Soviet Space Program Faces a Down-to-Earth Future : Transition: Collapse of the central government augurs ill for soaring history that began with Sputnik.

The haunting “beep-beep” emitted by a basketball-sized aluminum sphere circling the Earth in the winter of 1957 told a startled America that Sputnik had been launched into orbit and that the Soviets were far more advanced technologically than most had thought.

Sputnik and other early Soviet space triumphs rallied a nation to action, and before it would end, Americans--not Soviets--would walk on the surface of the moon.

Now the nation that launched that crude spacecraft and thus began the space race has virtually ceased to exist. And its once proud space program, which was at its best when viewed from afar, may be facing a similar fate.

No one knows for certain what will happen in the months ahead, but experts believe that much of the Soviet space program may be buried in the dust that finally settles around the crumbling central government of what was once the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Some of the program will probably survive, but it seems likely that the emerging Commonwealth of Independent States will drop from the ranks of the major space powers.

Experts believe some of the states will try to retain the ability to launch satellites for communications with the rest of the world and spying on their neighbors, but missions to Mars and cosmonauts orbiting the Earth may be on their way out.

At greatest risk is the manned space effort, which is the most costly element in the Soviet program and would require the cooperation of several states. The aging Mir space station is the only permanently manned orbiting laboratory in space, and that is the one arena in which the Soviets have reigned supreme for many years.

“The manned program is going to suffer,” said Thomas F. Heinsheimer, a member of the Pasadena-based Planetary Society and a scientist who has advised the Soviets on their program. “They have gotten all out of the manned program they can get, unless they commit to a manned Mars expedition, which they are not likely to do.”

However, it seems unlikely that the Soviet space program will disappear entirely.

“Will it survive? Oh yes,” said Abe Becker, director of the RAND/UCLA Soviet Study Center. “It’s much too valuable to be destroyed or let go to waste.

“The space program is one of the jewels in the crown,” Becker said. He predicted that the commonwealth will attempt to maintain as much of the program as possible--”for spring-boarding back into the business of high technology.”

As the republics that make up the commonwealth sort out their roles in the months and years ahead, there will be serious conflicts and much distrust among them. Thus the more powerful states, especially Russia, will want to maintain some kind of space-based surveillance network to keep watch on their neighbors.

“The Russian republic is going to need a lot of intelligence on what is happening in its own back yard,” Heinsheimer said. “They won’t care about what’s going on in Boise, but they will want to know about crops and moving trucks” throughout their region.

The main elements of the Soviet space program are concentrated in three republics: Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan. The rockets are built mainly in Ukraine; the control centers and the instrument manufacturing plants are mostly in Russia, and the main launch facility, the Baikonur Cosmodrome, is in Kazakhstan.

Marcia S. Smith, the Soviet space expert on the staff of the Congressional Research Service, said, “Those three (republics) agreed in early October that they could do it by themselves.

“You would still have a fairly diverse program--but under tight budget restraints,” Smith said. “There would be less emphasis on human space flight, more on communications and environmental missions.”

She believes it is also possible that several key republics will form an organization like the European Space Agency which would be supported by mandatory dues from all participating states to cover the essential space sciences. However, that would require a fair measure of popular support in the face of economic despair, and the esteem in which Soviet citizens once held their space program has diminished in recent years.

“It was a matter of pride, but times have changed,” Smith said. Because of pressing economic problems, the program “is now under increasing criticism.”

But pride is not the only reason for keeping the program going, she added. Communications satellites, for example, are essential for foreign investments because they provide a critical link with the outside world.

In addition, space exploration can pay real dividends. An aggressive space program, for example, could be all that is left of the old Soviet Union that could rank that region as a world power. Space research also has technological spinoffs in such areas as computers, transportation, communications and propulsion.

Abandoning the program now would lead to “massive unemployment,” and it would “exacerbate the brain-drain problem,” Smith said.

Those are among the reasons that experts such as Louis Friedman, director of the Planetary Society, believe the new commonwealth will not want to see the program die.

“They really want to keep it together,” said Friedman, who has made many trips to the Soviet Union. “There is no move to get rid of it.”

But Friedman worries that economic pressures, including a staggering rate of inflation, may undermine the program.

“Will the institutions be able to stay alive?” Friedman asked. “That’s a big question.”

The Planetary Society is involved in two robotic missions that Soviet scientists had planned to send to Mars around the middle of this decade. Friedman said both of those programs appear to be moving forward, but others believe their future is murky.

“We talk to them very often, essentially at the working level, and things are continuing,” said Heinsheimer, who was in the Soviet Union in August when the unsuccessful coup was staged against Mikhail S. Gorbachev. He said “working types” seem to be going about their chores just as they always have, but top managers are confused and unsure of the future.

Heinsheimer believes the new leaders will stop short of abandoning the robotic Mars missions. Instead, he said, they will probably just let the schedule slide, and eventually the program will fade away.

The missions to Mars were designed to establish the Soviet Union as a world leader in planetary exploration, a goal that had proved elusive. Numerous efforts to land spacecraft on other celestial bodies, including the moon and Mars, failed due to technological problems.

Characteristic of the Soviet program, there was no problem in launching the rockets. But soft landings proved beyond Soviet capabilities.

In fact, launches were the heart and soul of the Soviet program, and no other nation in the world came close to matching that country’s launch rate. Even during this troubled year, the Soviets have launched 56 space missions--a huge number by U.S. standards but the slowest year for the Soviets since 1967.

The workhorse of the Soviet program has been the World War II-vintage Proton rocket, which can deliver 44,000 pounds into orbit so easily that the Soviets never had the need to develop the miniaturization and sophistication that is the signature of the U.S. program. As a result, the Soviets were big on launches but relatively low on technology.

The most sophisticated instruments carried aboard Soviet spacecraft have historically been supplied by other nations, most notably the advanced countries of Western Europe. So while the Soviet program looked extremely successful from afar, it was actually crude by Western standards and always relied on outside technology for much of its success.

Its rockets, however, have worked remarkably well, giving the Soviet Union far easier access to space than any other nation. Rocket technology could still win foreign participation in the Soviet program, but some factories that used to produce rockets are now being used for other purposes, including the manufacture of buses and trucks.

The Soviets’ success with rockets allowed them to build a series of manned space stations in which cosmonauts spent up to a year orbiting the Earth. No other country has come close to matching that record. Space Station Freedom, a U.S.-driven international program, is about a decade away from being a reality.

While the Soviets concentrated on maintaining a permanent presence in space, the United States charted a different course nearly two decades ago. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration chose to build a reusable space vehicle, believing that such a program would greatly reduce the cost of going to space.

The space shuttle, however, turned out to be far more expensive than its planners had anticipated, greatly increasing--rather than reducing--the costs of access to space.

Meanwhile, the Soviets were mimicking the U.S. program. They came up with a carbon copy of the space shuttle, called Buran (Snowstorm), which has flown only once--and then unmanned.

To launch the Buran, the Soviets created the most powerful rocket on Earth, the Energia, which is capable of delivering four times as much weight into orbit as the U.S. shuttle.

But today, most experts believe Buran will never fly again and that the Energia will be mothballed.

There is no replacement in the works for the Mir space station, and that program is believed to be in jeopardy.

“Mir is slowly but surely falling apart,” Heinsheimer said. “There are endless maintenance problems.

“Eventually, they are going to decide this is not worth continuing,” he added. “It will be declared a success and abandoned.”

If so, that will leave the world minus one major player in the space arena. The program that had served as the catalyst for other space powers around the world could be reduced to a tool for spying by neighbor upon neighbor.