Giant ‘Tinkertoy’ to Come Together in Orbit : NASA: International space station will be launched bit by bit, by various nations. Project is to be completed in 2002.

In Building 4708, where NASA built moon rockets 30 years ago, the future is arriving--finally.

This is a future constructed of metal and graphite, 31,030 pounds and counting. As yet, it has no name; for now, they call it Alpha, because the believers say this is just the beginning of the Next Big Step into space.

This is it--the international space station. Finally, after years of debate and design, NASA’s pipe dream is taking shape.

“That there is the first U.S. launch,” said factory foreman Jim Waterman, pointing with pride to an aluminum cylinder with six docking ports that will serve as a connecting passageway for Alpha.

This passageway--called Node 1--is to be launched on a space shuttle in December, 1997, one month after the Russians send up the first station building block, a power and propulsion tug.

That’s not all. Across the huge room at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center is an arched sheet of shiny aluminum that will form the U.S. laboratory module.

Over there is the beginning of Alpha’s habitation module--kitchen, family room and bathroom combined. And behind those walls are gray, graphite-epoxy containers the size of phone booths that will serve as equipment racks.

“It’s finally gelling. It’s really coming together,” welder Charlie Bill Collins said, grinning. “It’s taken off just like a wild bunch of horses, and I love every minute of it.”

There were those who despaired of ever seeing a space station built. This is NASA’s seventh version of a space station; two summers ago, a newly scaled-down version of space station Freedom--Alpha’s predecessor--survived by a single vote in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Waterman took over a few weeks before that jolting vote of June, 1993. “People were looking for jobs or bailing out,” he said. “They thought the whole thing was going to be canceled. Guys on the floor honestly thought they were never going to build it.”

Now, he said, “we’re on a high.”

No longer is the big question, “Can you do it?” but, rather, “What are you going to do with it once it’s built?” noted Wilbur Trafton, NASA’s space station director.

The Boeing Co., prime contractor in charge of station production, is determined to be on time and within budget. So far, the company is meeting those goals, although officials admit it’s tight.

The sign at the factory entrance sums it up: 31,030 pounds of completed station hardware, 40,800 pounds projected for September, 1995, 68,900 pounds for September, 1996, and 93,800 pounds for September, 1997.

This is only Boeing’s share. McDonnell Douglas and Rockwell International’s Rocketdyne division also are making parts, as are Russia, Japan, Canada and Italy. The European Space Agency plans to supply components as soon as it sorts out budget problems.

By the time the 250-mile-high outpost is completed in 2002 and ready for a crew of six, it will have seven science laboratories and weigh 886,000 pounds. It will be almost as long as a football field, and its pressurized volume will be equivalent to the passenger compartments of two Boeing 747 jets.

That’s considerably larger and consequently more complex than the later drafts of Freedom, which was first proposed by President Ronald Reagan in 1984. The goal was to have an $8-billion station flying within 10 years for military and scientific research.

Nine years and $10 billion later, the Clinton Administration resurrected Freedom as Alpha. A post-Communist, post-Cold War Russia signed on. And Congress, intrigued by the foreign policy angle, gave the program overwhelming support last summer.

With 13 countries involved, Alpha is the largest scientific cooperative program ever. So far, it appears to be working.

“We are confident that they [Russians] know what they’re doing,” said Boeing’s station program manager, Douglas Stone. “They’re a little bit suspicious sometimes that we know what we’re doing.”

The United States hasn’t had a space station in orbit since Skylab came crashing down in 1979. Russia’s space station Mir has been up since 1986; NASA astronaut Norman Thagard is there now setting a U.S. space endurance record of three months plus.

NASA’s space shuttle Atlantis is supposed to dock with Mir in late June and retrieve Thagard and his two Russian crew mates. It is the first of seven Atlantis-Mir dockings planned over the next 2 1/2 years as practice for Alpha assembly and operations.

Alpha, in turn, is considered practice for eventual expeditions to Mars.

“We are a space agency and we intend to leave this planet, and in order to leave this planet we have to figure out how people can work safely and efficiently in space,” said NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin.

Before sending astronauts on yearlong journeys, NASA needs to learn how to prevent the bone and muscle loss caused by weightlessness, and how to deal with the mental stress caused by long confinements, Goldin said. The station also would test interplanetary travel gear, including water- and air-recycling systems and space robots.

There have been and will be problems, Stone acknowledged. Engineers devised more efficient tools for building the two U.S. nodes but did not test the tools before using them. The welded pieces of the first node consequently ended up misaligned. Workers had to go back, fix the tools, test the tools and try again, wasting precious time.

“We skinned our knuckles badly,” Stone said. “Even though we are dealing with rather straightforward manufacturing processes . . . there is still an opportunity to screw things up.”

Skinning knuckles? Screwing up? Such public admissions of guilt were seldom, if ever, heard during the Freedom era.

It’s part of NASA and Boeing’s “new way of doing business”: openness, streamlined management and, perhaps most important, promises kept. The station architecture, for instance, has remained fairly stable for 1 1/2 years.

Still, Congress could kill the program any time.

“It’s a concern to everybody,” said senior mechanic Scott Smotherman. “I try not to listen to it much, to be honest with you.”

NASA in May announced plans to eliminate more than 28,000 civil service and contractor jobs by the year 2000 to meet Clinton’s request for reduced space spending. Republicans in Congress want even deeper space cuts to help balance the federal budget.

But NASA and Boeing officials insist the space station program cannot survive further cuts. The agency is counting on $2 billion a year through the rest of this decade to build Alpha.

The current price tag for Alpha is nearly $30 billion, not counting shuttle flight costs or contributions from the international partners. This includes the $10 billion spent on designing and redesigning Freedom.

NASA estimates 27 shuttle flights will be needed to build and outfit Alpha, as well as 44 Russian flights and one European flight.

Considering that a shuttle flight currently costs about $400 million--a NASA figure disputed by some aerospace experts who contend that it is much higher--that’s another $10 billion for the space station. Add $13 billion to operate Alpha from 2002 to 2012 and you’re looking at a total U.S. investment of about $50 billion.

“I think it’s a tremendous folly, myself,” said University of Iowa physicist James Van Allen, who discovered Earth’s radiation belts by sending a Geiger counter on the first U.S. satellite in 1958.

“There’s no identified purpose which is even remotely commensurate with its cost,” Van Allen said. “The only way you can sidetrack that argument is to say that it’s very important politically. But it should be run by the State Department if it’s so important politically.”

Van Allen worries that Alpha is squeezing out worthier projects, namely those not requiring humans in space. Alpha, together with the shuttle program, consumes more than a third of NASA’s $14-billion annual budget.

But as the debate continues, so does work in Building 4708’s three-story bay. Advocates hope the reality that is taking shape before their eyes will ensure its completion.