Trapped in Budget, Policy Quarrels : Space Station Dream May Never Get Off the Ground

In an out-of-the-way corner of the Marshall Space Flight Center, engineers have labored for months on an arrestingly lifelike mock-up of the laboratory and crew quarters that are supposed one day to form the core of the orbiting U.S. space station.

Among the hundreds of visitors escorted through the modules for a glimpse of the future have been several veteran Soviet cosmonauts, and, according to witnesses, they were visibly taken aback at what they saw.

The space station being designed for the United States and its Canadian, European and Japanese partners dwarfs the Mir station in which Soviet cosmonaut-scientists have orbited the Earth for months at a time. Its living area and work spaces are, by spaceflight standards of the 20th Century--American or Soviet--positively commodious. Private sleeping quarters, for example, will be equipped with small television sets to receive the usual network offerings. The laboratory, the size of a modest mobile home, will serve the needs of biologists, astronomers, engineers, physicists and physicians who will have 75 kilowatts of power at their disposal, compared to an estimated 5 to 8 kilowatts provided by the solar panels aboard Mir.

But so far the American space station is but a troubled dream. With Mir, the Soviet Union has already established a more or less permanent presence in space, something the United States will not do until the end of 1996 at the earliest.

Indeed, the debate is not finally resolved as to whether the space station project, launched by President Reagan in his 1984 State of the Union message, will even survive.

Once estimated to cost $8 billion and planned to bear Ronald Reagan’s imprint as indelibly as the Apollo moon landings bore the mark of John F. Kennedy, the project has seen its projected cost double and its schedule slip by years.

The troubles the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has had with design and cost have been minor contrasted with the budgeting and policy quarrels that have gone on within and between Congress and the Reagan Administration.

“We have studied this thing for too many years,” said James Odom, the space agency’s associate administrator for the space station project. “We have come to the right decisions for a progressive program. If we are not willing to fund it, then we ought to back off and accept that we are not going to be the world leader in space, and reconstruct our program to fit whatever we think we can afford.”

Recent Action

Recent days have seen:

--A vote by the Senate Appropriations subcommittee responsible for the NASA budget to slash station spending for the upcoming fiscal year by $767 million, leaving $200 million. The subcommittee presented NASA with the choice of using the money to terminate the program or sustaining it until early next year, when the new President would decide whether to kill it or press on.

--A threat by Sen. Jake Garn (R-Utah) to filibuster against every appropriations bill reaching the Senate floor until senators were able to get a clear yes or no vote on continuing the station development.

--A move in the House of Representatives to strip the station budget of $400 million and commit the money to programs for the homeless, the elderly and the cities. That was defeated by a vote of 256 to 166.

--A decision by the Senate Appropriations Committee to transfer $200 million in unobligated funds from the Air Force and $400 million from the Defense Department to NASA “for national security-related space activities”--in other words, the station.

That last move, carried out by a band of senior Democrats and Republicans led by Sen. J. Bennett Johnston (D-La.), would enable NASA and the space station contractors to move toward preliminary engineering design work.

But, consistent with the project’s bizarre history, the Reagan Administration threatened to veto both the bill including NASA’s budget, because it emasculated the station, and the defense bill, because it would take money from the Pentagon to save it.

“Any attempts to fund the space station out of the defense allocation would be a clear violation of the bipartisan budget agreement and could itself provoke a veto,” James C. Miller III, director of Reagan’s Office of Management and Budget, wrote Garn.

The White House threat was followed by a letter from Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) and Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.), the chairman and top-ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, objecting to the liberties that the Appropriations panel had taken with the Pentagon’s budget.

Critical Showdown

Thus, the stage is set for the space station’s most critical showdown when the full Senate takes up the $299.5-billion defense spending bill next month.

Meanwhile, NASA is spending about $50 million a month to do little more than maintain the status quo: holding engineering teams together at companies selected last December as the principal station contractors--Boeing Aerospace Co. in Huntsville; General Electric’s Astro-Space Division in Pennsylvania; McDonnell Douglas Astronautics Co. in Huntington Beach, Calif., and Rockwell International’s Rocketdyne Division in Canoga Park, Calif.

At the moment, the effort involves about 5,000 engineers--3,100 working for the prime contractors and the subcontractors they have hired, and 1,900 at NASA offices at the Marshall, Johnson and Goddard space centers; NASA headquarters in Washington, and the new station headquarters in Reston, Va.

Four and a half years after Reagan declared the station America’s next great step in space and called for an orbiting station to be permanently manned within a decade, work is still in the “preparatory” phase. The engineers are refining documents, experimenting with “developmental hardware” and refining mock-ups such as the dummy laboratory and habitation modules at the Marshall Center in Huntsville.

When the program reaches its peak effort--the estimate is now about 1993--NASA’s plans call for a work force of 50,000 to be involved in the project, with spending hitting $3.5 billion in one year.

The history and the politics of the project provide little basis for confidence in long-term plans.

Although the station has enjoyed strong support on the Senate Commerce, Space and Transportation Committee and the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, lawmakers with more influence on the federal purse strings are more skeptical.

Sen. William Proxmire (D-Wis.), chairman of the Senate Appropriations subcommittee responsible for the space agency budget, mounted an effort last year to kill it. He failed, but the Administration’s request was finally cut by $425 million.

Mini-Station

At the same time, Proxmire joined Rep. Edward P. Boland (D-Mass.), whose Appropriations subcommittee controls the NASA budget in the House, in pushing through a $25-million appropriation to study a space mini-station.

The idea, pushed to the fore by spacecraft design pioneer Maxime Faget and a tiny company named Space Industries Inc. in Houston, called for a privately developed mini-station that would be periodically visited by the space shuttle. Shuttle astronauts would dock with the laboratory and spend a few days aboard it, installing experiments to be retrieved in a return visit.

Proxmire and some other critics of the giant U.S.-international station saw the special purpose mini-station as an attractive alternative, but NASA saw it as an adjunct.

As the moment came when plans called for a rapid buildup of the station effort, the Reagan Administration became bitterly divided over the President’s own space initiative. In a behind-the-scenes debate that raged for weeks, NASA held out for the national space station, while the Commerce Department and the Office of Management and Budget emphasized the mini-station.

It was an idea that had special appeal to the Administration officials, who were more than ever committed to the concept of “privatizing” the civilian space program after the Challenger space shuttle disaster.

In the internecine struggle, NASA lost. The White House endorsed development of the mini-station, with NASA and other government agencies to provide $700 million to lease space aboard it.

But with the budget crunch, congressional leaders saw no chance of going ahead with the mini-station when the Administration had already asked for $967 million for the big station.

Sen. Ernest F. Hollings (D-S.C.), chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, said he viewed Commerce Department and OMB officials as trying to kill Reagan’s own space station.

Last month, Hollings, joined by Sen. John C. Danforth (R-Mo.), the ranking Republican on his committee, plus Sens. Donald W. Riegle Jr. (D-Mich.) and Larry Pressler (R-S.D.), the chairman and ranking Republican on the science, technology, and space subcommittee, blocked NASA from inviting bids on the commercial facility. In the House, NASA’s authorization bill also contained language blocking NASA from selecting a contractor without explicit congressional authorization.

Saving Station

Hollings and others saw the action as saving the space station. Supporters of the mini-station saw a lost opportunity to advance the commercialization of space and launch a scaled-down version of a space station years before the permanently manned station could be ready.

Publicly, NASA officials dutifully endorse the private mini-station concept, without acknowledging their competition for limited funds.

“It is very disturbing to see people really think that the two of them are competitive,” said NASA’s Odom. “They are totally different. The (mini-station) is only the tip of the iceberg. How anyone can put them into a competitive role is beyond my imagination.”

With national political conventions in July and August interrupting congressional action, it may be autumn before officials finally know how much money they will have to press development of the station.

Administrator James C. Fletcher reacted with extreme circumspection to the Senate Appropriations Committee’s plan to dip into the Pentagon budget to save the station. He was, he said, “heartened.”

But what concerned officials as much as the possibility of the station being killed by the budget crunch was the possibility that more delays might cause America’s foreign partners to abandon their own plans to provide modules and equipment for the undertaking.

“I can’t imagine that the Europeans will go on much longer,” Odom said, “because they have made their commitment and they are going to have a space station of some kind whether we are a partner or not.

“For four years, we have been telling them that we really want them to be a partner in ours. But there is a threshold of pain beyond which they will not go.”