown during last month’s launching. And, as an economic proposition, its critics charge, the shuttle is a bust, contributing to a budgetary squeeze that could adversely affect the nation’s next big space project, the space station.

Massively Subsidized

The government long ago dropped the idea of recovering the initial capital costs of the shuttle. It still cannot recover the marginal costs of each flight. Every satellite launched from the cargo bay is massively subsidized and will continue to be as far into the future as can be foreseen.

“It’s a disaster from an economic point of view,” said Roger Noll, an economist at Stanford University who has studied the shuttle extensively. “It has plenty of capabilities. It’s just that it’s unreliable and costly. It’ll be a billion-dollar-a-year sink indefinitely.”

In addition, the shuttle system “is so complex that problems such as we’ve seen will continue to be the order of the day rather than exceptions,” said Philip P. Chandler of the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment, who was deputy director of a recently conducted major study of the future of the space program.

Troubles Almost Routine

Most of the problems are minor. Others can be more troubling. Virtually every flight has had trouble with the landing gear and, as a result, the landings continue to be made on the long, forgiving desert runways of Edwards Air Force Base in California rather than at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

The need to transport the shuttles back across the country is one of the reasons that the turnaround flight times have remained longer than expected, playing havoc with flight frequencies.

Chandler said that every launching costs the taxpayers roughly $250 million and that “they get back a very small part of that.”

“It’s rather like the Anglo-French Concorde. They’re not going to stop flying it. They lose money on each flight and make up for it in volume,” he added jokingly.

There is no chance that the shuttle, which remains popular with the public and Congress, will be shelved. Its feats are a great source of pride and prestige for the United States, and its unique abilities keep open a wide range of possible commercial, military and scientific missions.

But those capabilities are also proving to be part of its problem. For political and bureaucratic reasons, it was designed to be all things to all people. It had to meet commercial needs, and it had to meet Defense Department needs. As a manned vehicle, it had to have redundancy built upon redundancy. And the costs soared.

Now, the shuttle’s technical and economic experiences are raising questions about the future space station, NASA’s hoped-for permanent presence in space.

Congress is expected to budget about $200 million next year for further design studies of the space station, but it has yet to approve the project in toto.

“With the space station, you can avoid the problems that you had with the shuttle system,” said Marc Vaucher, program manager at the Center for Space Policy Inc. in Cambridge, Mass., a private space think tank that does consulting work for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Provide ‘Infrastructure’

“You won’t over-design, and you won’t try to meet the needs of too many users,” he said. “You’ll provide the basis, the infrastructure, from which you will then build on to meet specific user needs.”

But the shuttle’s continuing technical problems may affect the funding for the space station. The shuttle’s development costs were expected to have decreased by now, making money available for the space station without increasing NASA’s budget. That has not happened.

“With these two big projects--the shuttle and the space station--both going on at once, we’re headed for some difficult times in the whole funding area,” Chandler said.

It is likely, therefore, that Congress will stretch out the development time for the space station, which NASA had hoped to put into orbit by 1992. It is also likely, given the shuttle experience and the funding squeeze, that the space station will be a less ambitious undertaking--at least at the outset--than NASA is now projecting.

Modest Base Seen

Current designs envision a station that can be built incrementally, starting on a modest base with the possibility of adding components as specific requirements arise.

At the moment, however, NASA has identified 107 needs that it would like the space station to meet. The studies now under way are trying to find the commonality of those needs so that the design can be simplified.

The Reagan Administration has placed great emphasis on the commercial use of space, which, except for communications satellites, remains embryonic. There are plans and hopes to use the weightlessness of space for factories and for materials processing, but no one has yet demonstrated that those plans are practical.

“One of the reasons that it’s embryonic is that you’ve never had the ability to go up and do anything,” said Vaucher of the Center for Space Policy. “You’ll never have a commercial system if you don’t have an infrastructure system to support it. If the U.S. had never built the interstate highway system, you wouldn’t have much of a trucking industry.”

Stumbling Block

One of the stumbling blocks is that space exploration costs so much, a result of the failure of the shuttle to meet its cost projections. “Everything in space costs like the very devil,” said Thomas F. Rogers, a consultant to the Office of Technology Assessment who directed its study of the future of the space program.

However, Rogers argued that the shuttle and the space station are essential elements in the civilian use of space. Without them, he said, space would be limited to satellites for communications and Earth observation.

In hindsight, analysts now agree that the shuttle should not have been envisioned as the nation’s sole launching vehicle into space. It is not the best means of lofting so-called dumb payloads, such as satellites, which do not require the presence of astronauts and can be more cheaply and reliably launched on old-fashioned rockets.

The Air Force, a reluctant partner in the shuttle program to begin with, says it needs to keep a fleet of expendable rockets on hand so that it can be sure of launching its satellites when it needs them.

European Rocket

On the civilian side, the United States’ abandonment of expendable rockets opened the door for the European Space Agency’s development of its Ariane rocket, which has captured about 40% of recent business for commercial launchings.

Noll, the Stanford economist, argues that instead of spending $10 billion to develop and build four shuttle orbiters, the United States should have spent half of that building one experimental shuttle and used the other half to develop the next generation of expendable rockets.

However, “the shuttle has some very clear advantages over any other system,” Vaucher stressed. “Anything that requires intervention on the part of a human or anything that you want to bring back or anything that requires manipulation while you’re up there obviously requires a manned, reusable vehicle. Exactly what size that vehicle is, what you should do with it and how much you should pay for it are a whole set of side issues.”

The task now, while the space station is on the drawing board, is for the Administration and Congress to decide what reasonable, limited number of things the station should do and to build a system that can be expanded in the future to meet other tasks.

“Going into space is not an end in itself,” said Chandler of the Office of Technology Assessment. “It’s a means and, unless we’re clear about what it’s a means toward, it is not particularly justifiable. There are a lot of things to spend money on. It’s not clear that one has to go overboard on getting these facilities. You can find out a lot by having a modest capability there.”