The Space Station Question: What’s It Supposed to Do? : NASA: As its price got bigger, its size, number of features and intended mission shrank? Is it now one ridiculous--and too expensive--step for mankind?

Its price tag has tripled even as its size has declined and most of its features eliminated; nearly everyone, except the direct financial beneficiaries, oppose it; even proponents have a hard time explaining what it’s supposed to do. What is it? The space station.

At a time when Bush Administration officials contend they cannot uncover an extra dime in the federal budget for such items as health insurance for the working poor, the White House is asking Congress to commit more than $100 billion for a “continuously habitable” space station. What will the space station do? House astronauts. What will the astronauts do? Monitor each other’s health while maintaining the space station. The project’s name is station Freedom, but it might as well be the Lewis Carroll Orbiting Hall of Mirrors. Consider:

-- Cost. When Ronald Reagan proposed the station in 1984, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration said basic construction would cost about $11 billion, in current dollars. Now the figure is $30 billion and climbing. With operating costs, says a recent General Accounting Office report, the space station will set taxpayers back at least $118 billion--roughly half this year’s federal deficit.

-- Size and features. The space station announced in 1984 was to be equipped for astronomy, environmental studies, satellite repair, refueling of spacecraft, assembly of large ships bound for the moon or Mars, commercial “microgravity” manufacturing and research on the human body’s response to space. As the cost climbed, all missions except the latter two have been dropped. Now microgravity research is on the verge of being axed.

NASA has also retreated from a plan for the space station to employ the first “closed” life-support system that reuses water, oxygen and nutrients, as a Mars expedition probably must. Since no closed system other than Earth has ever run successfully, this was to have been a milestone. Now the station’s supply concept is “open”--meaning essentials will be trucked up from Earth, increasing costs and reducing knowledge gained.

Bottom line, aside from building and maintaining the space station--a circular exercise--about all NASA astronauts will do for $118 billion aboard Freedom is life sciences--roughly, taking each other’s blood pressure.

Since bone-calcium loss, muscle degradation, profound nausea and other problems have plagued many astronauts and cosmonauts, a better understanding of how human metabolism responds to space is necessary before people can take long space journeys. The space station might contribute some breakthroughs in this area, but is unlikely to be a cost-effective research tool.

Why? First, most life-science experiments could be performed on the space shuttle. Spacelab, an existing science facility that sits in the shuttle bay, was originally designed for just such use--a space-lab life-sciences mission is the purpose of the next shuttle launch. But regular use of space lab has quietly been penciled out of the NASA manifest because the facility’s existence poses an extremely embarrassing low-cost alternative to Freedom.

Second, the one important life-science experiment the shuttle cannot do--keeping people in space for months--has been the focus of the Soviet Mir mini-space-station program. Soviet officials have released some life-science data from Mir experiments, and indicated a willingness to share more. Do we need to spend billions duplicating Soviet findings?

Finally, by far the most compelling life-sciences question--can simulated gravity combat the sickening effects of space adaptation?--probably can’t be answered by Freedom.

The station will have a centrifuge in which lab animals can be subjected to simulated gravity. If this works, the animals’ health may be better than that of the astronauts monitoring them. But only a wheeled-shaped or tethered space facility that could rotate, simulating the G-force for all occupants, could provide direct data on the effects on people of simulated gravity. If lab-animal data is all NASA wants, this could be obtained in shuttle-bay centrifuge experiments at a tiny fraction of the cost.

-- Everybody’s opposed. It’s difficult to find anyone who supports the station, other than NASA and its contractors.

The recent Augustine Commission on NASA reform essentially recommended the station be made a secondary NASA objective. D. Allan Bromley, President George Bush’s science adviser, recently declared there was no commercial or scientific merit in the station’s microgravity research component. About 10 days ago, a House subcommittee voted to cancel space-station funding--significant because the subcommittee has traditionally been sympathetic to NASA budget requests. The National Research Council, a prestigious Big Science group, recently declared the space station “cannot be supported” by claims of science value. NASA officials reacted by saying the agency was not surprised, because the scientists’ council has long opposed space-station funding. Hmmmm--shouldn’t that tell you something?

NASA’s reason for wanting the station so badly is to keep the space shuttle and the astronaut corps in business. If new, throwaway rockets are built for most satellite and payload launches--an increasing likelihood--without the space station, there will be little for the space shuttle to do. So, in a truly circular arrangement--let’s call it a closed-cycle circularity--the space station will exist to justify shuttle flights, and the shuttle will exist to service the space station.

Job guarantees for the astronauts are only a minor consideration in this self-justification exercise. For more consequential are the tens of thousands of civil service and contractor jobs at the many NASA manned-flight centers that support people in space.

-- Means first, then ends. At a time when NASA cannot reliably or cheaply move goods or people into orbit, all talk of space stations, moon bases or Mars trips has an unreal quality--like Wilbur and Orville Wright arguing over airline schedules.

Until the basic nature of the U.S. space effort is reformed by shifting to new, relatively low-cost, throwaway rockets and to some new, small vehicle, such as a space plane, for those instances where people are needed, the United States will continue to have problems staging routine 1960s-style space efforts, let alone establishing continuously habited research stations.

Two items in this regard:

Responding to pressure from U.S. companies involved in the communications- satellite industry, last year the Bush Administration announced it would allow private space payloads to be launched by the Cape York consortium, a company planning to fire Soviet rockets from a new spaceport in Australia.

That Soviet rockets controlled by world-famous Australian space expertise are viewed by some U.S. companies as a more attractive launch service than any available in the United States should have shocked the space agency to its institutional soul. Instead, because NASA has one of the government’s fastest growing budgets, it shrugged this off. And the Russo-Australian consortium is for-profit on the assumption it can do a better job for less. Its secret is throwaway rockets, fashioned mainly from low-cost components.

Second, the Augustine Commission report chides NASA for cooking its books so that no one really understands what a shuttle costs. NASA, however, let slip an informative nugget by telling the commission that basic shuttle expenses are about one-third of its budget. Assuming all planned 1991 missions occur on schedule, this works out to about $515 million per shuttle launch--far higher than the $250-million estimate NASA sometimes cites--and $11,000 per pound of payload delivered to orbit. But that’s just for direct shuttle costs, not for general manned-flight support. A better estimate is that the shuttle soaks up two-thirds of NASA’s spending, putting the price of an individual flight at around $1 billion.

-- The real problem. Since humanity is sure to build space stations, Mars colonies and many more ambitious projects someday, the real problem behind the current Freedom plan is not its shaky rationalizations. It’s that nothing America tries to do in space will make sense until the country weans itself from the technologically glamorous but fiscally hilarious space- shuttle program.

Consider that the economically backward Soviet Union has had an operational space-station program for nearly a decade, but has launched the Buran, its space shuttle, only once. This ought to convey all the White House and Congress need to know about this subject. The Buran was parked after a single flight because Soviet space officials quickly reached the conclusion NASA resists: At current levels of technology, reusable spaceships are more expensive than throwaway models.

The Air Force has a project, called Advanced Launch System, to build a new launcher that would be relatively cheap, by virtue of avoiding the one-of-a-kind, max-tech engineering regimes of the space shuttle. NASA is a titular partner in some aspects of the ALS venture, but behind the scenes has lobbied to prevent this competitor from flying.

Recently, as support for ALS was building in Washington, NASA endorsed the idea of a new, cost-conscious, throwaway booster. But the space agency told Congress that $12 billion was required to develop the system--a higher figure than expected. NASA may be pulling the bureaucratic low-ball trick in reverse--in this case high-balling the research-and-development cost so the system would not be funded--allowing NASA to claim it tried to create a cheap rocket but was frustrated by Congress.

The irony is that by converting the nation’s shuttle fleet mainly to spacelab-style life-science research, shuttles could be given an honorable and defensible long-term mission; an astronaut corps could be kept in business for missions when people are necessary; annual shuttle launches could be reduced to a sustainable and safer rate, and the $118 billion saved by canceling the space station could be invested in new ALS-style vehicles and small space planes that would make access to orbit affordable.

There have been four presidential commissions on space policy in the last six years. None had a fundamental impact on the way NASA does business. How about a new commission to study this idea?