NASA in a Bind Over Spare Parts Shortage

With Columbia’s destruction, NASA must operate with three space shuttles, and officials said Thursday they may be forced -- as a last resort -- to consider mothballing a spacecraft for spare parts just to cobble together an abbreviated launch schedule.

The science behind what is known at Johnson Space Center as “the flow” -- the choreography of landing, servicing and launching NASA’s fleet -- was complex enough when there were four space shuttles.

Many of the shuttle program’s original manufacturers are long gone, and even with warehouses full of parts at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, there are often a finite number of supplies available to maintain the fleet.

Though it has happened less frequently in recent years, engineers, faced with a dwindling pool of dated hardware, have been forced to take parts from one shuttle and use them in another to keep its launch schedule on target. That process is known as “cannibalization,” a word NASA engineers detest but use because they can’t find a better one.

Now there are three space shuttles remaining -- Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour -- and NASA has no plans to build a new craft. In effect, NASA may find itself running out of spaceships.

Following the destruction of Columbia as it attempted to reenter the Earth’s atmosphere Saturday, the space shuttle fleet has been grounded while NASA conducts an investigation. At the very least, the next launch of Atlantis, which has an assigned crew and is technically ready to take off March 1, is on hold indefinitely.

But even after the flaw that destroyed Columbia is discovered and fixed -- a process that took nearly three years and $15 billion after the Challenger explosion in 1986 -- several NASA officials said Thursday that Saturday’s accident could further complicate “the flow.”

That could mean increasing the amount of time a shuttle stays on the ground between missions by weeks or months, or reducing the number of missions NASA flies each year, officials said. But it could also mean more drastic changes.

The worst-case scenario: NASA could be forced, at least temporarily, to consider turning one of its last three shuttles into a “hangar queen,” using it as an emergency blanket for parts and supplies.

“It’s within the realm of possibility,” said G.L. “Lee” Norbraten, manager of NASA’s space shuttle development office in Houston. “But it’s too early in the process to know how that will play out from the standpoint that a root cause [of Columbia’s destruction] is not yet identified. The scenarios are wide open.”

For years, NASA’s budget has hovered at or about $15 billion a year. Critics say it hasn’t been nearly enough to compensate for everything from inflation to the rising cost of keeping aging shuttles in space.

With a tight budget, the easiest way for NASA to save money over the years was to cut back on spare parts, said a former NASA official who specialized in logistics, supplies and maintenance of the space shuttle program.

According to Houston-based United Space Alliance, the prime contractor for the space shuttle program and the group responsible for its day-to-day operations, a space shuttle has about 2.5 million parts, including its fuel tank and booster rockets, with 2 million on the orbiter alone.

“It starts out in the budget process,” said the official, a retired Johnson Space Center official who spoke on condition of anonymity. “When Congress approved money, if there was any cut in services, it always went into spares.”

Norbraten and Melissa Motichek, a NASA spokeswoman in Washington, stressed that there are no plans to use one of the remaining shuttles for parts.

“They think three is enough -- for now,” Motichek said Thursday.

At its inception 22 years ago, America’s shuttle program was supposed to mark a revolution in space travel, largely because the spacecraft were supposed to be the most durable ever built. In Houston, many NASA officials still view them as predecessors to space “station wagons” that would eventually ferry families through space.

In some ways, that has proved true -- Columbia flew 28 missions in 23 years before it broke apart. In other ways, it has not -- the shuttles are not nearly as durable as they were envisioned, and the dream of building a spacecraft with an on-the-ground turnaround of a week has remained well beyond NASA’s reach.

One primary reason the program has lagged seems, at first blush, absurdly simple: parts.

After the Challenger explosion, members of a presidential commission investigating the disaster said they were shocked to learn that NASA periodically swapped parts between shuttles to ensure that they always had one shuttle on track to launch. Of the 300 parts that had to be replaced in Challenger before that ill-fated mission, 45 were taken from Columbia and the other shuttles.

In May, United Space Alliance took to the EBay and Yahoo Web auction sites in search of secondhand parts, including computer chips. Some of the computer technology is the same used in IBM’s earliest personal computers. A USA spokesman compared it to a “scavenger hunt.”

Columbia, the oldest shuttle in the fleet, was grounded for more than three years in the late 1980s and used as a parts supplier -- from bolts to a $25-million communications system -- for the other shuttles.

The $2-billion craft was nearly mothballed in the late 1990s, partly because it was the only space shuttle not outfitted with the hardware needed to dock with the international space station. Columbia was launched Jan. 16 after a $145-million overhaul that included a new cockpit and new thermal shielding.

Far fewer parts are cannibalized today than they were in the years leading up to the Challenger explosion. Still, the issue illustrates the difficulty NASA has encountered in keeping its fleet on track for eventual launch. That effort, also known as NASA’s “manifest,” was hard enough with four shuttles, and many analysts believe it will be harder with three.

Two former members of a panel that advised the National Academy of Sciences on potential space shuttle program upgrades said a parts shortage could ultimately force NASA to consider setting aside one of its remaining shuttles, temporarily, for parts. Both of the panel members -- reflecting the sensitivity of the issue at NASA, which was heavily criticized for cannibalization of parts after the Challenger explosion -- spoke on condition of anonymity.

“It’s feasible,” one of them said. “As an engineer, the answer is ‘yes.’ ”

Aaron Kolom, NASA’s assistant chief engineer in the early days of the program, said in an interview Thursday that the agency may have no other choice.

“You can see the logic of mothballing one,” he said from his Los Angeles home. “It’s a horrible decision, but absent doing that you just can’t be sure” of maintaining a launch schedule.

Others, however, while they agreed the logistics of planning launches could become more complicated and time-consuming, cast doubt on the remote possibility that NASA would consider having to mothball a shuttle.

“There are going to be effects on the manifest because Columbia was part of the manifest and the flow,” said United Space Alliance spokeswoman Kari Fluegel. “But they are still sorting that one out.”

Donald Emero, a retired Boeing Reusable Space Systems official and an author of the Academy of Sciences report on space shuttle upgrades, said the only positive anyone could identify in the Challenger catastrophe was that it grounded the fleet for three years.

That provided an opportunity for NASA to stock up on parts, some of which are still available. Though NASA had to use many of those parts to build Endeavour, its newest shuttle and Challenger’s replacement, the agency has also begun other “logistics” advances, including a massive consolidation of stockpiles and warehouses in the 1990s. What’s more, NASA also has at its disposal the parts of the space shuttle Enterprise -- an original test vehicle built in 1977 and unable to fly in space.

“It is true that in the early days there was a shortage of spares,” said Emero, a Fountain Valley resident. “In some cases ... if a vehicle in the fleet needed it right now they would go through and do what they call a cannibalization ....But they will use one [shuttle] for flying, they will have one getting ready to fly and they will have one on the ground getting upgraded. The premise of setting one aside? Forget it.”

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Staff writers Usha Lee McFarling in Los Angeles and Eric Malnic in Houston contributed to this report.