COLUMN ONE : Rockets: A Lesson in Politics : Experts say NASA doesn’t need the hardware. But Rep. Whitten’s constituents need jobs, so his district is home to a $3-billion federal project.

The Tombigbee Waterway curves through these hills like a giant question mark, as though the land itself is puzzled over the mystery of it all.

High on a bluff, where the Tennessee Valley Authority a few years ago dumped $1.5 billion into a nuclear power plant before abandoning the project, the big rigs are at work again. They are pushing the red soil over the massive steel and concrete building that was to house the reactor, clearing the way for another use of a site that was to breathe economic vitality into this chronically depressed region.

Rising on the 1,000-acre location is a state-of-the-art manufacturing facility which, in a few years, is to begin building advanced solid-rocket motors for the space shuttle. It was the failure of a solid rocket that caused the Challenger to explode, and the advanced design is supposed to make shuttle flights safer while increasing launch capability.

The $3-billion project will introduce a solid rocket system that has been mandated by Congress. But many space experts, and even the key panel that advises the National Aeronautics and Space Administration on safety, say that it is not needed, it may not be as reliable as the system already in use and the project is draining money away from more pressing needs.

Critics of the program say it shows what has gone desperately wrong in pursuit of the once-noble goal of exploring the universe. Too often, they contend, the program is driven not by the scientific tenet of expanding knowledge but by pork barrel-politics and bureaucratic fiefdoms.

The advanced system will replace solid rockets that were redesigned after the Challenger disaster and are working so well that NASA has repeatedly expressed satisfaction with them. Just recently, the space agency ordered 68 of them to power shuttle liftoffs through this decade.

Yet earlier this year, at the same time Congress was cutting funds from some of NASA’s most important science programs, it nearly doubled the appropriation for the advanced rocket project.

What is it about Mississippi’s rocket program that made it fare so well even though it is widely opposed, even by some of NASA’s strongest supporters?

The project is known simply as the Yellow Creek Advanced Solid Rocket Motor Facility. Some day it may be called the Jamie L. Whitten Rocket Center.

Whitten, 81, is the dean of the House of Representatives and chairman of the Appropriations Committee. That makes him one of the most powerful men in Washington and the closest thing there is to Santa Claus.

This is Whitten’s country, these rolling hills of northern Mississippi. The unemployment rate here has averaged more than 20% over the last 10 years, and the powerful Democrat believes the federal government should do something about that.

That, many say, is why the earth movers are at work again on the banks of the Tombigbee. Critics of the rocket facility say it is being built not because NASA wants it or because it is the next logical move in the space program, but because Whitten said build it, and he said build it here.

“If Jamie Whitten retired this would all be over in 15 minutes,” said Steven Aftergood, a space policy analyst with the Federation of American Scientists in Washington.

Whitten insists there will be an advanced solid-rocket motor facility, said one expert who requested anonymity, “but it’s a big investment in a system (the space shuttle) that we are trying to get free of.”

Many believe the time has come to replace the space shuttle with a new, manned system of powerful rockets that would be able to carry humans to the moon and Mars. But development of NASA’s proposed National Launch System, which would supersede the shuttle, has stalled because of a lack of funds.

The advanced solid rockets could also be used in such a new system, but many engineers believe solids should be phased out. Solid rockets cannot be turned off once they are fired up. They pollute the upper atmosphere, and many consider them to be more hazardous than liquid-fuel systems.

Once the manufacturing plant is completed here, however, it will be tempting for NASA to include the advanced solids in the design for its new launch system.

One key source said that even the White House had opposed building the Mississippi facility, and that, last year, the Office of Management and Budget “floated the idea of canceling the program, but a firestorm developed over the likely reaction of Whitten, so nothing happened.”

Whitten, who did not respond to requests for an interview, believes his constituents have it coming. “My district is part of the nation,” he once said, and thus should share in major programs that pass through his committee.

The very existence of the Tombigbee Waterway proves that Whitten knows how to get things done.

The huge, federally financed canal opened shipping from this region to the Gulf of Mexico--and the rest of the world. It was opposed by environmentalists who said it would serve no purpose, so when Whitten finally got the funds to begin construction, he had it start at both ends of the route.

When the inevitable fiscal crunch came and the project was stalled, he argued that it made no sense not to connect the two ends, and Congress allocated the funds to complete the project.

Whitten’s roots are in agriculture, not space, and he has never been known as a strong supporter of the space program. He did not even support the advanced solid-rocket motor program until NASA decided, in April, 1989, to build the plant in his district. Whitten then found himself in a strong position.

The White House was fighting to keep alive two expensive programs: the $8-billion Supercollider in Bush’s Texas and the $30-billion space station Freedom.

Insiders say that Whitten decided early on that if the White House wanted to win funds for either of those bitterly contested projects, there would have to be a little something for his district.

That surfaced dramatically during hearings on the space station program. The advanced rockets could help in construction of the station, because their added lift should make it possible to launch heavier payloads on the shuttle. Congressional critics were trying to kill the space station because of its cost, yet there was no effort to kill the advanced solid rocket.

At one point, White House Budget Director Richard G. Darman wondered aloud about the logic of it all. He noted that the House was trying to kill the space station, but without the station, why build the advanced rockets?

Rep. George E. Brown Jr. (D-Colton), chairman of a House subcommittee on science and technology and an astute operative at getting projects through Congress, gently reminded Darman that if the White House wanted the space station it had better not anger the good people of northern Mississippi.

Everyone knew he was referring to one person from Mississippi, Whitten.

The appropriation of $475 million for the rocket system came at the same time Congress cut from $175 million to $30 million funds for the National Launch System that will eventually replace the shuttle. An orbiting infrared telescope, part of NASA’s Great Observatories program, got no funds at all. Neither did a plan for an orbiting solar laboratory. Nor a research satellite to study the Earth.

The big winners were the space station freedom, expected to cost between $30 billion and $40 billion, and the advanced solid rocket program. Although NASA did not push for the rocket, it has taken it on with gusto because it guarantees Whitten’s support. Some NASA engineers support the program because the new rockets are supposed to increase by as much as 12,000 pounds the payload that a shuttle can carry.

Even if a case for the advanced rocket can be made, many critics say this is a strange place to build it. The rockets, each as tall as a 12-story building, will have to be shipped in three segments down the Tombigbee to the Gulf and around the Florida peninsula to the Kennedy Space Center.

The National Research Council, research arm of the National Academy of Sciences, recently noted that quality control will be of particular concern because the rockets use a highly volatile fuel that must be mixed in perfect chemical balance, and the rockets themselves must be built to precise specifications.

According to the trade publication Aviation Week and Space Technology, industry experts are concerned about where NASA will find the skilled labor to ensure that quality will be maintained. The nearest city, Memphis, is two hours away, and this area has never produced workers with the kinds of skills that will be required.

When fully operational, the plant will employ perhaps 1,200 people, of whom “a couple or three hundred will have to be highly skilled,” according to John Chapman, deputy project manager.

The decision to go ahead with the advanced rocket program has infuriated many in the aerospace field, among them William Haynes, a senior system analyst with 30 years’ experience in advanced aerospace systems. Like many other experts, he believes the wiser course would be to move away from solid rockets entirely.

“There was no way for the Challenger crew to respond to their solid motor failure, even if they had had time,” Haynes said. “They just had to ride it out.”

Since a faulty solid rocket cannot be turned off, every shuttle “carries a destruct package that will allow the range safety person to blow it up, crew and all, if it departs from its programmed flight path” and threatens a populated area, he added.

Such problems will not be solved with the advanced solid rocket. Each rocket will have to perform perfectly to avoid another Challenger-type disaster.

NASA’s Chapman said he believes the rockets can be manufactured safely here because the process will be highly automated, relying on state-of-the-art equipment that will provide even a continuous reading of the chemical balance of the solid fuel. He acknowledged, however, that the process will require “continual vigilance.”

The new rockets will have three segments, instead of the four used in the current model, and so will have one less joint. The joints themselves have been strengthened and improved to allow for better visual inspection during the assembly process, so the risk of another joint failure like the one that destroyed the Challenger will be reduced.

Many of the engineers working on the advanced rocket helped to redesign the rockets that went into use after the Challenger, and they felt they had done a good job. Some were surprised to learn that the redesigned rocket would be replaced.

The decision also troubled NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, which warned in March, 1989, that the “new solid rocket motor, by the time it is introduced, will have less proven and documented safety and reliability features than the current” (redesigned) rocket. The panel concluded that the money would be better spent improving other areas of the shuttle, such as the main liquid-fueled engines, or even on development of liquid-fuel boosters that to replace the environmentally damaging solid rockets. Solids are favored by some because they provide enormous thrust and are less complex than liquid-fuel engines.

Once they begin rolling off the assembly line, the new solid rockets will have to undergo extensive testing. That will require firing test rockets and releasing toxic elements into the air.

That will also be done in Mississippi. The test rockets will be loaded onto a barge and floated down to the Stennis Space Center in the heart of the Mississippi Delta. The decision to test the rockets in southern Mississippi has enraged environmentalists in that area, who say it will degrade the Delta’s dense foliage and diverse wildlife.

The opposition is led by an experimental biologist with Mississippi State University who had worked under contract for NASA while the space agency was evaluating the proposed test site. Robert J. Esher says today that he soon concluded NASA was more interested in satisfying Whitten than in evaluating the site.

“Once Whitten decided to put (the rocket plant) in his district, everything else was rubber-stamped,” said Esher, who is head of environmental research for the university’s DeLisle Environmental Laboratory.

Esher said the Stennis Space Center was only one of several sites NASA was considering for the testing, and that when NASA compiled its draft environmental impact statement on the site, it drew heavily from a report he had prepared. But, he said, the conclusions in the statement bore little similarity to his findings.

He said he was stunned to learn that the environmental statement declared that the huge site was not part of the Delta wetlands.

“We were standing in water” while carrying out the research, Esher said.

Eventually, the Environmental Protection Agency approved the project, but it forced NASA to reclassify the area as wetlands. And, in exchange for building the test site at Stennis, the space agency must develop 132 acres of wetlands, according to Lon Miller, project manager.

Miller, a veteran of the solid rocket program, bristles at any suggestion that NASA will damage the Delta. As he wrestled his four-wheel-drive truck around the building site recently, he insisted that tests will be conducted only when meteorological conditions are favorable.

The current generation of solid rockets is tested in the Utah desert, where the toxic emissions are considered less damaging to the dry environment. In the Delta, a sudden rain could wash the exhausts from the atmosphere into the wetlands.

Miller said the rockets will not be fired when rain is forecast, but Esher countered that a better answer would be not to fire them at all in the Delta.

A test firing will produce 400 tons of oxides of aluminum in various forms, Esher said.

“Aluminum is a toxic, heavy metal,” he added. “It kills plants.”

To simulate the stresses they undergo when launched, the rockets must be fired in a horizontal position on the ground. That could send emissions across the Delta, but Miller said a 60-foot-high ramp will be built 250 feet behind the test site. The exhaust will hit the ramp and be deflected upward, he said.

“It will rise and disperse over a wide area,” he said, so that concentrations of toxic elements in any one area will be “virtually undetectable.”

Research is under way to determine how to build a ramp that will withstand 6,000-degree temperatures for two minutes, he said.

People who live in northern Mississippi are already reaping benefits from the manufacturing project.

“This area has been economically depressed since the early 1980s,” said Hayden Ables, Chancery Court Clerk in Iuka, just south of the plant site. For years, he said, there was little hope for young people who grew up in that area. But today, a $13-million “magnet” high school is under construction and various other projects planned for the area will give new hope to the children of Tishomingo County.

“Our youngsters have a better opportunity now,” he said.

Rocket Redesign

The new solid Fuel rocket motors--to be built at Yellow Creek, Miss.--will replace productsthat were redesigned after the Challenger disaster.

The new rockets will use three segments instead of four, eliminating one joint. And the joints have been strengthened and improved, allowing for better visual inspection.

The Route:

The Yellow Creek plant is about 20 miles north of Iuka, in the northeastern corner of Mississippi.

* The rockets will be barged down the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway to Mobile Bay. From there, test rockets will be barged over to the Stennis Space Center in southern Mississippi.

* Rockets that are to be used with the space shuttle will be taken around the tip of Florida and up the east coast to the Kennedy Space Center.