New Shuttle Schedule Will Disappoint Many, NASA Chief Forecasts

The head of the nation’s troubled space program said Saturday that the space agency may release its flight schedule for the shuttle by the end of this week, but it probably will prove disappointing to just about everybody.

“I don’t think anybody is going to be satisfied,” James C. Fletcher, chief of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, said in Los Angeles at the first of a series of aerospace seminars for the press.

Fletcher said the flight schedule will include only “about 19” shuttle launches during the first three years after the shuttle resumes operations, probably in early 1988. That is near the number of annual flights NASA was completing at the time of the Challenger explosion last Jan. 28, but far below the space agency’s earlier goal of 24 flights a year.

The truncated schedule will mean that NASA will be unable to meet all of its contracts, and “some people are going to be unhappy,” Fletcher said.

That will probably lead to litigation against the agency, he added.

“If we break contracts, we will have liability, and we will undoubtedly be sued,” he said.

The contracts in jeopardy include commercial satellite launches. Disputes within the federal government over how many of those contracts should be honored has delayed the completion of the flight manifest. Fletcher said that the federal Department of Transportation wants NASA to cancel all of the contracts and get the shuttle out of the commercial launch business, thus encouraging the development of a commercial launch industry in this country, but NASA has fought to honor as many contracts as possible.

Although Fletcher declined to be specific, he indicated that NASA will have to cancel several launches already covered by contracts.

“We will not be allowed to fly very many commercial missions,” he said.

Other Competitors

That will leave two primary competitors for shuttle services, the Defense Department, which will have high priority, and the scientific community.

Fletcher, who met Friday with scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory near Pasadena, said he was able to offer few words of encouragement to scientists there who have invested years of their careers in missions that are awaiting space aboard the shuttle. Of the four missions planned by JPL, Fletcher said he thought at least three would gain space aboard a future shuttle mission, but maybe not for several years.

The fate of the fourth, Galileo, an ambitious mission to the planet Jupiter, is still open to question, he said. Because of tightened safety standards for the shuttle program, it may not be possible to launch Galileo, with its radioactive power supply, from the shuttle.

And alternative launch vehicles are hard to come by, he said.

Fletcher said the possibility of canceling the Galileo program entirely has been discussed, but he added that he expects to see it fly at some time in the future.

‘Priority’ on Telescope

Among other scientific missions, Fletcher said the launching of a space telescope has a “high priority” within NASA. The telescope, which will be placed in orbit above the distortion of the Earth’s atmosphere, was to have been launched this year.

The sad state of the U.S. space program was contrasted with the Soviet program by another member of the panel, Air Force Gen. Robert T. Herres, commander in chief of the U.S. Space Command.

Herres said the Soviet Union has completed 60 space flights since the Challenger exploded.

“They are capable of about 100 space launches per year,” he said, and they have maintained that pace for the past three years.

“It hasn’t varied too much,” he added.

Thomas O. Paine, chairman of the President’s Commission on Space, which has proposed a 50-year course for the nation’s space program, told the seminar that the nation needs a more clearly defined policy. Paine, who was head of NASA during the Apollo moon landings, noted that the success of that program met an ambitious goal set by President John F. Kennedy to put an American on the moon.

“We’ve hardly had a presidential policy decision since (Kennedy),” Paine said.

The symposium was sponsored by the Los Angeles Press Club and the Aviation/Space Writers Assn.