NASA Kills $700-Million TRW ‘Space Tug’ Program

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has canceled a $700-million TRW program to build an “orbital maneuvering vehicle,” often referred to as the space tug.

TRW spokeswoman Julie Meier Wright said the program, which commenced in the early 1980s, has provided 280 jobs at its Redondo Beach Space & Defense Sector. She said workers will be reassigned to other programs at the facility, which employs 17,900.

NASA cited “budgetary pressures” over the next several years and the lack of a “firm near-term requirement” for the spacecraft as the basis for the cancellation.

TRW’s portion of the program was worth $490 million. The cost has grown significantly in recent years, owing to stretchouts in the program schedule, Wright said. The original estimated cost of TRW’s work was about $275 million.

William B. Lenoir, NASA’s associate administrator for space flight, was quoted in an agency announcement saying that another space tug “eventually will be needed in our space infrastructure, but we will have at least two or three years to develop firm requirements before it will be necessary to begin development.”

The tug was to have been a reusable, remotely controlled spacecraft that would perform a range of satellite service missions and satellite retrieval missions, including the job of periodically reboosting the Hubble Space Telescope.

Presumably, NASA will use the space shuttle, which launched the telescope, to reboost it periodically. But Lenoir said such missions “will overburden the efficient use of shuttle capabilities in the late 1990s.”

Exactly why NASA would cancel the program if it needs the tug was left unclear. In addition, the NASA budget has been sharply increasing in recent years, so it was not clear exactly what budgetary constraints NASA was considering.