NASA Launches Battle to Save Space Station

In an intense effort to save its threatened space station, leaders of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration are warning key elected officials across the country that killing the station would mean lost jobs in their districts and “the end of future U.S. manned exploration of space.”

The warning has been leveled during meetings with selected members of the House and Senate. A key congressional source in Washington said the tone of one briefing held in Houston “smacked of hysteria.”

A House appropriations subcommittee last week slashed more than $2 billion from NASA’s planned expenditures for the space station during the coming year. If the funding cannot be reinstated, the station--which the General Accounting Office believes could cost $118 billion over the next 30 years--could well be doomed.

That prospect has stunned top NASA officials, whose initial reaction of disbelief has been replaced in recent days by a call to arms.

“We’re not giving up,” said William Lenoir, who heads NASA’s manned space flight program, which includes the station. “It’s going to be a very tough fight, and it’s going to be a long, hot summer here in Washington.”

The move to kill the station comes just as NASA is struggling with a number of troubled programs, including continued delays in launching the space shuttle. Many see the shuttle as the weakest part of the space agency’s program, yet it will have to make at least 23 flights to launch and build the station.

Even the scientists who would use the station are highly critical, as shown in a recent report by the Space Studies Board of the National Research Council. The report concluded that the station could not be justified on the basis of scientific merits.

The space station is to be a permanently manned, orbiting facility holding up to four crewmen who could research the effects of weightlessness on the human body, manufacture materials in a zero-gravity environment, and carry out various research projects. In the planning stage for seven years, the station is seen as the cornerstone of NASA’s space program into the next century.

The criticism of the station, coupled with eroding support in Congress and within the space community, has deeply troubled NASA officials. The depth to which the project has sunk was vividly illustrated May 15, when the House subcommittee with jurisdiction over NASA’s budget voted 6 to 3 to trim all but $100 million from the space station budget.

But last week, in the first formal attempt to fight back, officials at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston made an impassioned presentation to Democratic Rep. Michael A. Andrews, whose Texas district includes the sprawling space center. Johnson is the lead center for the space station.

The Houston briefing clearly revealed the despair NASA officials feel over the recent turn of events, and Lenoir said he did not think that dire warnings issued during that meeting were out of line.

At one point during the meeting, John Aaron, manager of the space station project in Houston, displayed a map of the United States with large block letters proclaiming “Businesses Getting Bucks.”

“Space station dollars are spent on the ground,” the caption on the map said. It noted that there are “over 2,000 businesses in 40 states” that stand to benefit from the space station program.

In that presentation, NASA noted that of those 2,000 businesses, 1,191 are in Texas, while California, the second-biggest potential loser, has 203. (California, however, stands to gain some of the largest contracts.)

Beyond the economic losses, the Houston presentation claimed that “the end of Freedom,” as the space station is called, also will mark the end of the United States as a world leader in space exploration. Among the other claims:

* “If the nation will not commit to space station now, it will never commit to future expensive deep space exploration programs.”

* “NASA will lose its ability to attract and retain top-quality talent without a leading-edge technology program.”

* “Credibility with the international community on future joint projects will again be seriously damaged,” a reference to Europe, Japan and Canada, all of whom are partners with the United States in the project, and all of whom have expressed varying levels of frustration.

The briefing ended with this bold assertion at the bottom of a chart:

“Cancellation of Space Station Freedom signals THE END of future U.S. manned exploration of space.”

One congressional source said he had never seen that kind of “hysteria” by a government agency.

Lenoir, however, defended the tone of the presentation. “I see a lot of NASA people making presentations to senators and congressmen across the country,” he said. “They will no doubt contain similar kinds of data.”

It will be a hard sell for many members of Congress, according to Rep. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), chairwoman of the House government activities and transportation subcommittee. She said testimony before her committee has suggested that “NASA estimates (of the cost of the station) could be as much as four times too low.” In contrast to the General Services Administration’s estimate of $118 billion, NASA has maintained that the station could be built for about $30 billion.

Boxer said she wonders whether a permanently manned orbiting space station is the “wisest way to spend our tax dollars.”

Lenoir says that he has no doubts. “We certainly feel very strongly that the space station is key to NASA’s near term future,” Lenoir said. “Without it, there is a big, gaping hole.”

But many, including some of NASA’s strongest supporters, believe a “gaping hole” would be better than the station, as it is now designed.

Even the Pasadena-based Planetary Society, the largest space organization in the world, has come out strongly against the station. Caltech planetary scientist Bruce Murray, vice president and co-founder of the society, recently told the Senate subcommittee on science, technology and space that the space station is “a recipe for programmatic disaster that will last well into the next century.”

Like many other scientists, Murray believes the nation needs a space station. They just don’t like this version. “I don’t think many people support the space station,” said former NASA administrator Thomas Paine. “But I think almost everybody supports a space station.”

This station was designed long before anyone had decided just what to do with it, according to Murray and many others. The need for a space station changed dramatically when President Bush called for the exploration of the inner solar system, including an eventual manned expedition to Mars.

The space station suddenly had a purpose, because much research must be conducted in space before such an expedition. But critics say that this particular station does not lend itself to that kind of research. For example, it does not include facilities needed to determine if astronauts would benefit from artificial gravity during a years-long journey to Mars.

In addition, many experts believe the space shuttle has proved it is not up to the task of making 23 flights and servicing the station by the time it was to be completed by the end of the decade.

“The space shuttle has not been that reliable,” said congresswoman Boxer. “The space station would depend upon the shuttle, and the fact that the shuttle has not been that reliable does make you think hard and long about the project.”

NASA’s current woes are a symptom of a much deeper problem, Paine added during a recent interview. The nation, the Congress, and even the scientific community, no longer support the space program as they once did.

“The consensus has come apart in the last few weeks, and we have got to find a way to put it back together,” he said.

Part of the problem, Paine said, is the constant stream of nagging problems that have afflicted so many NASA programs, beginning with the Challenger disaster and extending to some more recent ventures, including the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope with a flawed mirror.

As a result, Congress and many others began doubting NASA’s ability to carry out its programs, he said.

Paine believes NASA may have reached a “crossroads” where the agency should step back and rethink the space program.

The present leaders of the space program believe, however, that their best course is to continue pushing for the space station as the next “logical step” in the exploration of space. Lenoir admits that they have not done an adequate job of selling the program.

“We have talked about it in dry, scientific tones,” Lenoir said. “That’s not as exciting as the space station is.”

So he expects to continue pushing the station, following a strategy that Paine--who guided the space agency during the first moon landings--believes will probably fail.

“I don’t think a space program based on low Earth orbit is salable to the American people,” Paine said. “We’ve been to the moon, 25 years ago. We were doing space stations in the early 1970s.”

Pinning their hopes on the space station, Paine said, is leaving NASA “20 years behind the times.

“Part of our problem is we’re not bold enough.”