It’s ‘All or Nothing’ : U.S. Space Program at Crossroads

The scheduled launch this fall of the space shuttle Discovery will signal the re-emergence of this country’s manned space program after a 32-month hiatus. But the return of the shuttle also will confront the nation with a host of difficult questions about America’s commitment to the next stages of space exploration.

Those questions--including the possibility of a Mars mission or a return to the Moon--have been delayed as space officials sought to rebuild the shuttle program after the explosion of the shuttle Challenger in January, 1986. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union and other countries have made major strides in their own space efforts and have surpassed the United States in some areas.

Congress Holds Key

Now, according to space experts and congressional leaders, Congress will have to decide whether to meet that challenge with a new outpouring of dollars or relinquish the leadership position won by this country in the 1960s.

“The United States space program is at a crossroads,” said a recent study by the Congressional Budget Office. “The momentum over the last 20 years has brought the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to a point where new activities will require substantial increases in the agency’s budget.”

The study concluded that the new era would not allow Congress to make half-a-loaf decisions on the space budget, as it has often done over the last decade. Future projects will be performed on such a large scale that they will demand major commitments over a number of years, it said.

“Civilian space is becoming an all or nothing proposition,” the study noted.

Many of the projects that constitute the next stage of exploration have been discussed for years. In addition to the much-debated space station, they include a flotilla of orbiting observatories, development of a new shuttle, and--most exotic of all--a permanent moon base or a manned journey to Mars.

Doubling of Budget Seen

All of these projects carry large price tags, and various studies have predicted that a commitment to the new era would double or triple the current $9-billion space budget by the year 2000.

Some congressional leaders, including supporters of the space program, say the outcome of the debate is very much in doubt. Congress could well decide, they say, that the country can no longer afford to maintain a leadership position in space exploration and limit the budget to small-scale efforts.

Sen. Jake Garn (R-Utah), one of two congressmen who has flown in the shuttle, says the outlook is “discouraging.” Over the last decade, Garn says, Congress has been increasingly willing to see the United States’ space effort down-scaled, even in the face of vigorous programs by other countries.

“I was absolutely embarrassed that we did not have a Halley’s Comet probe up,” Garn said, referring to the 1986 visit of the comet that was studied by three spacecraft from other nations but none from the United States.

“We ought to be looking far beyond the space shuttle-space station stuff, we ought to be looking at planetary exploration,” Garn said. If the United States fails to commit itself to these projects, he predicted, then space could become another technological field abandoned to other nations.

The crucial period for making space decisions has arrived now, according to some space authorities, because the long recovery period of the shuttle has presumably ended, leaving NASA with a pressing need to determine its priorities. If the flight of the Discovery and other shuttles are successful, the shuttle spacecraft will again be available for servicing projects such as the space station and the observatory network.

Technological Gains Cited

Moreover, they note that technological progress has brought the space program to the door of the new era. The shuttle itself was intended from the beginning as a vehicle to service long-term facilities in space. In much the same way, the Tracking Data and Relay Satellite network, the first of its kind, will soon allow a U.S. space station or other facility to communicate continuously with their base rather than going through the old system of land stations scattered around the world. Having built these expensive tools, the space experts say, the country is faced with the question of what to do with them.

The Reagan Administration attempted to answer this question earlier this year with a new space policy advocating the exploration of the solar system as a “long range goal,” but the real confrontation likely will wait until a new President takes office in January.

Democrat Michael S. Dukakis and Republican George Bush have expressed support for a vigorous space program, and both say they would support funding for a space station. Beyond that, their enthusiasm for some of the possible new ventures is difficult to gauge.

“At some point a President is going to have to say, ‘Yeah, we are committed to this thing over the long haul,’ and he’s going to have to persuade Congress he means it,” said John Logsdon, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University. None of the last three presidents have been willing to make that commitment, he said.

No Single Focus

Unlike the Apollo flights to the moon in the 1960s, the new era does not have a single focus. The wide range of possible ventures, in fact, has inspired an intense debate among space supporters. At present, there is little agreement over which projects are worthy and which should be abandoned or left to other nations. The debate revolves around these categories:

--Mission to planet Earth. This program would use space as a vantage point to study Earth on a global scale, using some form of a space station, shuttle-carried space labs or other facilities. Recent concerns about the growing greenhouse effect and erosion of the atmosphere’s ozone layer have increased interest in this option.

--Return to the moon. In this project, man would return to the moon as a long-term resident, most likely to establish an astronomical observatory on the far side of the moon or to conduct experiments aimed at extracting fuel and oxygen from lunar materials.

--Solar system probes. Similar to missions launched by the United States in the late 1970s, these unmanned spacecraft would explore other bodies in the solar system. Currently under consideration are flights exploring Jupiter, Venus, Mars and the sun.

--Manned mission to Mars. The goal--to send a man to Mars and return him safely--is reminiscent of Apollo. But the Mars mission would be infinitely more difficult and expensive. In the judgment of some, it is also the only goal grand enough and risky enough to capture the imagination of the public.

Urges U.S.-Soviet Mission

The cheering squad for a Mars mission is led by Carl Sagan, the astronomer and author, who believes such a project could become a powerful tool in reducing the threat of superpower confrontations. The United States, he says, should go to Mars in a long-term partnership with the Soviet Union.

“The only broad-scale justification for manned spaceflights has to be political, not scientific,” Sagan says, arguing that the Apollo visits to the moon were political missions aimed at establishing this country’s superiority over the Soviets.

Speaking at a meeting of the Space Caucus, a group of space supporters in Washington, Sagan contended that the political goals of the Mars mission would be the reverse of the Apollo program. It would show that the United States and the Soviet Union can work together in harmony.

“Avoiding more war is an issue that will sustain (a Mars mission),” Sagan said.

Logsdon of the Space Policy Institute dismisses the Soviet partnership as too volatile, but he also advocates Mars as a long-term goal. Humans will eventually go to Mars, he says, because of man’s need to expand his presence to other planets. Ultimately, he says, that is the only justification for interplanetary travel.

“You can’t justify a Mars visit on the basis of scientific benefits or any other benefit. The balance sheet doesn’t work out,” said Logsdon. “Man will go to Mars for the same reason he crossed the ocean looking for new lands. He wants to go there and stay, to inhabit a new place.”

Regarded as Dreamers

Other advocates of a strong space program regard the Mars supporters as dreamers. Among other obstacles, they point out that the Mars mission would require a new transportation system at a cost estimated by the Office of Technology Assessment to be $120 billion over the next 20 years.

Christopher Craft, the plain-speaking former NASA official who headed the Apollo mission, reacts with irritation at the mere mention of a Mars mission. “Mars is bull,” he said in a recent interview at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. “Trying to sell a Mars mission is the way to kill the space program. It would cost billions and billions and no damn fool in Congress is going to sign the check.”

NASA would be better advised to pursue more modest goals, starting with a space station and building on that achievement, Craft says.

Thus far, NASA appears to be doing just that. It has defined what the agency refers to as the “core program” necessary to keep America’s space effort in a leadership position through the 1990s.

And moderate it is, compared to other visions of the future. The core program includes establishment of a first-stage space station and hoisting aloft two space observatories that were delayed by the explosion of the Challenger. It also recommends development of a transfer vehicle that would remain in space and move people and cargo from one orbit to another, and an unmanned version of the space shuttle, known as Shuttle C.

Call Goals Deceptive

Some NASA watchers believe the apparently modest goals are deceptive. For one, the space station alone has become wildly expensive with a $14.6-billion price tag. Secondly, the space station is seen by some as a foot-in-the-door for future ventures. Logsdon and others argue, for example, that the real purpose of the space station will be its use as a laboratory to investigate questions about the long-term effects of weightlessness. Dealing with that issue and others in life sciences will be crucial before anyone can send man into deep space.

Thus far, the response to the NASA program in Congress has been mixed. In 1989 the agency budget will increase to $10.7 billion--about $1.5 billion more than this year. But Congress also trimmed $100 million from the $1-billion request for the space station in 1989. The Administration claimed the $1-billion level was just high enough to keep the program alive.

It is that kind of ambivalence that has left NASA officials to wonder if the United States still has the will to compete with the Soviet Union and other countries in space exploration.

In former astronaut Sally K. Ride’s report on space leadership, released last year, she identified two areas where the Soviet Union already has surpassed this country: the long-term inhabitation of space, achieved through a series of space stations and the exploration of Mars. The Soviets launched two robot probes to Mars this year and announced a goal of putting a man on the planet by 2010.

Soviet Spectaculars Expected

While most space experts believe that Soviet scientists have not yet matched American technology, the Soviet Union’s strategy of making slow, steady progress has begun to pay off, NASA officials say. And soon the Soviets’ ability to achieve space spectaculars will increase sharply when they begin to use their huge Energia rocket and their own version of the space shuttle, expected to be operational by the end of this decade.

“If anything should have shook us up, it was Mir (the Soviet space station),” said William Huffstedler, director of new initiatives for NASA. “They were up there for four years, doing all sorts of things. But there was no reaction here. For some reason, no one seemed to care.”

In addition to the Soviet Union, the United States space program is also feeling the pressure from Japan and from the European Space Agency, a consortium of 11 countries that is also building a version of the shuttle.

“In my opinion, we have floundered,” Huffstedler says. Much of the problem, he says, comes from the American approach to its space agenda. Each venture--such as putting a man on the moon--has been regarded as a separate enterprise, divorced from other activities. When the enterprise is finished, he says, the fruits of the research, even the hardware, are tossed out as if they had no value.

“We could not put a man on the moon today because we have discarded the Saturn V’s, the rockets that put us there,” Huffstedler said.

Since the Challenger disaster, Huffstedler said NASA appears to have moved away from this approach. One example, he said, is the decision to alter the space shuttle into a new format, the unmanned Shuttle C, a heavy-lift vehicle. Instead of spending many billions to develop a new vehicle, NASA is probably going to spend $1 billion on Shuttle C. It will not do everything that a new vehicle could, but it will use virtually all the same parts, the same launch pads and can be maintained by the same technicians. By building on the past, NASA will get most of what it needs at a far lower cost, he says.

Logsdon of the Space Policy Institute notes that other countries, notably the Soviets, have used this approach for many years. In the end, a space program costs much less that way, he says, because progress is made in small steps rather than great leaps. “What you want is a slow, steady ramp into space,” he says.

sh ‘Way Out of Budget Lock’

Logsdon argues that the “slow, steady ramp,” may also be the way out of the congressional budget lock. If the United States is willing to go to Mars in 30 to 40 years, rather than 20 years, that will make a large difference in annual costs, he argues. “What we need is an acceptance that the space program will be supported at a certain level, year after year, and an acceptance that some parts of the program will not see a payoff until the 21st Century,” he said.

The recent study by the Congressional Budget Office proposed a more drastic version of this approach. If Congress balks at the cost of a rapid buildup, the study suggested a “stretched-out” version of the space program. The stretchout would delay the space station by seven years, reduce shuttle flights, eliminate the Shuttle C and preclude any involvement in a Mars mission. But NASA’s budget would be kept at its present level of about $9 billion a year.

A budget squeeze is not the only imponderable facing the space program. Some space authorities predict that the future of the American space effort will depend more on the success of the shuttle than any budget problem. John Pike, associate director of the Federation of American Scientists, says another shuttle disaster in the near future would probably end the civilian space program for many years.

“If another shuttle blows up in the next several years, then I think Congress would pull the plug on NASA,” Pike said. Another loss of a shuttle is probably inevitable at some point in the program, he says. The real question is when the next one will occur, and how often thereafter.

Reliability of Shuttle

“Losing one shuttle every several hundred flights is probably acceptable,” Pike said. “Losing one every 25 flights is probably not acceptable. Right now we don’t know which it will be.”

If, as Pike expects, the shuttle’s reliability proves to be toward the high end, the other pieces of the space program begin to fall into place. A frequently flying shuttle means schedules can be met and also means a reduction in unit costs for each flight.

On the other hand, a shuttle that is continuously plagued by flight delays will work to frustrate the best laid plans for future space activities.

“Come next February, if I was the guy at the White House asked to figure out what to do with the space program,” Pike said, “I would want to know the answer to two questions: How often will the shuttle fly, and how safe is it? When I knew those answers, I could make a pretty good guess about everything else.”