Attacks Cloud Space Station’s Future : Space: Replacement of NASA director, funding battles and criticism of latest design add to problems. But officials say they are on target to launch first components in 1995.

At McDonnell Douglas’ sprawling Orange County space plant, inside a corrugated steel building known as 46-North, engineers are assembling an intricately machined aluminum frame designed to help push America back toward the frontiers of space.

The 6-by-15-foot, black-and-gold anodized structure is part of the first, full-size version of one of the rocket thruster packages intended to keep space station Freedom--and NASA’s manned space program--circling Earth well into the 21st Century.

But the future of Freedom, and the aspirations it represents, is far from assured.

Nearly 35 years after a Soviet satellite named Sputnik scared the United States into launching an unprecedented space exploration program, the space station has become the focal point of an intense debate over America’s future in the cosmos.

Under development since 1984, the station is designed to serve as an orbiting life science and microgravity laboratory. Astronauts would board it for 90 days to study the long-term effects of weightlessness on humans and the potential for using a nearly weightless environment to process fluids, crystals and other materials with scientific or commercial applications. Eventually, the station could serve as a jumping-off point for manned missions to the moon and Mars.

Just as significant as its scientific mission, supporters say, is the station’s importance as a symbol of the nation’s prowess in technology, its spirit of adventure and, ultimately, its will to succeed.

“Space station Freedom is not only a very valuable scientific program,” President Bush told a group of young science students last month, “but it is essential to our destiny as a pioneering nation.”

After triumphing in a bruising congressional battle last year and securing a $2.25-billion berth in the Administration’s 1993 budget, NASA officials and Freedom contractors say they are on target toward the scheduled launch of the first space station components in November, 1995. The station, to be lofted piece by piece aboard the space shuttle, is to be partially operational by 1997, and permanently manned by a four-astronaut crew by 2000.

“We’re on our way to producing real flight hardware,” said Robert Moorehead, deputy director of the space station program for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. “We anticipate we will fly in less than four years, (and) in four or five years, America will have its laboratory in space.”

But opponents of the program are renewing their attack, complaining that a recession-racked nation has more pressing needs for the $30 billion to $40 billion that Freedom is expected to consume by the end of the century.

“I don’t know when I have ever seen . . . a project that expensive with as little pay-back as the space station provides,” said Sen. Dale Bumpers (D-Ark.), who led the assault on funding in the Senate last year. “Absolutely, I’m going to take that sucker on again.”

The unexpected firing of NASA Administrator Richard H. Truly Feb. 12 is certain to complicate the fight over space station funding. Supporters of the program are concerned that Aaron Cohen, the NASA caretaker administrator named by Bush on Thursday, lacks the political experience to forcefully push the NASA agenda in Congress. The space station has even drawn fire within the scientific community, with critics characterizing it as an astronomical Edsel unlikely to ever justify its enormous cost.

The Space Studies Board, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences, concluded that the latest design for Freedom “does not meet the basic research requirements of the two principal scientific disciplines for which it is intended”--life sciences and microgravity research.

The board complained that there is no money in the space station budget for a centrifuge, which creates various levels of artificial gravity and is needed for biological experiments. NASA nevertheless has promised to install one sometime after 2000.

In addition, scientists have told NASA that a four-astronaut crew will be inadequate to carry out a full range of biological experiments. Earlier plans for a larger lab and an eight-astronaut crew were scrapped last year because of budget considerations.

NASA officials have defended the station’s ability to produce important research data, despite the financial constraints, and have pledged to work with the scientists to address their concerns.

Even if NASA wins the looming budget fight, another catastrophic failure in the space shuttle fleet, which must carry the space station into orbit, could doom the program before it gets under way.

“When is the shuttle going to blow up? . . . That’s the wild card in all of this. That’s the thing that could just totally change everything in an afternoon,” said John E. Pike, director of the space policy project for the Federation of American Scientists.

Freedom’s future is of special interest to California, which in the next five years faces the loss of more than 200,000 jobs directly or indirectly related to the struggling aerospace industry. Most losses will be caused by cuts in defense spending.

Two of the space station’s three prime contractors are based in California, as are more than a dozen major subcontractors.

With a work package valued at $3.5 billion, McDonnell Douglas Space Systems Co. in Huntington Beach is the biggest of the three prime contractors. Space station work accounts for about one-third of the company’s business and employs 1,500 workers in Orange County and another 750 at other facilities, primarily in Houston.

In Canoga Park, the Rocketdyne Division of Rockwell International Corp. holds about $1.6 billion in space station contracts and has about 1,100 employees working on the program. The third major contractor is a division of the Boeing Defense & Space Group in Huntsville, Ala., with station contracts worth about $2.6 billion.

Ken Francis, president of McDonnell Douglas Space Systems, said company officials were stunned last year when a key House subcommittee rejected the Bush Administration’s $2-billion space station funding request, a move that was reversed. “Maybe we should have seen it coming, but we didn’t,” he said.

Last year’s debate pitted those who argue that the billions to be invested in Freedom could be better spent on Earth against those who speak reverently of the nation’s future as a space-faring nation. Ultimately, the space visionaries won. In June, the House voted 240 to 173 to fund the station, and the Senate followed suit in July with a 64-35 vote.

But the victory does not mean that the station will have a free ride this year, Francis said. “In today’s (budget) environment, the program will always be under some form of attack.”

The looming funding battle will be closely watched in foreign capitals, as well as in Washington. The United States has entered into a partnership with Canada, Japan and the European Space Agency, which represents 13 countries, in which those governments have pledged to provide about $8 billion of the space station’s funding.

Although the European consortium was pleased with the Administration’s budget request, “the big question is how the NASA budget, and space station in particular, fares during the congressional budget process,” said Ian Pryke, who heads the European Space Agency’s Washington office.

Despite the uncertainty on Capitol Hill, NASA officials and the major space station contractors said that this year will be a milestone for the program as they prepare to produce the first batch of hardware that will fly on space station Freedom.

“If they have one more good year (in Congress), they are going to be well along the road to having a good part of it built,” said Rep. George E. Brown Jr. (D-Colton), a major space station supporter and chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology.

At McDonnell Douglas, engineers and scientists are at work on several major space station systems and structures, including the command and control systems, the thruster packages that will keep it aloft until 2027, and the 300-foot aluminum truss that will serve as its backbone. Other California contractors, including Lockheed Missiles & Space Co. in Sunnyvale, are providing key elements of the systems for McDonnell Douglas.

At Building 46-North, work on the prototype for the thruster frame, which consists of forward and aft bulkheads connected by aluminum cross-members, is to be finished by June. The flight version will hold six propellant tanks and 13 thrusters, which will adjust the station’s position in space, and, more important, propel the station back to its proper orbit as the effect of gravity begins pulling it toward Earth. The thrusters are to be tested this spring at the White Sands missile range in New Mexico.

The truss, to be built on the ground in pieces and bolted together in space, will be built at the Huntington Beach plant.

Rocketdyne, with help from other contractors, including several based in California, is responsible for the station’s electric power system. Six sets of solar panels, each 39 feet by 122 feet, will attach to the ends of the truss (four at one end and two at the other), with rotating joints manufactured by Lockheed. The panels will provide about 65 kilowatts of power for station operations.

The system also includes a battery assembly, to store power for use when the station is flying in the Earth’s shadow, and a cooling system for the solar panels. The 250,000 photovoltaic cells that will make up the panels are being built in Sylmar by Spectro Lab, a Rocketdyne subcontractor.

“We’re very confident about the technology,” said George J. Hallinan, Rocketdyne vice president and program manager for the station’s electric power system. But Hallinan said he is more worried about what happens in Washington. “I would imagine there will be a vigorous debate again, but my anticipation would be . . . that we’d be successful again this year.”

Boeing’s Missile & Space Division in Huntsville is the prime contractor for the two cylindrical modules to be suspended from the center of the truss, which will serve as the station’s laboratory and living quarters. The company also will provide life support and environmental control systems for the modules.

“We are really quite bullish on the status of things right now,” said John B. Winch, Boeing’s deputy program manager for the space station. “We’re actually going to be cutting metal this year. We will be building parts this year for flight hardware. I really think we’re pretty much on our way.”

Aside from another congressional donnybrook, the event that space station contractors most fear is another shuttle accident like the Challenger in 1986, which killed the seven astronauts aboard.

“There’s apt to be another one. Statistically there will be another one,” said Francis of McDonnell Douglas. “You just have to pick up from there. What you’re talking about, ‘Is the risk worth it?’

“You don’t explore space, you didn’t explore the West, you don’t explore anything, without some human price to pay.”

California’s Contribution to Space Station

Two of space station Freedom’s three prime contractors are based in Southern California. McDonnell Douglas of Huntington Beach has work valued at $3.5 billion. Rocketdyne of Los Angeles has $1.6 billion in contracts. A look at the seven major components they are building for the space station, scheduled for operation by 1997:

ROCKETDYNE

A) Solar panels: 39-by-122-foot panels provide 65 kilowatts of energy for station operations

B) Batteries: Store power for use when station is flying in Earth’s shadow; also cool solar panels

McDONNELL DOUGLAS

C) Airlock: Hatch that allows astronauts to take spacewalks and make repairs

D) Command and control system: For navigation, life support, internal operations; located inside modules.

E) Thruster: Propulsions system keeps space station aloft; adjusts station’s position in space

F) Aluminum truss: 300 feet long; backbone for station; electricity runs through it

Source: NASA, McDonnell Douglas, Rocketdyne

Researched by ROBERT STEWART and APRIL JACKSON / Los Angeles Times