Shuttle Delays Add to Pentagon’s Cost Concerns

The delays that have plagued the launching of the space shuttle Atlantis are adding urgency to the Pentagon’s efforts to reduce its reliance on the manned spacecraft to loft its payloads into space, experts said Monday.

As the space agency scrubbed the Atlantis launching for the fifth time in the early morning hours of Monday, the cost of delays had reached more than $1.8 million at the space center alone. The next possible attempt to launch Atlantis will be Wednesday.

The delays, occurring at a time of shrinking military budgets, have provided a costly reminder that when men, not machines, put military satellites into orbit, unpredictable health and safety factors add to the uncertainties of a successful launching.

Even before Atlantis reached the launching pad here, such considerations had prompted the Air Force to begin exploring alternatives to the shuttle. Those include the development of improved unmanned rockets and the rehabilitation of a launching pad for such rockets at Vandenberg Air Force Base near Santa Maria, Calif.

A space shuttle has not suffered so many delays before flight since January, 1986, when weather and technical problems postponed the Challenger launching six times. The shuttle exploded 73 seconds into its flight on a seventh attempt.

More than any other single factor, the loss of the Challenger prompted the Pentagon to announce that it would not extend its commitments for the shuttle beyond the eight Pentagon missions it had already chartered.

After the Atlantis mission, which experts say will carry a reconnaissance satellite into orbit, only two more shuttle missions will be dedicated to Pentagon payloads.

However, faced with technical problems in its efforts to build a heavy-lifting Titan 4 rocket, the Air Force may have to rely on the shuttle for longer than it had hoped. As they tally the financial and logistical cost of delays in the Atlantis mission, Air Force officials are said to be eager to get contractors back on track on the Titan 4 to limit the time the Pentagon would be dependent on the shuttle.

In the case of Atlantis, the presence of men aboard the spacecraft has caused three of the five delays. An astronaut’s illness, inclement weather and a computer failure had halted four earlier launching attempts.

But Monday morning’s scrub was called after high winds and cloud cover endangered the shuttle’s ability to return to a runway at the space center in case an emergency landing should become necessary after launching.

Although not a factor in Monday morning’s postponement, foul weather at any of a number of emergency landing sites, including Edwards Air Force Base and one in Spain, could halt a launching.

“Between the astronauts’ health requirements and the number of places the weather has to be good simultaneously for a launch to proceed, the space shuttle clearly has launch constraints you don’t have with unmanned systems,” said John Pike, a space policy analyst with the Washington-based Federation of American Scientists.