Experts Struggle to Design Yugo-Priced Space Station : Science: NASA team questions whether job can be done. California firms have a big stake in the project.

In a glass box of a building in Crystal City, Va., just three subway stops from the headquarters of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, space station Freedom is being cannibalized.

Working under a looming deadline, a team of experts is struggling to transform a commodious orbiting laboratory and space-farers’ home away from home into a Yugo-priced station appropriate for hard times.

They have a challenge of heroic proportions: to cut the budget in half, salvage whatever they can from the station, come up with a design that will preserve the role of the Europeans, Canadians and Japanese, and make it something that can be put into orbit by the end of the 1990s.

“I don’t know that we can do it, but we are going to give it a try,” said Bryan O’Connor, who is leading the team. “And if we can’t do it, we are not going to tell them that we can.”

California companies have about $6 billion in space station contracts and more than 4,000 jobs riding on the outcome.

Many experts believe President Clinton and NASA Administrator Daniel S. Goldin have laid out an impossible task--putting a technically sophisticated space station in orbit in five years at an annual cost of $1 billion to $1.8 billion.

“I’m not even sure you could have a Skylab kind of a thing today” for $1 billion a year, said Axel Roth, deputy director of space station work at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.

That assessment defines the redesign challenge as well as any. Skylab, flown in the mid-1970s, was fashioned from the surplus third stage of a Saturn V moon rocket. It was a convenient expedient to get experience at long-duration spaceflight. But the redesign team has vowed to make the most of the assignment cooked up by the White House and its Office of Science and Technology Policy after Budget Director Leon E. Panetta had recommended that the space station program simply be killed.

During its first weeks, the group looked at about 30 station concepts, some reminiscent of designs considered and discarded by the space agency years ago. So far, the team has identified three as leading contenders.

One concept would use key elements of the existing space station design to build a much smaller and less capable facility. A second would use some existing and some simplified station elements, and add technology from a military satellite for propulsion and control. The third proposal is a radical departure that calls for a 23- by 92-foot core station that would be orbited in a single launch.

Critics of budget cuts complain that none of the new designs would provide a station sufficiently large or powerful enough to carry out its intended scientific mission--research on long-term human reaction to a weightless environment, and the effects of zero gravity on industrial materials and processes.

“The government wants a Cadillac for a Chevrolet price,” said Bob Thompson, a Houston-based executive of McDonnell Douglas Space Systems Co. of Huntington Beach, Calif., one of the space station’s three prime contractors. Thompson directed development of the space shuttle program for NASA during the 1970s.

Complicating the daunting process is a fierce competition among space station contractors seeking to preserve their share of the ever-shrinking aerospace business.

The Boeing Co. has a $2.7-billion contract to build the space station’s pressurized modules--the living and laboratory quarters--and the “nodes” that connect them. It has suggested cutting costs by eliminating a 350-foot spar that was to have served as the station’s backbone. The spar, not coincidentally, was to have been built by McDonnell Douglas.

McDonnell Douglas, which holds station contracts worth $4.2 billion, has proposed a new design that would eliminate only two segments of the spar structure, and move some of the electronics that were to be placed inside Boeing modules outside, on the McDonnell Douglas spar.

El Segundo, Calif.-based Rockwell International Corp., whose Rocketdyne Division has a $1.9-billion contract to build the space station power system, outlined its own plan. Under it, NASA would commission a new, wingless space shuttle, at a cost of about $2 billion, rewire and reconfigure it, and send it aloft as the space station. Rockwell builds the space shuttle.

Lockheed Missile & Space Co. of Sunnyvale, Calif., the largest station subcontractor, suggested that NASA adopt a propulsion and control system for the space station, known cryptically as “Bus-1,” that Lockheed already has developed for a secret military satellite. NASA is considering the proposal as an option.

Guidance from the White House has been minimal, but stern. The team is to look at concepts that would require spending of $5 billion to $9 billion over the next five years, instead of the $12.5 billion that would be needed to build the current design.

The team hopes shortly to have all of the candidate designs divided into three general categories based on price: those costing $5 billion, $7 billion and $9 billion. Detailed estimates will be presented by June 7 to an independent panel named by the Administration.

The international partners who have signed agreements to participate in the space station project already are registering complaints.

During a meeting last month, representatives of space agencies from Europe, Japan and Canada--which have committed $8 billion to the space station project--said the Clinton Administration still has not defined precisely what it wants its scaled-down station to accomplish. They also expressed concern that whatever new plan NASA devises will fail to provide enough power to meet the needs of their add-on modules.

At the center of the space station controversy is Goldin, who was named NASA administrator a year ago. Formerly an executive with TRW in California, Goldin had virtually no experience with the manned space program.

His detractors suggest that he was willing to give the White House unrealistic assurances because he so badly wanted to hang onto his job in the new Administration.

They also complain that he kept his deputies in the dark as he negotiated the budget with Panetta, a longtime critic of the space station, and that NASA managers who worked on the space station for years have been cut out of the redesign deliberations.

At a headquarters meeting after the cuts were announced, Goldin apologized to his subordinates for keeping them uninformed and then added: “I just didn’t think I could trust you,” according to a source who was present.

When NASA first designed space station Freedom in the mid-1980s, it tried to appeal to every possible scientific or industrial user by proposing a mammoth facility.

The original plan called for a central, 500-foot-long spar, from which designers suspended 44-foot long laboratory and habitation modules. In addition, NASA planned to mount another large, rectangular spar assembly, to provide even more room to attach experiments and other payloads. The configuration was known as the “dual keel” design.

The station was viewed as a research base, a satellite repair and refueling facility, and a jumping off place for eventual journeys to the moon and Mars. Beginning with a crew of four, designers envisioned it growing into a bustling international laboratory occupied by as many as 24 scientists and technicians.

By the late 1980s, however, it was apparent that NASA had been overly optimistic about the number of potential space station users. After a review by a panel of experts, NASA decided to trim the project, removing the “dual keel.”

Two years later, the nation was into a recession, and Congress ordered NASA to cut an additional $8 billon out of the program. By then, the price tag from inception through the year 2000 had grown to $38 billion.

So in 1990, NASA again redesigned the station, shortening the keel, eliminating one of the four sets of giant solar arrays and reducing the size of the laboratory and living modules. The idea was to assemble more pieces on the ground and spend less time putting the station together in orbit.

The reconfiguration, which reduced the station’s scientific potential and cut the planned crew from eight to four, failed to mollify critics. The $30-billion estimate adopted by NASA in 1990, they said, was still only a fraction of the program’s true cost.

The debate continued and in February, Clinton ordered the program’s budget dramatically reduced.

The least expensive of the three options under consideration by NASA calls for using or combining some elements of the current station, in particular the pressurized “nodes” and “modules” developed by Boeing, and adding the Lockheed propulsion and control system. It also would feature an abbreviated spar that would support solar arrays.

That $5-billion version would be built up gradually, beginning with a 24-kilowatt power plant that would eventually be expanded to 60 kilowatts to power experiments and life-support systems. It would rely heavily on the space shuttle to provide communications and living quarters for crew members during the buildup, and the shuttle’s presence would always be needed as an emergency escape vehicle. A dozen shuttle flights would be needed to complete construction.

Under the $7-billion option, NASA would modify a space shuttle to accommodate a single cylinder, or “module,” wired, plumbed and equipped entirely on the ground. That plan would eliminate the McDonnell Douglas spar.

But the single-launch station would provide only 30 kilowatts of power and could not accommodate power increases. That makes the design highly unattractive to the international partners, whose laboratory modules would be launched later.

The $9-billion option would make the most use of hardware already developed for space station Freedom. It would require 19 shuttle flights to complete and, ultimately, could provide 70 kilowatts of power and accommodations for a crew of four. The station would be smaller, but similar in many respects to the redesign completed in 1991, and would accommodate most of the needs of the international partners.

Scaling Down the Space Station

Hard times have forced NASA to downsize its plans for an orbiting space laboratory. NASA’s original space station design, developed in the mid-1980s, called for a warehouse-sized “dual keel” facility, shown at right. Measuring more than 500 feet long, it ultimately was to have supported a crew of 24, serving as a research base, a satellite repair and refueling center and a jumping off point for a return to the moon and a trip to Mars.

The Leading Contenders

A redesign team, working under White House orders, had identified these three leading contenders. The next step: Detailed estimates must be presented by June 7 to an independent panel named by the Administration.

OPTION 1: The most expensive alternative proposed by NASA is based on the original design. The central spar would span 271 feet, and the station eventually could accommodate a crew of four. It would require 19 shuttle missions to complete. Cost: $9 billion Crew: 4 Power: Up to 70 kilowatts OPTION 2: The mid-priced alternative would require only one shuttle launch. But NASA would pay a price in terms of power and size. The single launch station would consist of a pressurized module 23 feet in diameter by 92 feet long, with solar panels deployed from its side. Cost: $7 billion Crew: 4 Power: 30 kilowatts OPTION 3: Known as the “modular build up,” the budget-priced space station would rely heavily on the space shuttle to provide communications and life support systems during much of its life. It would require a dozen shuttle missions to finish. Cost: $5-billion Crew: 4 Power: 24 kilowatts (expandable to 60)