Tragedy Brings Space Program to a Standstill

The tragic loss of the space shuttle Challenger Tuesday with seven persons aboard brings the nation’s manned space program to a standstill during what was to have been the busiest time in its history.

While the loss of seven lives far overshadowed all other concerns, experts on the space program pointed out that it will be months, at best, before another shuttle blasts off from Cape Canaveral.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration will not launch again until its own investigation has been completed, the cause of the disaster has been determined and corrective measures have been taken.

Optimistic Estimate

The most optimistic estimate for that process to run its course is at least two months, but it will probably take much longer.

While the accident’s long-term effect on the space program is somewhat unclear, the tragedy’s immediate impact will be substantial.

NASA had planned 15 shuttle missions for 1986--by far the busiest schedule in its history, one that many had said was overly ambitious.

This was to have been the year that NASA demonstrated once and for all its ability to field a quick turnaround fleet of space vehicles that could meet commercial and military needs. But early delays with the Columbia mission and with Challenger itself last week were already raising questions about that capability and the practicality of attempting so many launchings.

There is no chance now that the shuttle Columbia will be launched in early March for this nation’s most important observations of Halley’s comet. The Columbia was to have carried a sophisticated observatory, called Astro, into orbit so that scientists in the United States could carry out observations during the same time that five international spacecraft were to encounter the comet.

The schedule was already so tight that scientists feared NASA would not be able to launch Columbia in time to be on station for the encounter, but that issue became moot Tuesday. The Columbia was to have been launched on March 6, but even the preliminary investigations into Tuesday’s tragedy are not likely to be completed by then.

Also in doubt are two important science missions set for May.

An Ambitious Effort

The Challenger’s next mission had been scheduled for May 15, when it was to have carried the European spacecraft Ulysses into orbit as part of an ambitious effort to study the polar regions of the sun. After its release from the shuttle, Ulysses was to have used its own rockets to fly near the planet Jupiter, and then use Jupiter’s gravitational field to fling itself out of the plane of the Earth’s orbit and over the sun’s poles.

The timing was already tight because Jupiter will not be in the right position to serve as a gravitational slingshot for another 13 months, so any delay would have jeopardized that mission anyway.

The shuttle Atlantis had been scheduled on May 21 to launch the Galileo spacecraft on an ambitious unmanned mission to Jupiter. But that flight also depended on Jupiter’s being in the right position, so a delay of even a few days could force a one-year postponement of that project.

Goals Won’t Be Met

Tuesday’s tragic accident means some of these goals will not be met.

Moreover, according to Leonard W. David, research director of the National Commission on Space, NASA’s lucrative trade in the launching of commercial communications satellites--plagued by technical flaws that sent several “duds” into space last year--could dwindle. The loss of one of the four shuttle orbiters, by disrupting an already tight launching schedule, could drive wary customers to France’s competing Ariane rocket program.

In the long run, David said, the accident clouds the Reagan Administration’s plans for the next century’s exploration of the moon and Mars--plans that begin with the use of shuttle crews to build a permanent station in orbit around the Earth.

“Much of our speculation has been based in the premise that the shuttle and a space station are operating by 1995 or so,” David said. “So clearly, a shuttle mishap like this one is a serious setback. . . . They need so many orbiters available to put up the (space station) modules, and NASA had them pretty well plotted out.”

The accident, said Thomas Paine, who is chairman of a presidential commission that is charting the future of the nation’s space program, “will force a re-examination of how we will serve the nation’s needs through the space program.”

And that re-examination, he suggested, may not be a bad thing.

It appeared certain, too, that Congress would launch the most intensive investigation of the manned space program since 1967, when both the House and Senate probed the Apollo 1 training fire that killed astronauts Virgil Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee. Monday was the 19th anniversary of that tragedy.

Sen. Albert Gore Jr. (D-Tenn.), a member of the Senate space subcommittee, called for an “immediate” and “intensive” investigation of Tuesday’s tragedy.

“In addition to the human tragedy, we’ve also lost 25% of the nation’s launch capability in one stroke,” added Paine, who headed NASA when Americans first landed on the moon.

“And we were already spread pretty thin,” he said.

Although shuttle chief Jesse W. Moore said Tuesday afternoon that it would be possible for the Rockwell Corp., which built the orbiter, to assemble a new vehicle, congressional sources said it is virtually unthinkable that in the present budgetary atmosphere lawmakers would approve building another orbiter to replace Challenger.

Paine said the tragedy will force the nation to take a new look at its manned space program.

Impact May Not Be Severe

“The evidence was we could probably manage to carry out the program, but we were counting on a zero accident rate with four vehicles,” he said. That, he suggested, was “a little bit ambitious.”

While there is no way in the months ahead to avoid what Paine termed “a major dislocation in the nation’s space program,” the long-range impact may not be too severe.

“There’s an enormous sense of loss because these people represent all of us,” said Bruce Murray of Caltech, who led the Jet Propulsion Laboratory during some of its busiest years. “We’ve lost members of our own family in a psychological sense.

“Where do we go from here? We will continue the manned space program in the same direction as before. There is no possibility we will be detracted from that,” added Murray, who has championed unmanned missions in space.

He said tragedies such as Tuesday’s come with the territory.

“There is no way to do this (manned exploration of space) without risk. The only uncertainty was how that risk would manifest itself. Unfortunately, it manifested itself in a tragic way.

“But there is a lot of resilience in the program and the people of NASA,” he said. “This is not going to derail the program. We will continue in the same general direction we were going.”

Times Staff Writer Michael Wines in Washington also contributed to this story.