Shuttle Flight Set for Feb. 18, 1988; 16 a Year Possible

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration plans to launch the space shuttle again on Feb. 18, 1988, and gradually work up to as many as 16 flights a year with military satellites and space station hardware occupying cargo holds once reserved for commercial payloads.

After months of deliberation and a detailed review by the White House, space agency officials disclosed a flight schedule calling for the shuttle to fly six times during its first year back in action.

NASA Administrator James C. Fletcher and the shuttle program chief, Rear Adm. Richard H. Truly, estimated that all but 19 or 20 of the foreign and commercial satellites previously ticketed for launching by the shuttle will have to go elsewhere for launching in accordance with the Reagan Administration’s new policy banning routine commercial launchings from the shuttle.

Although Fletcher did not suggest that the Jan. 28 Challenger disaster was caused by pressing the shuttle fleet too hard, he said he now believes that “we had an overly ambitious flight schedule before the accident.”

“This shuttle manifest is based on a flight rate goal that we believe is acceptable and prudent,” he said of the new schedule. “It complies with White House policy that NASA will no longer launch commercial and foreign payloads except those that are shuttle-unique or those that will have national security or foreign policy payloads.”

Challenger Replacement

The new plan envisions the first flight of a new orbiter to be built as a replacement for the Challenger to occur in early 1991 and the first launching from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California in 1992.

During the first years of resumed operations, Truly said, all shuttles will land at Edwards Air Force Base, although NASA still hopes to improve Florida weather forecasting and increase safety sufficiently to enable a third of the flights to land at Kennedy Space Center eventually.

At the same time that it detailed its plans for returning the shuttle to service, NASA said the Challenger’s wreckage will be entombed in two deactivated missile silos at Cape Canaveral, not far from the launching pad from which the fatal flight blasted off.

More than 100 tons of debris from the destroyed spaceship was recovered from the ocean and used in the investigation of the tragedy. A NASA announcement said the two missile complexes, once used to launch Minuteman missile tests, will be modified later this year. The Challenger wreckage will be transferred into them early next year, and the silos will be sealed with concrete covers.

Sun, Jupiter Missions

Still not resolved in the new flight schedule released Friday is the question of when the space agency will launch the Ulysses spacecraft to explore the polar regions of the sun and the Galileo probe to survey Jupiter and its moons.

Fletcher said both missions, to be controlled from Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, will be assigned launching plans next year. JPL’s Magellan mission to map Venus was scheduled for launching aboard the shuttle in May, 1989.

As commercial satellite owners are forced to turn elsewhere for launching services, an estimated 41% of NASA’s shuttle flights will be devoted to military payloads, even though the Air Force has ordered a new Titan 4 launching vehicle and is preparing to issue a contract for a medium-weight launcher. Another 47% will carry NASA scientific payloads. The remaining 12% will carry out missions for other government agencies and foreign clients.

Under the new schedule, the first major science mission will be the launching in early 1988 of the Hubble Space Telescope, which, before the shuttle disaster, had been scheduled for launching this year.

More Visible Universe

The telescope, costing more than $1 billion, will vastly expand the visible universe, and project scientists contend that it will make it necessary to rewrite astronomy textbooks with its observations of events taking place soon after the creation of the universe.

The first shuttle launching under the new manifest is scheduled to carry a Tracking and Data Relay Satellite identical to the one destroyed in the Challenger accident.

In addition to the need for the satellite to build up the communications network for future shuttle operations, Truly said, its deployment offered a relatively simple mission for a conservative first flight.

Members of the crew may be selected before the end of the year, he said, because their early identification would offer a morale boost to the space agency and its contractors, which have been hit hard by layoffs in recent months.

Although NASA announced soon after the Challenger accident that it would proceed with plans to send a teacher and a journalist into space aboard a shuttle, Fletcher and Truly indicated that they favor moving slowly toward the civilian-in-space program.

New Hampshire schoolteacher Sharon Christa McAuliffe was among the seven Challenger crew members who died in the disaster, and Fletcher said Friday that there is now “a lot of opposition from some quarters to flying any so-called civilians in space.”

“My advice,” he said, “is ‘yes, in time,’ but certainly not in the first year.”