The Cutting Edge: COMPUTERS / TECHNOLOGY / INNOVATION : Political Shift Could Fuel Idea for Savings on Space Station

This nation’s long effort to build a permanently manned space station is particularly frustrating to engineers like Gene Meyers of West Covina. He watches in wonder as a nation that has spent more than $12 billion redesigning proposed space stations deliberately destroys a “warehouse” as tall as a 15-story building that has already been launched into orbit.

And it does it again and again, every time the space shuttle reaches orbit about 200 miles above the Earth.

The fuel for the shuttle’s three main engines is carried inside an external reinforced aluminum tank that is about the size of a Boeing 747. It costs about $35 million to build the tank and at least $300 million to launch its 33 tons into orbit.

But it is sent spiraling back into the Earth’s atmosphere, where it disintegrates and burns as it plunges toward the Indian Ocean.

Meyers is not the first aerospace engineer to wave his arms over his head and yell, “Stop this madness!” But he is probably the most persistent. And with a shifting political climate in Washington and dramatic budget cuts under way at NASA, Meyers may finally be getting a hearing on an idea whose time has long since come.

Ever since the design of the shuttle was firmed up more than two decades ago, some have argued that it makes no sense to destroy a structure as well built as the external tank, especially after it has already been launched into space. After all, the nation’s first space station, Skylab, was fashioned from an upper-stage fuel tank of a Saturn rocket and it worked just fine until we let it drop out of orbit and burn up.

And the shuttle’s external tank has an even thicker skin and stronger internal structure than the tank that housed Skylab.

The external tank, many engineers insist, would make a dandy space station, with minimal modifications, at a fraction of the cost of anything that has been proposed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. A single tank would provide twice the room of NASA’s current design, and several of them could be linked together around a central “collar” that would provide deluxe accommodations for crews that could number in the hundreds.

The mystery in all of this is that no one has offered a plausible argument against using external tanks as the fundamental building blocks for a station large enough to allow manufacturing, research and even accommodations for orbiting tourists. Martin Marietta, which builds the tanks, has done studies that show the feasibility of the idea.

Yet it has gone nowhere. The most promising program, sponsored by 57 major American universities, died out a couple years ago because of a total lack of interest by the federal government. NASA has been particularly cool to the idea, apparently because it is viewed as competition for the international space station coveted by the agency.

Now there is some evidence that that attitude is softening. Mark Holderman, a NASA engineer at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, has developed a proposal to use one external tank as a commercial-industrial station. Holderman calls his project Geode, “a geology term that describes a rather ugly, unimpressive stone on the surface with surprisingly beautiful gem-like crystals located within its interior hollow space.”

Holderman concedes that NASA has not fully embraced his ideas, but he is being allowed to promote them despite his belief that such a station could be built for a fraction of what it would cost to build the station desired by NASA. The fact that Holderman is being permitted to disseminate full-color brochures bearing the NASA logo, even to members of Congress and high federal officials outside NASA, is curious. Perhaps some in the agency are finally willing to take the idea seriously.

It could be, as Meyers says, that “the time for this has come.”

Meyers, 50, took early retirement a year ago from TRW Corp., where he had been an industrial engineer, to devote full time to promoting his concept of a commercial space station consisting of several connected external tanks.

“This has gotten to be an obsession with me,” he says, because it just makes so much sense. Such a station would be large enough to carry out manufacturing of gravity-sensitive materials on an industrial scale. Various companies could own a complete tank, providing the privacy to protect sensitive research and the life support for sustained operations.

The station would look a little like a giant wheel with external tanks for spokes. The space shuttle could ferry supplies and personnel back and forth.

A few problems would have to be worked out, including some sort of maneuvering system that would keep the facility in place, but Meyers and others insist the technology is already available to solve every problem.

The project would, he says, eliminate a ridiculous waste. With 70 flights of the space shuttle, 70 external tanks have been destroyed, representing an in-orbit value of about $30 billion.

Meyers could be right about timing. Several members of the new congressional leadership are known to support privatizing as much of the space program as possible. Where better to begin than to develop a program that would encourage industry to take the lead in building its own space station using the shuttle’s external tanks as the primary components? If they don’t pick up the ball and run with it, maybe there isn’t that much of a need for industrial facilities in space.

* Lee Dye can be reached via e-mail at 72040.3515@compuserve.com.