Commercial Shuttle Work May End : Reagan Studies Plan to Limit Flights to Defense, Science

President Reagan is considering a Cabinet-level recommendation to take the diminished U.S. space shuttle fleet out of the business of launching commercial and foreign satellites, White House spokesman Larry Speakes said Thursday.

The proposal, put forth by the Economic Policy Council headed by Treasury Secretary James A. Baker III, would, if adopted by the President, drop the long-held objective of making the space shuttle pay its own way by carrying commercial payloads.

It stands also to have a bearing on the pending presidential decision of how and whether to proceed with building a new orbiter to replace the Challenger, lost with its crew of seven in a conflagration above the Florida coast last January.

Shuttle Decision Delayed

Speakes told reporters that the long-awaited decision on a shuttle replacement will not be made until there is further study of the council’s recommendations next week, including a review of whether the Administration has the authority to terminate the contracts with commercial customers waiting to have satellites launched when the shuttle fleet is put back on flight status in 1988.

The issue of restricting the shuttle to national security and government scientific payloads has been fiercely debated for weeks within a senior interagency group headed by White House National Security Adviser John Poindexter, but disclosure of the Economic Policy Council recommendation was the strongest suggestion so far of a more limited role for the shuttle fleet.

In the meeting, which took place Tuesday, the council considered a choice of dropping commercial launchings and terminating existing contracts or gradually phasing out commercial launching services. Speakes said that a majority opted for the former course.

Would Send Signal

If adopted, Speakes said, the policy would mean there would be less urgency to proceed with the construction of a new shuttle at a cost of nearly $3 billion and send a strong signal to private enterprise that the market is open for privately financed expendable launch vehicles.

Shortly after the White House disclosure, Air Force Secretary Edward Aldridge told reporters that he had discussed the possibility of using the French Ariane rocket to launch some weather satellites grounded by the shuttle disaster and the subsequent failure of an Air Force Titan and a NASA Delta launch vehicle.

Detailing how the Air Force plans to shift to more unmanned launch vehicles to offset the loss of Challenger and the grounding of the three shuttles, Aldridge said that the United States had made a major policy mistake when it opted to use the shuttle for nearly all of its space launchings, forgoing the development of new unmanned rockets.

23 New Titans

To ease the launching crisis, he said, the Air Force now plans to buy at least 23 new Titan expendable launching vehicles--10 more than it originally had planned. In addition, he said that some satellites designed to fit into the shuttle’s cargo bay will be modified so that they can be launched aboard the Titan rockets.

As expected, Aldridge announced that the shuttle launching complex at Vandenberg Air Force Base will be placed on a standby status and that no shuttle launching is expected from the West Coast facility before 1992.

He refused to accept characterization of the action as “mothballing” but said that putting the new $3.3-billion complex on a standby status as soon as it is completed would produce savings “in the billion-dollar range.”

NASA Backs Away

With the Administration’s decision on an orbiter replacement apparently near, NASA on Thursday backed away from a confrontation with Congress over plans announced last month to reorganize the management of its space station project, shifting management to NASA headquarters in Washington and as many as 300 employees from Johnson Space Center in Houston to Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.

Under pressure from Texas congressmen angered by reports that the Houston area would lose $741 million in contracts while north Alabama would gain $871 million, NASA Administrator James C. Fletcher announced that he would take another 90 days and make a thorough review of the issue before taking any action.

In spite of Fletcher’s postponement and his acknowledgement that Congress had not sufficiently been consulted on the issue, the House Appropriations Committee appended a provision to the space agency’s appropriations bill, forbidding it to use any of the money to shift the space station project out of the Johnson Center without congressional permission.

May Fill Vacancies

Also Thursday, congressional sources said NASA will soon fill two major management vacancies created by resignations in the wake of the Challenger accident.

According to sources who declined to be identified, Lt. Gen. Forrest McCartney, chief of the Air Force’s Space Division in Los Angeles, has been offered the post as director of the Kennedy Space Center, replacing Richard Smith, whose retirement becomes effective today.