Imperiled Space Station Puts NASA at Crossroads

The news leaked from Capitol Hill on a chilly Wednesday morning in February, wiping out an upbeat mood inside gleaming new offices just occupied by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Officials had hoped their new headquarters was a harbinger of better times ahead.

But instead of pushing on with the United States’ most ambitious project since development of the space shuttle, top NASA managers found out Feb. 17 that the Clinton Administration was about to pull the plug on their long-suffering plans to build a truly sophisticated orbiting space laboratory.

For the dreamers, engineers, politicians and others committed to American preeminence in space, the new Administration’s plan to sharply scale back space station Freedom and cut its budget in half represented a turning point.

For the first time, there was real fear that the United States might abandon its 35-year commitment to human space exploration.

“If we do not have a permanently occupied, American space station by the end of the decade . . . it’s going to be the end of the (manned) space program,” said John Pike, a space analyst for the Federation of American Scientists.

“We hoped we were sailing with Christopher Columbus, opening a new frontier in space; but there is a danger we may be sailing with Leif Ericson, defeated by the frontier.”

Nowhere is the uncertain fate of the space station watched more carefully than in California, where the aerospace industry is already reeling from cuts in defense spending. Two of the project’s three prime contractors--McDonnell Douglas Space Systems Co. in Huntington Beach, and the Rocketdyne Division of Rockwell International in Canoga Park--together hold space station contracts worth more than $6 billion. More than 60 California companies employ 4,200 people on the project.

“All our eyes are turned to Washington, with concern, and with hope that a lot of the work that’s been done so far can be preserved,” said McDonnell Douglas spokesman Thomas E. Williams. About 3,000 McDonnell Douglas employees are working on the project in Huntington Beach, and an additional 1,000 are employed in Houston.

The value of McDonnell Douglas space station contracts are currently $4.2 billion. “It represents a very important piece of our space business,” Williams said. “We’ve been working on it now for almost a decade. But we also see it as critical to the future of the manned space program.”

NASA’s controversial administrator, Daniel S. Goldin, insists he intends to save the space station, not kill it. To the public, and to NASA employees more discouraged than they have been since the 1986 Challenger accident, Goldin has bravely maintained the agency’s travail is in fact an opportunity to show its mettle.

For the last 10 weeks, a team of experts convened by Goldin has struggled to design a new, cheaper space station to meet Clinton’s cost mandate. The goal is to cut annual expenditures on the project from $2.3 billion to roughly $1 billion, and to still have it in orbit by the end of the decade.

Congress will have the final say on the space station’s future when it debates the NASA appropriations bill this summer and fall. The project’s opponents, who have been outmaneuvered in other times, now sense their best opportunity.

“The space station has already been downsized to the point that it is of dubious scientific value,” said Sen. Jim Sasser (D-Tenn.), chairman of the Senate Budget Committee. “I do not believe the President’s heart is in the project. I think the Administration is going through this redesign effort mainly to carry out what it perceives as a campaign commitment.”

The program has repeatedly survived past attacks in Congress. But some suspect that the politics of the issue has changed since Republicans successfully blocked the Clinton Administration’s jobs bill last month. “If an infrastructure jobs bill is frivolous, then the space station is a jobs bill that we certainly can ill afford,” Sasser said.

Many of the station’s strongest backers believe the new plans may so drastically limit the capability of the station that congressional support will evaporate, and the program will die a quiet death.

“It seems to me that if this thing starts to fly apart . . . then you’re going to have a fracture” of the solid congressional coalition that has kept the program alive for the last nine years, said one Capitol Hill source.

The station’s longtime supporters consider it unthinkable to abandon the project. Not only would it forfeit U.S. leadership in space technology, they contend, but it would be a cop-out on a national commitment to Japan, Canada, and the European Space Agency who are partners in the endeavor. And they note that the country already has spent nearly $9 billion on the program.

Some analysts say cancellation of the space station would inevitably make it necessary for the shuttle to take up the slack, carrying out a measure of scientific work planned for the station.

But Rep. George E. Brown Jr. (D-Colton), chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, believes that cancellation of the station would make the shuttle program itself, now costing nearly $4 billion a year to maintain and operate, a candidate for the chopping block.

Without a station, says Brown, “eight (shuttle) launches a year would go down to three or four a year. The cost of a launch would run up into billions and the shuttle itself would become a very attractive target for budget cutting. If you are willing to shoot down a $2-billion-a-year space station, what would you do with a shuttle costing more and more and going without a real mission?”

Humans have dreamed of building an outpost in the frontier of space for as long as they have aspired to explore the planets. But the term “space station” did not enter the lexicon until the 20th Century. In the 1920s, German space visionary Hermann Oberth wrote of placing large rockets in orbit around the Earth to act as small moons.

The space station concept popularized in science fiction films of the 1950s and 1960s--a huge, spoked wheel, gently turning in the black of space--sprang from the mind of Wernher von Braun, the German scientist who came to the United States to work for the U.S. Army after World War II.

Von Braun wrote a series of articles for Collier’s magazine, describing the nation’s future in space, and pictures of the station that appeared in the magazine in March, 1952, mesmerized the country. He saw the station as an astronomical observatory, a weather observation post, a navigation aid for ships and airplanes, a jumping off place for exploration of the planets, and a possible nuclear weapons base.

A fleet of “space taxis” or “shuttle craft,” as he described them, would ferry both men and materials to the orbiting, 250-foot-wide space platform.

In the early 1970s, the Richard Nixon Administration approved a plan calling for development of a reusable space truck--the space shuttle, to be followed eventually by construction of a permanent space station.

“The decision . . . was not a shuttle or a space station,” said Bob Thompson, who headed the shuttle program for NASA from 1970 until 1981. “You have to have the shuttle if you’re going to have the space station.”

Even before serious design got under way, the cost genie was out of the bottle, and the culprit was the shuttle itself. It was envisioned as a “truck” that would revolutionize space operations by making it relatively inexpensive to put payloads into space. Instead, the vehicle has been temperamental and vastly expensive to operate.

NASA advanced several designs for the station over the last decade, starting with a mammoth structure that was to be a research base, a satellite repair and refueling facility, and a jumping off place for eventual journeys to the moon and Mars.

But the plans and the goals were trimmed as the years progressed and costs exploded. Soon after the Clinton Administration went to work, top officials decided drastic new measures were required.

“When we looked at realistic numbers on space station Freedom spending, and the plausible limits of NASA spending a year or two down the road, we saw a wedge of station requirements that would have become a Pac-Man and eaten the rest of the agency,” said White House science and technology adviser John Gibbons.

The situation was outlined to Clinton, who Gibbons described as surprised, and “concerned that the envelope of projected costs was just totally out of range of what any sensible person can plan on now.” Some in the Administration, notably Office of Management and Budget Director Leon E. Panetta, were ready to kill the project outright.

For a legion of critics that includes scientists and members of Congress, the decision to cut the space station is long overdue. They argue that NASA has never clearly identified the station’s principal mission, changing the justification to suit the latest whim of Congress, the President or the scientific community.

They say the program will not contribute enough to the nation, either in pure science or applied technology, to account for its enormous cost--last estimated at roughly $31 billion, including $8 billion already spent, through the year 2000. And they contend that NASA officials and space station contractors have routinely underestimated, some would say misrepresented, the true costs.

Even some of those who believe the nation should continue manned space exploration have harsh words for the program.

“There is no plan, and there is no stomach for the roughly half-trillion-dollar enterprise that would be going back to the moon and to Mars,” said Rep. Dick Zimmer (R-N.J.), who says he favors continuing less costly manned missions.

Rather than being a “door into space,” Zimmer said the station “seems like a closed door, blocking our further progress, because it will absorb resources that could be used for more worthwhile (manned and unmanned) projects.”

Other critics believe that, with the end of the Cold War, there is no longer a reason to send men and women into space at all, at least in the foreseeable future. Scientific missions can be more safely and economically achieved with robots and satellites, they argue. And the billions saved could be put to better use at home.

“American taxpayers shouldn’t be asked to foot the bill for any space program simply because it has prestige value,” said Sen. Dale Bumpers, an Arkansas Democrat who is fighting hard to kill the space station program, although Bumpers said that its demise would not necessarily mean the end of manned space shots.

William C. Snoddy, deputy director of program development at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, says that argument misses the point.

“When you go out to the Space Camp here (in Huntsville, Ala.) and talk to the kids, they’re not training to . . . send out robots and take measurements. They want to do it themselves. . . . It’s the challenge that it offers youth. It’s the audacity of some of the things that NASA has done. I think you lose all that without having humans in space.”

Supporters of the space station also argue that putting off construction would be a major mistake.

“There is no way I can envision that we will go forward in space without a space station,” said Axel Roth, deputy director of space station work at the Marshall Center.

“I am convinced that whether this space station is killed or not, there will be a space station one day, larger than (the small Russian station) MIR or Skylab. We’re going to have one. It’s just a matter of whether we get it now or get it later. And it’s going to cost a whole lot more later.”

Pike said he is particularly concerned that another catastrophic shuttle accident, like the one that killed seven crew members aboard the Challenger in 1986, will occur before the nation has built a permanent space base. If that occurs, the United States is likely to indefinitely postpone further manned space flights, along with plans to build a space station, he said.

NASA estimates the probability of another such accident at 1 in 78. The shuttle fleet has flown 30 times in the nearly five years since flights resumed in September, 1988.

In the wake of the Challenger disaster, NASA added new layers of internal management to the space station program and Congress began supervising NASA with unprecedented zeal.

“I think as a result of Challenger, (we) paid a severe price,” said Martin Kress, deputy director of the space station program at NASA’s Washington headquarters. “It’s like the kid who got caught driving while intoxicated. We never really got the car keys back.”

Next: The struggle to redesign the station.