Panel Asks if Haste Imperiled Nuclear Satellite Safety

A House subcommittee Wednesday demanded the release of a classified analysis of two space shuttle missions once scheduled for May, suggesting that Energy Department and NASA officials have neglected safety concerns in their haste to launch nuclear-powered satellites.

In a lengthy letter to Energy Secretary John S. Herrington, Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) questioned “the appropriateness of assumptions” used to reach conclusions about the safety of the Galileo and Ulysses satellites, each fueled by 69 pounds of deadly plutonium-238.

Safety in Blast Cited

Internal NASA and Energy Department documents indicate that the satellites were to be powered by nuclear generators whose ability to withstand explosions is still unproved, Markey, chairman of the Energy and Commerce subcommittee on energy, said.

Other internal Energy Department documents, he said, projected that a launching pad explosion of the space shuttle conceivably could cause the release of 57,100 to 90,900 curies of plutonium, one of the deadliest substances known.

A curie is a measure of radioactive decay, and scientists estimate that just 2 to 10 millionths of a curie can cause bone or lung cancer when inhaled.

NASA and Energy Department officials said Wednesday that the analysis sought by Markey’s panel is being declassified and will be sent to him when that process is completed. Markey was denied access to it, the officials said, because his office has no secure facilities for storing and examining secret materials.

Dangers Called Minute

Federal officials have issued public assurances that the nuclear dangers posed by the two shuttle missions would be minute. All nuclear missions are reviewed by an interagency panel of NASA, Energy and Defense Department experts and must be approved by the White House.

Markey seeks the release of an Energy Department study that outlines the potential health effects of a large release of plutonium in a shuttle accident. The study is a companion to unclassified analyses of the likelihood of shuttle accidents.

In his letter, Markey said that most documents studied by the House panel indicate “a high level of official concern with safety” for the two satellite launchings. Failure to release the health effects documents “would appear to undercut” official assurances of safety, he said.

Moreover, some internal assessments of the shuttle missions “raise more questions than they answer,” he wrote. Among them are memos suggesting that NASA and Energy officials stretched their usual safety guidelines to meet the tight schedule for the two missions.

Task ‘Underestimated’

Only last month, NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel concluded that the job of safely installing the satellites and their booster rockets in the shuttle’s payload bay “was underestimated by everyone” and posed “the most critical problem in meeting the (launching) schedule.”

However, the NASA panel continued, “the old philosophy that technical perfection is more important than schedule has changed with Galileo and Ulysses”--a statement that Markey said indicates safety concerns had taken a back seat to the launching timetable.

Agency officials have expressed confidence that the nuclear generators would withstand a major shuttle explosion generating pressures of 2,000 pounds a square inch, Markey wrote, even though a 1984 test blast disintegrated a generator and the simulated fuel inside it at pressures of only 1,300 pounds.

Six Years of Warnings

As of last December, the generators had not been proved able to meet NASA’s 2,000-pound pressure standard, internal memos stated. Those documents, written by the interagency panel, criticized Energy officials for ignoring six years of warnings about the explosion resistance of the generators.

That same month, NASA manned spaceflight director Jesse W. Moore warned of “cause for concern” over the Galileo and Ulysses missions’ safety, apparently because officials were waiving standard NASA safety procedures for some crucial shuttle parts.