Key Hughes Manager Raps Plan to Build Space Station

Albert D. Wheelon, executive vice president of Hughes Aircraft, said Tuesday that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s plan to build a permanent, manned orbiting station is “a blind leap of faith” that would do serious injury to the U.S. space program.

The remarks were Wheelon’s first comments on the future of the U.S. space program since he completed his role on the presidential commission investigating the loss of the shuttle Challenger.

“We cannot allow ourselves to become hostage to a single space project again,” Wheelon said in a speech before the Aero Club of Southern California, an association of aerospace executives.

The space station, which will cost an estimated $8 billion to $10 billion, would leave little money for planetary research or other important missions, he said. The United States launched 36 spacecraft to other planets in the 1960s and 11 in the 1970s but has scheduled only one in the 1980s, he noted.

Wheelon said the NASA space station would be in an orbit inappropriate to service most of the nation’s communications, navigational or military satellites. He said the evidence so far does not show that materials processing in space would warrant a space station.

Meanwhile, Wheelon said the U.S. satellite communications industry’s survival is at stake if NASA does not live up to its earlier commitment to provide launch services. NASA has been examining a possible suspension of shuttle service for the communications industry.