Shuttle’s Longevity a Boon for Region
Hoisted by a massive crane and held up by a labyrinth of scaffolding, the 500-ton space shuttle Columbia dangles 10 feet above Kathy Smith on the floor of Boeing’s Palmdale plant. Armed with a bonding compound, Smith patches up the wear and tear that has come with flying 122 million miles and 26 missions into space.
“She’s part of the lick ‘em and stick ‘em crew,” explained Allen M. Hoffman, director of assembly and test operations at Boeing’s Major Modifications facility, a Jiffy Lube of sorts for the shuttle program.
When NASA introduced the space shuttle in 1981, the agency envisioned the fleet of four orbiters lasting perhaps a decade before being replaced. But with the 100th shuttle mission blasting off tonight at the Kennedy Space Center, it now looks like the venerable launch system could be operating until 2020.
NASA is preparing for the possibility of flying the shuttles 300 more times, solidifying the outlook for thousands of shuttle workers in Southern California and elsewhere who provide engineering and maintenance for the fleet. But the plan also raises concerns again about the durability of a craft built with 1970s technology.
The space agency has little choice. A replacement for the aging shuttle, the X-33, is several years behind schedule and may not fly at all, while work on the International Space Station has been accelerating.
“For at least 10 to 15 years, NASA won’t have anything else,” said Marshall Kaplan, a Potomac, Md.-based aerospace consultant. The shuttle “is the only vehicle we have to service the space station.”
Although it has been flying for nearly two decades, the shuttle still has more than three-quarters of its design life left, said the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, saying that the vehicles are more than capable of handling increased flights to service the space station.
“There is a tremendous amount of life left in the vehicles, probably 20 years’ worth,” said William Readdy, NASA’s deputy associate administrator overseeing the shuttle program. “The fleet we have continue to get better and better as we mature our process and upgrade the subsystems. I’m totally confident that the space shuttle is up to the task.”
Boeing Co. officials are even more confident, saying their shuttle vehicles could fly for 30 more years or longer.
“They are in terrific shape,” said Stan Albrecht, Boeing’s vice president and program manager for the space shuttle, noting that each of the four shuttles in service were designed to fly 100 missions. Discovery has flown the most missions at 27, followed by Columbia with 26, Atlantis with 22 and Endeavor with 14. The Challenger had flown 10 missions before it exploded shortly after launch in 1986.
“The missions flown so far [have] been relatively few,” he said. NASA had initially envisioned 50 missions a year, far more than the five it has actually averaged.
The outlook for the shuttle’s life is good news for Southern California, where the vehicles were developed and built. The region continues to have a major role in the shuttle program.
As major aerospace projects moved elsewhere and thousands of jobs were lost, shuttle work remained stable and is likely to continue so for the foreseeable future.
Boeing is one of the main contractors for the shuttle program, which is managed by the United Space Alliance, a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin Corp. More than 2,500 Boeing employees in Huntington Beach, Canoga Park and Palmdale work on the shuttle, mainly to design upgrades and make modifications to the vehicles and their main engines. Two thousand more work for hundreds of Boeing suppliers, many of them mom-and-pop operations.
Most of the design and development work is handled by about 1,200 employees at the company’s Huntington Beach office while modifications and the actual overhaul of the shuttle is completed by about 350 workers at the Palmdale facility.
And at Boeing’s Rocketdyne unit in Canoga Park, about 1,000 employees refurbish the shuttles’ main rocket engines and continually work on new enhancements, hoping to increase the engines’ operating efficiency and reduce costs.
A few miles away, Mooney Industries, with eight employees, makes metal parts for shuttle engines. About half of its revenue comes from shuttle-related work.
“It bodes well for us,” said Brian Mooney, production manager and son of the company owner, referring to the shuttle’s outlook. “We are constantly watching these programs, trying to make sure they don’t leave us behind.”
NASA officials said shuttle-related work isn’t expected to dry up any time soon. Although it has retained its familiar shape, the shuttle has been undergoing a major metamorphosis, NASA said, incorporating thousands of new technologies and enhanced designs. There is little of the 1970s technology left on the aircraft, the agency said.
Last year, Boeing’s Palmdale facility spent 10 months making more than 100 modifications to the Atlantis at a cost of about $70 million. Upgrades included gutting the cockpit and replacing 32 gauges and electromagnetic displays with 11 flat-panel color display screens. It slashed the orbiter weight by 75 pounds--a money saving move considering each launch costs about $10,000 per pound.
A third-generation main engine, developed at the Canoga Park Rocketdyne unit, was also installed on the Atlantis, which tripled the engine’s safety factor, NASA said. And cargo capacity for the shuttles has been increased by eight tons, mainly by installing lighter external fuel tanks.
Meanwhile, Columbia has been undergoing a comprehensive inspection at the Major Modifications facility in Palmdale, with technicians examining 236 miles of wiring and 24,000 heat-absorbing tiles that surround the craft. Technicians are also upgrading Columbia’s cockpit panel and the vehicle is expected to be fitted with the new engine as well.
“We’re doing a little more than a quick, 3,000-mile tuneup,” Hoffman said, noting that each shuttle spends 12 to 18 months at the facility when it undergoes a major overhaul about every three years. Columbia is slated to return to Cape Canaveral piggybacked on a Boeing 747 next spring.
Still, safety concerns have continued to dog the program since the shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986.
Last month, a study by the General Accounting Office raised concerns about plans to increase the number of shuttle missions to service the space station, concluding that past work-force reductions “are jeopardizing NASA’s ability to safely support the shuttle’s planned flight rate.”
In the next two years alone, almost 20 shuttle flights--using Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavor--are planned to build the $60-billion orbiting outpost. NASA has flown only four missions in each of the last two fiscal years.
Meanwhile, NASA’s staff has been reduced by a third to 1,800 since 1995, the study said, and noting that there were more than twice as many workers older than 60 as those younger than 30. “This jeopardizes the program’s ability to hand off leadership roles to the next generation and achieve a higher flight rate,” the study said.
It isn’t the first time staffing has become a safety concern. The dramatic cutbacks prompted President Clinton to order a review of the agency in 1996, based on concern that budget cuts, staff reductions and the fleet’s advancing age was increasing the risk of accidents.
An independent committee of outsiders, the Aerospace Advisory Safety Panel, eventually concluded that the “efforts to streamline the shuttle have not inadvertently created flight or ground risks,” giving the agency a clean bill of health.
NASA officials defended the staff reductions, which they said were completed during a lull in space flights. But with the anticipation of increasing the number of flights, NASA said it has added 550 employees.
“Over the last couple of years, while waiting for our Russian partners [for the space station flights], we had only been flying on the order of four a year, so the staff here was reduced. It was very appropriate to the task,” Readdy said. “But in anticipation of the step up to eight flights a year, we have continued to add staff. We think we’ve got the appropriate work force to do the job.”
Also, NASA officials said the risk of accidents has been gradually reduced. After the Challenger explosion, each shuttle mission faced one chance in 76 that it would end in the same sort of disaster. But safety reforms have reduced the risk to about 1 in 200, NASA officials said.
“In short, the shuttle is safer than it was in the early ‘90s,” NASA Administrator Daniel S. Goldin said last month at a conference in Long Beach. “We have had 74 consecutive successful flights, and we are committed to making the improvements to make the shuttle even safer.”
