Five Years of Trouble Seen for Space Program : Payload Backlog to Soar in Time It Takes U.S. to Replace Shuttle, Build Expendable Launchers

No matter what comes of the investigation of the Challenger tragedy over Florida six weeks ago and no matter what the Reagan Administration does in response to it, the American space program is in serious trouble not just for the short term but for the next five years, government and industry experts say.

That is how long it will take to build a new orbiter, step up production of expendable launching vehicles and work through a rapidly growing backlog of satellites and scientific payloads that had been scheduled to be put into orbit by the now-grounded shuttle fleet.

Can’t Orbit a Grapefruit

“We are bereft of launch capacity,” said Glen Wilson, a longtime member of the Senate Space Committee staff and now president of the National Space Society. “We can’t even put a damn grapefruit in orbit.”

William R. Graham, NASA’s acting administrator, said last week that a backlog equivalent to 24 fully loaded shuttle missions will accumulate by 1990 even if the remaining three orbiters go back into operation a year after the Jan. 28 Challenger disaster. Unless a new orbiter is built to replace Challenger, the backlog will continue to grow.

By October of 1988, shuttles had been scheduled to lift 14 new commercial or foreign satellites into space, and most of them now will almost surely be delayed. In addition, the Federal Communications Commission has approved the launching of 25 more communications satellites, which have not been officially put on the shuttles’ flight manifest.

And, while the shuttle program is out of commission during the next year, at least 10 Defense Department satellites are expected to be delayed. It is estimated that the number will rise to 25 or 30 by late 1988, when the Air Force plans to begin using a new expendable rocket being developed to carry the same kind of heavy payloads that go into the shuttle’s cargo bay.

There are no shortcuts that would avert a crisis.

General Dynamics is still building Atlas Centaur unmanned launching vehicles, but it would take months for it to scale up its assembly force to turn out enough vehicles to have a significant impact. Two launchers already committed to specific payloads are now under construction, and the company estimates that it would take 21 months to assemble another from spare parts on hand.

At Huntington Beach, Calif., the assembly line that produced the Delta workhorse, which launched more satellites than any other rocket, has been closed since the end of 1984. There are enough spare parts to assemble two or three rockets, but a company spokesman said that it would take 21 to 24 months to put the first one together.

AF Orders Rockets

For now, with NASA all but immobilized, the Air Force will depend on 26 retired Atlas and Titan 2 intercontinental ballistic missiles in various stages of refurbishment for use as space launchers.

And grounding of the shuttles has temporarily left the military without a way to get its biggest satellites into synchronous orbit. The Air Force--which had been concerned about the possibility of just such a catastrophe as the Challenger explosion--last year, in the face of NASA opposition, ordered 10 improved Titan rockets. They are capable of putting its largest communications satellites into synchronous orbit 22,000 miles above the Earth; but the first is not due for delivery until late 1988, and Martin Marietta Corp. has told the Pentagon that the schedule cannot be significantly accelerated.

Commercial customers who want to get communications satellites into orbit may turn to the French Ariane rocket, but it is heavily booked already, with no vacancies on its 1986 flight manifests. Officials of the consortium that built Ariane have said that in 1987 and 1988 they will attempt to accommodate six to eight satellites in the U.S. backlog.

“We are now paying the price for our niggardliness 10 to 15 years ago,” Wilson said. “We cut corners, we didn’t invest enough. We needed to build expendables, we needed five to six orbiters.”

No ‘Margin for Error’

Mark Oderman, vice president of the Center for Space Policy, a Cambridge, Mass., consulting firm, said that NASA’s budget has been whittled down just as its activities have expanded. “It lost its margin for error,” he said.

While attention has been riveted on the presidential commission seeking the cause of the Challenger explosion 8.9 miles above the Florida coast, the crisis in launching capacity and the future of the beleaguered U.S. space program are being debated in extraordinary secrecy by an interagency panel headed by White House National Security Adviser John M. Poindexter.

The panel, which has been meeting six days a week but refuses to disclose either the form or the substance of its deliberations, will determine to a large extent the kind of agency NASA will be in the years after Challenger. Its recommendations were initially expected to go to President Reagan early this month, but Administration officials now say that it is likely to be another two weeks before it completes its work.

The questions before it include whether to replace Challenger and how to steer the request for funds through a Congress preoccupied with the federal deficit and the Gramm-Rudman budget-balancing law.

Congressional sources familiar with the panel’s deliberations say they expect the Administration to ask for a supplemental appropriation of about $2.8 billion to press ahead with construction of a new orbiter, plus funds for the Air Force to increase its purchase of the improved Titans--the so-called Complementary Expendable Launch Vehicles. The panel’s options include forgoing a fourth orbiter, which would leave NASA with the prospect of radically overhauling its manned spaceflight program.

The prospect of a three-shuttle fleet and the use of expendable rockets for more routine satellite launchings has brought renewed interest in recent weeks in turning to private enterprise for launching services. The idea had been slow to take hold in the face of the overwhelming competition of the shuttle and France’s Ariane, but it got a boost last week from NASA’s Graham.

Mixed Fleet of Launchers

In a memorandum to the chief of the space agency’s shuttle program, the acting administrator said that, in the wake of the accident, there is an emerging consensus that the United States should have a mixed fleet of shuttles and expendable launching vehicles. Moreover, he said, “a viable, competitive domestic commercial capability” may be in the offing in the “foreseeable future.”

The Reagan Administration has moved gingerly toward encouraging private enterprise in the space program at the same time that the shuttle has contested fiercely for commercial payloads. General Dynamics is authorized to sell its Atlas Centaur to private customers, and a Maryland firm called Trans Space has the rights to market the McDonnell Douglas Delta rocket.

Neither has made its first sale, and many experts contend that commercial satellite launching services will never be able to compete successfully unless the government provides subsidies or limits the shuttle’s use in commercial satellite launchings.

“It is very unrealistic to think that, without a major subsidy, the private sector can have a competitive product for the late 1980s and early 1990s,” former NASA Administrator Thomas O. Paine said. “The idea that one can summon the private sector like some spirit from the deep to come rushing in at this time of need is a novel idea.”

Expendable Launchers

By the time that new expendable launching vehicles could be assembled, the shuttle is expected to be flying again.

If the United States decided to take the shuttle out of commercial satellite operations, sources say, Ariane would be certain to expand and undercut the price charged by private U.S. launchers. By the middle of the next decade, the backlog now developing will have disappeared. Japan is expected to be routinely launching satellites by then, and the critical shortage of launching capability may have turned into an excess.

In a recent appearance before the House space science and applications subcommittee, former astronaut Donald K. Slayton suggested that private launching companies should be encouraged.

Slayton, now president of Space Services Inc., a Houston-based company working to develop a satellite launching business, said the manned shuttle is uniquely able to carry particularly heavy payloads into space and to recover payloads from space. “This is a national resource that should not be squandered on payloads not requiring these capabilities,” he said.

The space policy issues in the wake of the Challenger loss are likely to be the most intensely debated since the decision to develop the shuttle 15 years ago.

More Advanced Vehicle

Some lawmakers, including Rep. George E. Brown Jr. (D-Colton), believe that the country should seriously consider stepping up research on a more advanced manned spacecraft rather than putting the reduced shuttle fleet back together.

Others contend that Congress should authorize the purchase of two orbiters because a second would be considerably cheaper to build than the first. In the beginning, NASA sought funds for five shuttles. Although Congress authorized only four, the Rockwell International assembly line was kept intact, building spare parts.

Sources familiar with the work of the interagency panel said that it has not decided whether the Administration should ask for a supplemental appropriation this year to get started with a Challenger replacement. Faced by the imperative to reduce the federal deficit, the Administration could direct instead that NASA pay for a new shuttle by shifting funds from other programs or even by closing some of its field centers.

Such belt-tightening would have a devastating impact on space science programs, raising the possibility that NASA would cease to be a research and development agency and become an organization with little to do except launch the shuttle.

“Space science would be zapped,” said Rep. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), chairman of the space science and applications subcommittee.

“If the replacement of launch capacity is not accomplished with the infusion of additional money,” Oderman, of the Center for Space Policy, said, “we will have a transportation system with nothing to put in it.”