Space Station in Constant War Over Priorities

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 thrust America back into the race to explore the planets.

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 Planet 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 at a time 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 is intended to serve as a jumping-off point for manned missions back to the moon and to 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 the year 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 two weeks ago 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 President Bush on Thursday, lacks the political experience to forcefully push the NASA agenda in Congress. The space station has drawn fire even 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, for instance, that there is no money in the space station budget for a centrifuge, which would be needed for biological experiments. NASA nevertheless has promised to install one sometime after the year 2000.

In addition, scientists have told NASA that a four-astronaut crew will be inadequate to properly 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, however, 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 even 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 state’s struggling aerospace industry. Most of those losses will be caused by planned 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 or so 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 later 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 240-173 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.”

At the heart of the money problem is the federal government’s burgeoning budget deficit, which is expected to reach nearly $400 billion this year, and the system that Congress and the White House worked out in October, 1990, to attempt to limit its growth.

Money for NASA programs, including the space station, comes from the pool of funds set aside by Congress for the House appropriations subcommittee that oversees spending by the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Housing and Urban Development and independent federal agencies, including NASA.

That means that NASA must compete with disabled veterans and the urban poor for ever more scarce federal dollars. Under the 1990 budget agreement, savings resulting from cuts in defense spending cannot be applied to domestic programs.

Faced with a fiscal 1992 allocation that he felt could not meet the demands for more veterans’ medical aid, urban housing needs, and the NASA budget, Rep. Bob Traxler (D-Mich.), chairman of the appropriations subcommittee, eliminated all funds for the space station. When Congress restored the money, it severely cut many other NASA science programs.

What will happen this year is anyone’s guess, Traxler said in an interview. “From this distance, I think it would be extremely difficult to predict what the outcome is going to be . . .,” he said, “not only on (the space) station, but any number of vital and important programs within NASA, or within other agencies.”

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.

While the European consortium was pleased with the Bush 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 ESA’s Washington office.

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

“We will see great strides in the next year,” said Larry Morata, McDonnell Douglas vice president and space station project manager. “Our development hardware will be coming on line. . . . NASA is emphasizing keeping the program steady and on course.”

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 special rotating joints manufactured by Lockheed. The panels eventually 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 already are being built in Sylmar, in the San Fernando Valley, 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, that will serve as the station’s laboratory and living quarters. The company also will provide life support and environmental control systems for the modules.

Living and working conditions will be slightly cramped for the four astronauts who will permanently occupy the space station, for 90-day tours of duty, beginning sometime in the year 2000. Until then, experiments aboard the station’s laboratory module will be “tended” by crews who arrive on regular shuttle flights.

The habitation module, where the crew will eat, sleep and wash, will measure 27 feet long by 14 feet in diameter, the same size as the laboratory. Astronauts--both men and women--will sleep in bags strapped to bulkheads in their private living areas. They will use recycled water to shower and wash their laundry because the estimated cost of transporting one gallon of water into space is between $2,500 and $4,000. Eventually, even the air they breathe will be recycled.

“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 one that blew the Challenger out of the sky in 1986, killing 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