Local and Global Reasons to Fund a Space Station

Does spending for a space station make sense in a time of budget deficits? Yes it does, but that’s not a fashionable opinion these days.

Skepticism toward big science is suddenly rampant. In a week that saw the space station win authorization by only a single vote in the House of Representatives, the superconducting super collider project was voted down by a wide margin.

And the space station, on which the National Aeronautics and Space Administration proposes to spend $16 billion by 2001, could still be scuttled in a separate House appropriations vote early this week.

A querulous spirit is rising. Opposition was especially strong among new House members, who are most mindful of voter concerns about budget deficits. A majority of the 114 new House members voted to kill both space station and super collider.

To be sure, votes often depended on whether one’s district received NASA funds. A first-term New York Democrat called the space station a “pork barrel in space,” but newcomers from Florida, Texas and other states with NASA facilities were supportive.

Oddly enough, one-third of California’s Congressional delegation voted to kill the project even though California will benefit most from space station work--4,300 jobs and billions of dollars in contracts for McDonnell Douglas, Rockwell and many smaller contractors.

Either some lawmakers think they’re too grand to vote for jobs for other Californians or they were confused, as many Representatives were last week. Concern for budgeting mixed with misunderstanding as opponents questioned the station’s scientific value as well as its affordability. And project supporters often responded only with vague claims of U.S. prestige or competitiveness.

The naysayers were shortsighted and the yea sayers unpersuasive.

But there is a good case for the space station--an orbiting laboratory in which astronauts will live for long periods and carry out biological and industrial experiments. It was provided to President Clinton by the commission he appointed last March to study how we could go forward with a less costly, but productive project. That commission, led by Charles Vest, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, stated priorities clearly.

The station’s primary purpose is to learn about space travel, specifically how human beings and materials react to prolonged weightless exposure. The background there is that Russian cosmonaut Yuri Romanenko lost bone and muscle during a year in orbit. He can now walk again but his hips are permanently arthritic and he has heart trouble. Much needs to be learned about working in space.

Second, said the Vest commission, the station would yield technological and engineering knowledge. We’d learn, for example, how best to construct and use solar arrays to produce power for the station, how to modulate and maintain power in such an environment.

Third, the station would further international cooperation--no mean consideration. Canada, Japan and member countries of the European Space Agency have spent heavily to develop laboratories which will be part of the U.S.-launched space station. It would be a grievous matter for the United States to renege on those partners. Plus, the new space station will go forward with significant participation by Russian science.

This is a project with many benefits, although the Vest commission was wise enough not to promise specifics. It didn’t say that solar power’s role in space would greatly increase its use on earth--although that may happen. Because past benefits of space exploration have been unpredictable.

Thirty years ago, NASA needed to get pictures back from space but transmitting normal photographic or television images was impossible. So the technology of breaking images into digital bits for transmission and reformulation was born. Since that time, digital imaging has had profound effects in medicine--CT scanning--in computing and it’s at the heart of today’s hottest new industry, multimedia.

Similarly the need for concentrated power in space capsules spurred developments in microelectronics. And we take for granted the most useful consequences of three decades in space--the communications, weather and environmental satellites that now orbit earth continuously. They literally have changed the world.

Still, some ask, if satellites and unmanned space probes do such a job, why send astronauts at all? The Vest commission addressed that question and told the President forthrightly “a human presence in space exploration has an intrinsic value.”

The new version of the space station, a reduction from the 1984 original plan, will take $2.1 billion a year out of NASA’s $15 billion annual budget. Clinton is demanding cuts in NASA personnel and other spending to help pay for the station. It will not prevent funding of the important Pathfinder program, in which a number of small atmospheric probes will be landed on the surface of Mars.

It will be decades before humans go to Mars, because there is still so much to learn. After the space station teaches about working in space, a mission may return to the moon to construct a telescope that will be able to see planets in other galaxies.

The space program is about future, past and present--about trying to answer the eternal questions of who we are and what we’re doing here. And it does no harm that while pursuing such grand visions, the program provides good jobs and business to McDonnell Douglas Space Systems in Huntington Beach, which will build the space station’s structure, to Rockwell’s Rocketdyne in Canoga Park, which will produce the electrical system and to hundreds of contractors throughout Southern California.

In our admirable concern for budget deficits, we should not be shortsighted.