Unmanned Space Program Drawing to a Close

The roar of a rocket blasting off the launching pad will soon fill the air here again as an enormously successful space program lumbers toward its demise.

The launching from this saddened spaceport is set for May 1, long before the next space shuttle is likely to lift off, and there will be no astronauts on this flight.

The rocket will be a Delta and will carry a weather satellite into orbit. It is part of the program that sent astronomical observatories into orbit, delivered the first U.S. scientific instruments to the surface of the moon and sent spacecraft to Mercury, Venus, Mars, Saturn, Jupiter and Uranus.

Program Ends in 1987

That program is to end in August of next year, when the last of the seven remaining “expendable launch vehicles” is fired from the nearby Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. The launching pads will be deactivated, the equipment put in storage and a successful program that has been in the shadow of the manned space effort will end.

That, according to the man who runs the program, is a real shame.

“We’ve got a good program going,” said Charles Gay, head of expendable launchings for the Kennedy center. “You hate to put something like that aside.”

There are five unmanned launchings planned this year and two for next year. However, no new rockets are being built. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration decided years ago that the shuttle would be the nation’s space vehicle and that cargo delivered to space would be carried by the manned vehicle.

Risk to Human Life

But the risk to human life in accomplishing objectives that could be carried out with unmanned vehicles will come under close scrutiny after the loss of the space shuttle Challenger.

NASA has launched more than 200 Delta and Atlas rockets carrying communications satellites, scientific instruments, Defense Department payloads and interplanetary missions. There were some failures, especially in the early years, but the recent record has been remarkably good.

“I’ve been in this job since March of ‘79,” Gay said. “I’ve launched 45 expendables. I haven’t lost any as far as the launch is concerned.”

One rocket did not reach orbit because of a failure in its second stage, and “a couple” have had problems with their payloads, he said. But those problems have plagued satellites launched from the shuttle as well.

‘Failure Rate Very Low’

“The failure rate (for expendables) is very low,” Gay said.

Only Delta and Atlas rockets remain in NASA’s space arsenal. The bigger Titans, which sent planetary probes like Voyager on odysseys through the solar system, and the awesome Saturn, which carried men to the moon, are gone.

Deltas have liquid-fueled first- and second-stage rockets and a solid-propellant third stage. NASA describes the Delta as the “workhorse” of the fleet because it has successfully delivered more than 150 payloads to space.

The Atlas/Centaur is the heavy-duty rocket in the expendable fleet. The Centaur, which is the upper stage, was the first to use liquid hydrogen-liquid oxygen engines like those that power the space shuttle.

Nearly all of the equipment for the remaining seven launchings is here. The rest is at the McDonnell Douglas plant in Huntington Beach.

‘We’ll Launch Them’

Gay said that the only steps needed to continue the program are to build additional rockets and find customers willing to switch from the shuttle to expendables.

“If they give us the missions, we’ll build the hardware and we’ll launch them,” Gay said.

That would require some trade-offs because the current generation of expendables cannot launch payloads as heavy as the shuttle’s, so satellites would have to be a little smaller than those designed specifically for the shuttle. The customer’s cost could be somewhat higher, too--possibly twice as much as the shuttle charges.

The price for launchings from the shuttle does not come close to covering the government’s cost of sending it into orbit, but the price for expendable launchings more closely reflects the actual cost, according to NASA sources.