Humdrum Future in the Stars Looms for NASA : Space: The shuttle program is the only thing still going for the agency. Lofty plans for an orbiting station are in danger of being scrapped.

Exploring Mars is out, for now. So is returning to the moon. The space station is in purgatory. For astronauts of the present and near future, the only sure thing is a shuttle ride.

And now the winged space-plane, too, is under constant fire, dodging a hail of political, technical and budgetary bullets on its way to orbit. As the country’s sole means of sending people into space, its grounding by accident or policy would halt the nation’s 30-year experiment in human spaceflight.

“There is a clear and present danger that the Space Age is over,” said space policy analyst John Pike of the Federation of American Scientists. “The Russians have gone from communism under Gorbachev to reform under Yeltsin, and yet they kept on flying. We go from Bush to Clinton, and the whole thing comes apart.”

As if to accentuate the shuttle’s fragility, after a remarkable record of on-time launches in 1992, this year two of the orbiters within a month suffered last-minute scrubs caused by technical glitches.

Then last month, NASA technicians found a pair of eight-inch pliers wedged in an opening at the base of a solid rocket fuel booster they recovered in the Atlantic. Before it was jettisoned, the booster had helped blast the shuttle Discovery to orbit a few days before.

And, sources revealed, angry NASA officials are investigating how a shuttle main engine got through inspections and a test firing and was poised to power Discovery to orbit earlier this year even though it was missing a part.

As if all this were not enough, in March a panel of independent safety advisers quietly called for redesign of a shuttle booster joint because of signs of possible weakness around an O-ring seal. NASA managers said they are reviewing the matter. But it served, if nothing else, as a chilling reminder of the 1986 explosion of the shuttle Challenger. That was caused by a leak of hot gas resulting from poor design in a booster joint at a time when the program was under budgetary and political pressure.

Administration officials maintain that, far from ending the Space Age, they are taking difficult but vital steps to make the space program, including the shuttle, more affordable and relevant to changing national needs.

The White House has directed NASA to cut its total spending by $15 billion over the next five years--the equivalent of one year’s budget--and to shift the remainder from expensive, long-term human space spectaculars, such as the planned space station, toward robotic science and development of new technologies.

The shuttle’s high cost remains its greatest problem. Although it is a technological wonder, a series of official reports has deemed it a failure at its original goal of making spaceflight routine and economical. They recommend development of a more efficient way of getting people and cargo into space. Then, the argument goes, more people would come up with reasons for going there, and cargo to send there. But developing such a system would cost additional billions of dollars and could not be operational for a decade or more.

The Clinton budget, issued April 8, calls for a $3.8-billion reduction in the planned space shuttle budget of $22.8 billion for 1993 through 1998. Added to reductions already made by NASA since 1992, that would total at least a 24% cut in shuttle spending through 1998, according to NASA official David Bates.

NASA Administrator Daniel S. Goldin said the cuts will not affect shuttle safety and could even enhance it by making the system more efficient. Referring to the program’s 30,000 employees, he said: “You don’t need tens of thousands of people to guarantee safety.” He noted that $600 million is being invested especially to upgrade the shuttle and make it safer.

The shuttle also faces a possible “underemployment” problem. Building the space station was supposed to be its main task for the late 1990s. But NASA is engaged in a crash program to redesign the station by June 7, and one of the White House mandates is to reduce the number of required shuttle flights.

Sources said the shuttle budget could be in for further reduction on the space station’s behalf. They said the White House has told Goldin that any costs above the White House-approved “half price” for the space station (about $7 billion over the next five years) can be taken from shuttle operations or a related program to upgrade the shuttles’ solid rocket boosters.

Goldin said he has not yet ordered such a transfer of funds.

Shuttle costs are a controversial topic not only because of the amounts, but because of the varying methods used to arrive at them. Depending on the method, the estimated cost of each shuttle flight ranges from $44.4 million to about $1.7 billion, according to NASA, congressional and independent analysts.

The $44 million represents the “marginal costs” to NASA each time a shuttle flies, and they include consumables such as propellant. Put another way, this is the amount NASA saves by not launching a shuttle. A January report by the General Accounting Office, the congressional watchdog agency, said this figure is appropriate for occasional uses of the shuttle.

But GAO took issue with NASA’s use of that figure in estimations of how much the construction of the space station would cost. It recommended instead that, because the space station was to be the “predominant user” of shuttle services in fiscal years 1997 to 1999, it should be allocated a proportionate share of the shuttle’s fixed operating costs.

Left out of the $44 million figure are fixed costs such as those for the standing army of at least 27,000 contractors and 3,000 NASA civil servants who build and test hardware and software, service and launch the shuttles.

The agency takes these costs under the program’s operating budget for the year, plus the costs of its space communication network, and divides by the number of flights that year to produce an “average cost per flight.” For 1993, that figure is $413.5 million, according to NASA. By this method, the more the shuttle flies, the cheaper each flight is.

But the report noted that this figure does not include the money invested in the 1970s to develop the shuttle technology, or the cost of constructing and upgrading hangars and other government facilities, or to improve boosters and other hardware.

A researcher at the University of Colorado, Roger A. Pielke Jr., took the comprehensive approach. He totaled all the costs ever spent on the program, including research and development in the 1970s, and divided by the number of missions to produce a figure of $1.7 billion per flight.

But a congressional analyst who follows space issues noted that the study inflated the 1970s research dollars into today’s dollars, making the program sound more expensive. On the other hand, the analyst said, the study left out certain “infrastructure” expenses, such as NASA engineering labs that spend part time working on shuttle-related matters.

Shuttle director Leonard Nicholson of Johnson Space Center in Houston said that under the current cost-cutting effort, with increased efficiencies, “I absolutely believe we’ll be able to make the shuttle as cost-efficient as any launcher people will compare us to.” He said that by fiscal 1996, he expects the “average cost per flight” to be down from $400 million to $300 million.

Since the Challenger accident, NASA has redesigned its flawed boosters and flown 29 missions. Nine of the last 12 have launched on the appointed day, officials note. Nicholson said that despite the recent spate of publicized technical problems, “the number of problems on each flight has been steadily decreasing.”

Because of new NASA studies, the theoretical probability that a shuttle will suffer a catastrophic accident has recently been revised to 1 in about 55 or 60, rather than the previous 1 in 78, according to congressional and other sources. But such estimates do not predict when an accident will happen.

And despite NASA’s cautious approach, there are slip-ups. For example, Otto Goetz, manager of the shuttle’s main engine program at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., said there is an intense investigation underway to find out how Discovery’s No. 3 engine passed inspections by contractor Rocketdyne and reached the launch pad even though it was missing a turbulence damper--a part known as the “tab”--which is designed to channel the flow of gases through the turbine blades.

The oversight was discovered by chance when the pumps were examined for unrelated reasons. Goetz said the engine could have worked without the part, “but I wouldn’t want to fly long without it.”

He said that, because of the successful record of the main engines, “there may have been some relaxation” of attention to detail. “This should serve to sharpen our minds.”

NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, in its March report, as usual listed a number of concerns. Among them was the frequent appearance of “soot on the O-rings” of the shuttle’s booster nozzle joint, indicating that hot gas was reaching them.

“The possibility of heat effect or blow-by at the primary seal . . . is sufficiently high to suggest the need for a redesign of this joint,” the panel said. (This is not the joint that caused the Challenger explosion.)

NASA officials said the O-ring seal is doing its job, preventing escape of hot gas. But the design is such that the gas is not supposed to reach that far. They plan to change the assembly process to prevent that, and they may yet decide to redesign the nozzle joint, Nicholson said. “That issue is not dead.”