Keeping the Glenn Glow Is NASA’s Daunting Task
America’s space program hasn’t soared this high in nearly 30 years. With John Glenn circling the planet aboard the shuttle Discovery, public enthusiasm over the 77-year-old astronaut’s historic flight has NASA officials nearly in orbit themselves.
“Nobody expected the magnitude of the public interest and press coverage we got,” Joe Rothenberg, chief of NASA’s office of spaceflight, said of last week’s launch. “There were people who came dressed in 1950s and ‘60s outfits, with bouffant wigs and everything.”
But Discovery and the world’s oldest astronaut are scheduled to come back down to Earth today at 9:06 a.m. PST, and so too, in all probability, will the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s sky-high approval ratings.
As the Democratic senator from Ohio marches off to glory in praise and parades, NASA scientists will shift their focus to building a hugely expensive international space station that already is troubled by severe cost overruns, an erosion in U.S. congressional support and doubts about Russia’s financial commitment. Indeed, admit NASA administrators, returning Glenn to space 36 years after he became the first American to orbit Earth is a tough act to follow. “Our challenge is to maintain this level of public enthusiasm,” Rothenberg said. “Because if the public turns against us, Congress will turn even faster.”
Forty years after its creation by Congress, NASA is operating with a tighter budget, a trimmed-down work force and a renewed sense of purpose after several years during which the agency was perceived to have lost its direction. The Glenn mission has boosted spirits inside the agency that has plans to put an astronaut on Mars early in the next century.
But the space station--an orbiting laboratory to be built by the United States, Russia and 11 other nations--is at least 1 1/2 years behind schedule and 20% more expensive than originally budgeted. The station is slated to be completed six years from now at an estimated cost of $21 billion, numbers that many observers think are too low by half.
NASA already has given Russia $60 million to finish the control module and informed Congress that annual stipends of $150 million to that nation’s space agency may be required to keep the project on track.
“It will not be an easy road,” Gretchen McClain, NASA’s deputy administrator for the project, warned this week.
The complex project is set to begin later this month, when the Russians send the control module into orbit aboard an unmanned rocket. Next, the shuttle Endeavour is to take up the first structural component in a Dec. 3 launch, the first of 43 scheduled shuttle flights over the next four years.
“What NASA must do is put all this good PR in the bank so they will have some in their account when the bad PR comes in on the space station,” said John Pike, space policy director for the Federation of American Scientists. “And it is entirely predictable that things will go wrong.”
One thing that could go wrong is that NASA and such prime contractors as Boeing Co. and Lockheed Martin Corp. fail to sell the American public on the need for a permanently occupied orbiting lab that could serve as a platform for one day leaving the solar system. That public support is critical, Rothenberg said.
Assembling the space station, by using shuttles to ferry pieces that are to be bolted together like Tinkertoys, poses such a challenge that the public will find it fascinating, Rothenberg argued. American astronauts will spend more than 900 hours spacewalking on the project. “My conjecture is that building the space station is going to be more interesting than the shuttle going around in circles,” Pike said. “It has a plot line, a beginning, middle and end.
“And if no catastrophic failure occurs, you could look at it as being amusing to watch.”
Of course, there are risks, especially when a shuttle blasts off and lands. In fact, Glenn, after his 1962 flight, was deemed too valuable a national treasure by President Kennedy to ever fly in space again.
Daniel S. Goldin, NASA administrator, gambled in assigning Glenn a few geriatric experiments and a payload specialist seat on this nine-day mission. And if Discovery lands safely, Goldin, Glenn and the nation will have won.
But it could be a long time before another NASA event draws such attention. Glenn’s journey did not usher in an era of celebrities in space, although NASA has acknowledged that many recognizable people of all ages and backgrounds recently have volunteered as astronauts. “There isn’t room, and it would be foolish,” Rothenberg said.
Loss of life isn’t the only risk connected to the space station. Funding for the project could dry up. Once hauled into orbit, pieces of the station may not fit together or function properly.
As a cosmic trucking system, the shuttles now are to be used in the role for which they were designed, according to John Logsdon, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University. “NASA missions can’t be sustained as public entertainment. The shuttle was supposed to be routine.”
Before Glenn’s flight, shuttle missions had become so routine as to be barely mentioned by the mainstream news media. Since the 1986 Challenger disaster, in which seven crew members died when the shuttle exploded seconds after liftoff, NASA has launched 65 missions without major mishap.
And that record illustrates what Pike calls the defining irony of a publicly funded space program in which science and popular support are both critical. “If it’s boring, then maybe NASA is not trying hard enough, playing it too safe. And if it’s too dangerous, something like Challenger can happen.”
Even some NASA critics, who don’t see much scientific merit in the geriatric studies Glenn is participating in, don’t begrudge him the ride.
“The Glenn mission has been a roaring success for a lot of complex reasons, including that the country is badly in need of a hero right now,” observed Bob Park, a professor of physics at the University of Maryland. “And who doesn’t like John Glenn?” Still, Park is among those who think both the space station and manned spaceflight are foolish and unnecessary. “We put John Glenn is space 36 years ago to find out how it works,” Park said. “And what we found out is that space is a terrible environment for humans. And it still is.”
To maintain public interest--and political funding--NASA officials assume astronauts are essential, Park said. “But that attitude is changing because the next generation of cyber-kids, raised on computers, doesn’t see any difference between reality and virtual reality.”
The reality is, however, that shuttles will be blasting off with increasing regularity in the next few years. But will anyone turn out to watch?
“In the late 1990s, our relevance is the question,” Rothenberg said. “We have got to communicate the science to the public, to show the connection to everyday life on Earth. That’s the only way we can get the public support we need.”
Times researchers Lianne Hart in Houston and Anna M. Virtue in Miami contributed to this story.
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Tighter Times for NASA
Funding for NASA has fluctuated over the years. It now accounts for a smaller portion of the federal budget, compared to the mid-1960s.
Fewer Personnel
The number of civil servants employed by NASA has decreased since John Glenn made his first Earth orbit in 1962.
1962: 22,686
1998: 17,923*
*As of October 1998
Source: NASA
