Space Agency Lost its Edge in Technology Long Ago : Space: NASA spends much energy trying to fund continuing operations. Radio Shack’s computers are more advanced than the shuttle’s.

When the space shuttle Atlantis finally blasted off Friday, it was the first shuttle flight under full control of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s new, state-of-the-art onboard computer system. These space-age marvels are something and, at $1.2 million apiece, they ought to be. Why, they have an incredible one megabyte of random-access memory!

In case you’ve lost track of the silicon-chip arms race, laptop computers selling today at Radio Shack offer two or four megs of RAM for a few thousand dollars. But then, they’ve been designed for free-enterprise research and development--giving them an advantage over NASA productions.

One enduring fallacy of space-program funding is that NASA is on the technological cutting edge. In fact, since the basic shuttle designs were completed about 15 years ago, most of the agency’s budget has gone into shuttle-operating subsidies and shuttle-support programs, not research. “Nobody doubts that the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization, with one-third NASA’s budget, is producing far more new technology,” says Bruce C. Murray, a former director of the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “Research associated with the B-2 stealth bomber produced more new technology during the 1980s than NASA did.”

This issue is particularly important as NASA presses its request for $118 billion to fund space station Freedom--a sum equal to nearly 60 years of appropriations for the National Science Foundation. Vice President Dan Quayle, head of Bush Administration space policy, has cited technological competitiveness as a principal justification for station Freedom funding. Yet since most space-station money will go to operating subsidies, diverting billions in federal funds from cost-effective small-science projects to one questionable big undertaking may detract from U.S. technological advancement.

Consider that when the House of Representatives voted in June to overturn a committee recommendation that Freedom be cancelled, it appropriated $1.9 billion to keep the program rolling. Where did the money come from? Mainly NASA accounts associated with space science and productive R&D.;

Congress likes to hear that money is being used for research--so NASA annually reports one-quarter to one-third of its $14-billion budget goes to this purpose. But this claim is achieved, sources familiar with NASA budgeting say, by categorizing as R&D; what are, in fact, operating subsidies for the manned-flight program, where nothing technologically new has happened in years. For example, the space-shuttle system has officially been operational since a Columbia flight in November, 1982, but NASA continues to report some expenses associated with repairing and refurbishing shuttle engines as a “research” project.

One indication of NASA’s technological stagnation is its program of interplanetary probes. During the glory days of the 1960s and early 1970s, NASA launched a half-dozen missions a year at the moon, Mars, Venus and the outer planets. These probes were developed rapidly, allowing designers to take into account rapidly evolving changes in technology; they were launched in short order, creating quick feedback on what worked.

Today, NASA sends up, at best, two probes annually; during most years of the 1980s, there were no probe launches. Completed spacecraft, such as the Hubble Space Telescope, may sit around in “clean rooms” for years, awaiting launch slots on the oft-grounded shuttle. Probe designs have become decade-long multibillion-dollar production numbers usually culminating in a single spacecraft like the Hubble or the Galileo device now bound for Jupiter. Because NASA can afford only one spacecraft under these conditions, any defect is a disaster--the Hubble’s faulty mirror and Galileo’s jammed antenna imperil these programs.

High costs and interminable development times make designers conservative; long delays between construction and launch mean minimal feedback, because, by the time results come in, the next generation of probes has already been commissioned. Finally, with costs running into the billions, if something goes wrong aboard a probe it is not merely chalked up to experience, as in the rest of the R&D; community, where mistakes are a normal part of the game. Instead there are formal investigations, congressional hearings, boards of review and similar stifling ramifications that serve to render designers even more timid.

Another aspect of NASA’s sluggish system is that, by the time new technology is fielded, it is archaic. Development of the new shuttle computer began in 1984, when one megabyte of RAM was hot stuff. Seven years to field a new computer product? Private companies making items as complex under market discipline would laugh at that development time.

Currently, NASA is developing the Earth Observing System, an environmental probe. The first EOS--which could be dubbed Son of Hubble--may take 15 years from concept to launch, and cost $3 billion. In the early 1970s, NASA designed and built the highly successful Viking probes, which went not to Earth orbit--as EOS will--but all the way to a soft landing on Mars, in just five years, for $1 billion each in current dollars. When EOS finally goes up, years from now, its electronics will be so dated no self-respecting teen-ager would allow them in his bedroom.

Why has NASA lost its technological cutting edge? One reason is overstaffing. In 1964, NASA had 1,477 employees per space mission launched. The figure has risen steadily--last year it reached 2,953 employees per launch. Though computers have taken over many technical chores involved in space launches, NASA today, measured by output, has three times as many people per product as in its glory days, when the agency was effective.

What are all those folks doing? Certainly not making projects foolproof--as the Challenger and Hubble failures demonstrate. Rather, in Parkinson’s Law fashion, NASA overstaffing harms agency efficiency--all the extra headquarters types, to keep busy, interfere with real work. During June, 1990, for example, the space station program office at McDonnell Douglas played host to 910 person-days of visitors from NASA, according to one source familiar with its operation. Researchers who ought to be working on technical innovations instead spent much of their time preparing presentations for what one engineer calls “these professional meeting attenders.”

In the late 1970s, NASA began switching from R&D; innovations to space-shuttle operations; many in the science community were unenthusiastic. “At that time, several of the center directors (NASA has a half-dozen research installations around the country) thought it would be the death of the dream for NASA to shift to operations,” Murray said. Now NASA wants to commit itself to 20 years of subsidies for space-station operations, instead of going back to the cutting edge by, say, a new focus on researching new systems for moving people and payloads to space cheaply.

Relevant note: The JPL is widely considered the best-run and most creative NASA research center. It’s also the only center not directly under NASA headquarters--the California Institute of Technology manages JPL on contract. This means, among other things, that JPL researchers can avoid most odious forms of government paperwork. On the other hand they must perform, because--there are no civil service job guarantees. By association with Cal Tech, JPL technicians get steady exposure to new ideas from grad students, while the students benefit by seeing for themselves how a real-world technology effort is run. Proposals to reinvigorate NASA by converting other space centers to research university management have not been greeted with open arms by headquarters.

Meanwhile, station Freedom supporters are using an argument that turns concerns regarding technology competitiveness on their head.

During the Reagan Administration, when space-station funding seemed about to fail, NASA signed space-station cooperation agreements with Japan and the European Space Agency. Though international cooperation in space is, of course, an important goal, the objective of these agreements was to get the lobbying log rolling for station Freedom. NASA gave away the store, with allies paying only a few billion dollars based on NASA’s own artificially low, initial space-station cost estimates, while all the big-ticket operating subsidies are to be born by--guess who. Under the deals, Japan, for example, gets its own Freedom module by paying just $2 billion of the $118 billion.

Now the lobbying sales pitch says that the United States cannot back out of the space station because the high ground would be ceded to Japan and the European agency. This is claimed, although, considering the recession, most member European nations would probably welcome a chance to escape from their Freedom contributions while placing the blame elsewhere. With more ominous force, it is asserted that if Freedom were cancelled, Japan would embarrass the United States by building its own space station--though the Japanese space program is still having trouble launching weather satellites.

Tokyo has lobbied the Bush Administration heavily about funding Freedom, with Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Nakayama complaining bitterly to Quayle in a recent meeting about the House vote that nearly cancelled the project. Japan’s line is that if Washington backs down from the space station, the United States will lose credibility as the world’s leading force in science.

That is clever lobbying on Tokyo’s part. But why would the chief U.S. trade competitor be so eager to see this country embark on a project to enhance its technological competitiveness? One explanation is Japan’s long-range planners have realized station Freedom will do no such thing, and would not be upset to see the United States sink $118 billion, which might otherwise go to productive R&D;, into a space facility with no commercial applications. Until NASA is shaken up and made a progressive agency again, the last possible argument for space spending is new technology.