High Achievers

The space shuttle missions are getting to be old hat, and it’s a long time since public attention during a space flight was riveted to the doings in orbit. But the current flight, which is scheduled to end this afternoon at Edwards Air Force Base, has been one of those special ones that remind the folks on Earth what an audacious and thrilling enterprise the space program still is.

In two space walks on Friday and Sunday, two astronauts traveling 17,500 m.p.h. assembled and disassembled a four-story metal tower and a 12-foot pyramid, demonstrating and perfecting construction techniques in orbit that are expected to be used to build a space station in the next decade. The Reagan Administration wants to build the station. Congress has yet to give the go-ahead because there remain serious questions about what this country needs a permanently manned space station for. But the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is proceeding on the assumption that the questions will be answered and that the country will come to the political consensus that a space station is the next logical step in the exploration and exploitation of space.

All that aside, there’s no arguing with the power of the television pictures from space. They are still spellbinding. Here are the astronauts in their space suits working away in the shuttle’s cargo bay, putting together the Tinkertoy structures and hefting them around with ease. What they learned about construction in weightlessness will now be factored into the planning for the space station, which would be carried into orbit piecemeal and assembled there.

The excitement that the space program engendered in the 1960s, which culminated in the lunar landings, is long gone, but the program itself is no less important. Throughout recorded history, people have wondered and explored, and it falls to this generation to be the first to explore outside the planet.

NASA is still able to combine engineering and public-relations skills to come up with a methodical, step-by-step program that always features something new in the pursuit of a clearly stated goal. It’s worthwhile sometimes to marvel at how well the people in the space agency do it. They make the unbelievable seem commonplace.