Spinning Out Of Orbit

By LEON JAROFF

It was the embodiment of Yankee ingenuity and derring-do, the pride of the U.S. and the envy of the world. The very mention of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration evoked images of intrepid astronauts walking in space and frolicking on the moon, of sophisticated robot craft swooping past ringed and rocky alien worlds. To millions of people around the globe, the voice of Mission Control was the true Voice of America.

Those days are long gone. In Washington NASA is under siege, its reputation tarnished, its programs in disarray, its future clouded. Overhead, the crippled $2.1 billion Hubble Space Telescope orbits, its vision blurred by an embarrassing, inexcusable flaw in one of its reflecting mirrors. In Congress legislators are having second thoughts about any further funding of the highly touted $37 billion space station, questioning its usefulness and NASA's ability to assemble and operate it.

At Cape Canaveral last week, technicians prepared to move the shuttle Atlantis from its launching pad back to the vehicle-assembly building for repairs after failing to halt the seepage of hydrogen from a flange connecting fueling pipes to the spacecraft's giant external tank. As a result, all three U.S. shuttles are grounded while NASA continues to probe the cause of the mysterious leaks, not only in Atlantis but also in its sister ship Columbia.

Only one event brightened an otherwise gloomy week for the space agency. The first commercial version of the Atlas rocket was finally launched by NASA from Cape Canaveral. It lofted into orbit a satellite that in September will provide scientists with important data on radioactive damage to satellites in outer space.

That lone success did little to bolster NASA's sagging morale. Last month Vice President Dan Quayle, in his role as chairman of the National Space Council, instructed NASA administrator Richard Truly "to put together an outside task force that will consider the future long-term direction of the space program." And last week Quayle announced that Norman Augustine, chairman of Martin Marietta Corp., has been selected to head the new group. To some, creation of the task force signaled a diminished role for NASA in space.

The mounting criticism of NASA is in sharp contrast to the almost uninterrupted acclaim heaped on the agency in the years that followed its establishment in 1958. With virtually unlimited funds, sound management and inspired creativity, NASA soon overcame the Soviet Union's head start, sending brilliantly conceived and increasingly sophisticated unmanned craft to every planet but Pluto and landing men on the moon.

Not long after Neil Armstrong took his "one small step for man," however, even as more Apollo flights were successfully plying the lunar route, the seeds of NASA's decline were planted. Some space historians go so far as to pinpoint the day it happened: March 7, 1970, when President Richard Nixon, preoccupied with Vietnam and budgetary problems, decided that it was not in the best interests of the U.S. to have a high-profile space program.

Rejecting suggestions that the nation proceed apace with a space station and a permanent base on the moon in preparation for sending astronauts to Mars, Nixon issued a statement that shook the NASA hierarchy: "Space must take its place with other national priorities." Suddenly the space agency's primary mission became sheer survival. "Once NASA's goals in space were rejected," says John Logsdon, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, "its purpose became maintenance of the institution. A siege mentality developed. NASA circled the wagons and began to lie to itself and everybody else."

Seeking a major project that would involve manned flight and thus more easily elicit the support of Congress ("No bucks without Buck Rogers," quip congressional aides), the agency opted for the Space Transportation System, the shuttle program. Lobbying the White House, the Defense Department and Congress intensively, NASA portrayed the shuttle as all things to all people. The winged craft would be reusable and thus economical, a safe, reliable space truck with many different roles. In as many as 60 flights a year, it would loft or capture satellites and patrol the skies for the military. Furthermore, NASA assured the White House, it could lead to the direct employment of 8,800 people in 1972 and 24,000 by 1973.

In January 1972 Nixon authorized the development of the shuttle, a decision that Logsdon calls "one of the major public policy mistakes of the last quarter-century." As the naysayers predicted at the time, the shuttle was highly oversold. While a remarkable feat of engineering, it was highly complex and subject to recurring glitches that have prevented NASA from ever achieving more than nine launches -- never mind 60 -- a year. Worse, since it depended almost solely on the shuttle to orbit satellites until after the Challenger disaster, the U.S. has fallen behind in the development of expendable rocket launchers. More and more U.S. companies are looking to the European Space Agency's Ariane rocket, which last week carried two television satellites aloft, for placing commercial satellites in orbit, and also -- now that Washington has given its approval -- to the Soviet Proton.

NASA critics see a disturbing parallel between the shuttle and the proposed space station. The concept of the station evolved in part to provide a useful mission for the shuttle, which could be employed to carry crews back and forth to the orbiting base. But, say Ronald Brunner and Radford Byerly, researchers at the University of Colorado, the station was more important to the NASA hierarchy as a megaproject to stem the decline in the agency's manpower, which by 1981 had dropped to 22,000 from a high of 36,000 in 1967.

Having polished its sales technique with the shuttle, NASA successfully lobbied Ronald Reagan and his aides, again overselling, exaggerating the benefits and downplaying the difficulties of building the space station.

The extent of NASA's sales hype became evident in July when the space agency announced that the station had to be extensively redesigned and simplified. An independent study had found that some 3,800 hours of spacewalking would be required annually merely to maintain the proposed station -- a figure drastically higher than the 130 hours NASA had estimated and far beyond the capacity of the current U.S. space program.

Truly, who has held his post only since 1989, argues that NASA is taking a "bum rap," especially about the shuttle's latest troubles. "It is very frustrating to be castigated, to end up in political cartoons and to be made fun of," he says, "when the agency carefully checks for hydrogen leaks, finds them and judiciously cancels flights to ensure the safety of astronauts." Bruce Murray, a Caltech planetary scientist and former head of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, agrees: "I don't think that it is fair to beat the current NASA people about the head and shoulders when they are trying to implement a flawed plan."

Not all the news is bad. After the benign neglect of space during the Reagan Administration, Murray, a confirmed Democrat, has been pleasantly surprised by the Bush Administration's approach. He lauds Bush's so-called Space Exploration Initiative, which would forge a sensible, coherent space program that, step by step, could land astronauts on the red sands of Mars by 2019. That program largely follows recommendations made to the White House by the National Academy of Sciences in 1988. The Academy urged, among other things, that "core functions" such as developing inexpensive and reliable means for launching payloads into orbit be assured of stable funding -- roughly $10 billion annually -- before any "special initiatives" like the space station are approved. Bush is also seeking a 23% increase in NASA's budget, to $15.2 billion for fiscal 1991. "With this kind of leadership," says Murray, "I think it will be possible again to draw in the young people with stars in their eyes." Once more, after two decades of meandering in space, NASA has a strong space advocate in the White House and a mandate to return to its winning ways. The question remains: Is NASA up to the task?

With reporting by Glenn Garelik and Dick Thompson/Washington