Shuttle Disaster Seen Likely Within Decade : Space: NASA official tells panel problems are expected, since technology is complicated--and often experimental.

Space exploration is a risky business and another shuttle disaster is likely within the next 10 years, a top official of the U.S. space agency conceded Tuesday under intense grilling by a Senate panel.

“We’re likely to lose one” of the next 100 space shuttle flights during the next 10 years, said James R. Thompson Jr., deputy administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, in testimony before the subcommittee on science, technology and space of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee.

“There is risk in spaceflight. We accept that,” Thompson said. He added that other problems experienced recently by NASA projects--such as those with the Hubble Space Telescope and the fuel leaks in two shuttle models--were to be expected, since the technology involved is very complicated and often experimental.

The testimony from Thompson and other NASA officials came during the second hearing in two weeks on the flawed space telescope, which could lose up to 40% of its research capability because of a defective mirror or mirrors that produce fuzzy images in pictures taken with the telescope’s camera.

If NASA had tested the Hubble Space Telescope before it left the ground, it probably would have detected the potentially disastrous mirror problem, NASA officials acknowledged.

However, they defended the decision not to test the Hubble before sending it into space as a sound economic decision. Although those testifying had not personally made the decision, they said it was apparently intended to save some $10 million.

“I want to make sure that everybody understands that you don’t get testing for free. It costs money,” Thompson said.

Thompson cautioned that now is not the time to give up on NASA, but rather time to plow ahead. “The worst mistake we could make is to let a series of problems like this (cause us) to turn away from space exploration,” Thompson said. “I am convinced that America won’t quit.”

In reconstructing the history of the space telescope, NASA officials said that they considered bids to build the telescope some 10 years ago from two contractors, Eastman Kodak Co. and Hughes Danbury Optical Systems Inc. Kodak wanted to test the telescope one final time, fully assembled, before it would have been sent up into space, at a cost of some $10 million. Hughes Danbury, the company that built the two mirrors on the telescope, did not request a final test, and NASA decided not to conduct one.

“What went wrong is NASA did not require in the bid proposal a full test,” said Sen. Albert Gore Jr. (D-Tenn.), who chairs the subcommittee.

“That could have been done,” Gore said, “but it wasn’t done.”

Typically, Gore said, “there’s always a final assembly test.” The “common denominator” between the Hubble telescope malady and the space shuttle fuel leaks is inadequate testing, he said.

NASA’s “proclivity to . . . not give credence to test results” might cause Congress to be less inclined to appropriate as much money to NASA’s large, experimental projects, Gore said.

Officials from the two contracting companies involved in building the telescope also testified that in hindsight, the telescope should have been tested one final time, fully assembled, before it was positioned 381 miles above the Earth’s surface.