Let's Not Orbit White Elephants

By Dennis Overbye

Last spring's announcement that NASA would seek Russian help to redesign and & build the agency's beleaguered white elephant of a space station seemed like such a good idea it was almost shocking. One-world visions of multicultural life among the stars danced briefly in the heads of old Trekkies and space fans. The inclusion of Russia, the only other spacefaring nation, could breathe new life into the tired space-station project and indeed into the entire once great, once imagination-grabbing American space program. As it turns out, that idea was too good to be true. The new space station approved by Clinton and the Congress last month bears little evidence of that utopian dream. So far there is no mention of hooking up with the Russian Mir space station or of Mir 2, due in 1996. No mention of using the huge Russian Energia rocket to save billions in launch costs. If anything, the plans underscore once again the uselessness of the space station and NASA's desperation to have something, anything, in the sky.

"I don't care what it looks like, smells like or feels like so long as the United States of America provides world leadership with a space station," NASA administrator Daniel Goldin told a House committee. For the past decade, NASA has touted the space station as the necessary next step in the conquest of space, but the propensity to invest in hardware and grand engineering projects rather than ideas, as if NASA's only constituency were the aerospace industry, has retarded rather than advanced the agency's true mission of exploring the universe. Such genuine marvels as the Hubble Space Telescope (which has returned spectacular results despite a slightly misshapen mirror), the Galileo spacecraft now on its way to Jupiter and the COBE satellite, which last year revealed details of the origin of the universe, have had to operate in the shadows, delayed and beggared by NASA's other concerns.

Asked by Clinton to come up with three options reducing the cost of the space station by at least half over the next four years, NASA uncharacteristically but bravely admitted it couldn't be done and came back with choices costing from $12 billion to $13 billion, ranging from a glorified shuttle hitching post to a giant can with solar-panel wings. In choosing the former option, which resembles the original Freedom, Clinton satisfied the aerospace industry and its supporters in Congress. He also placated Canada, Japan and the European Space Agency, which have been suckered into spending billions of their own on the space station and don't want any changes. By going along to get along, however, he robbed the station of its last pretext of a scientific rationale; on the new station, astronauts will have to live on the space shuttle and will be able to stay in orbit only 20 days -- so much for studying the effects of long-duration weightlessness.

Because space and science are confused in the public's eye, the space station has tainted all of science with its bloated budget. Without it, there would probably be no category of research called "Big Science," with its misleading connotations of power and bureaucracy. Nothing has suffered more from this guilt by association than the giant superconducting supercollider particle accelerator, which has the misfortune to be in Texas, also home of the Johnson Space Center, a major space-station player. Some members of Congress have decided that having both projects is too much of a good thing for the Lone Star State. Three weeks ago, the House of Representatives voted to kill the supercollider. The Senate can still rescue the collider, as it did last year, and show that America still cares about something besides the GNP.

The space station lurches on, like a fighter out on his feet but held up because he is entangled in the ropes -- that is to say, politics. On the home front, the station has on its side 75,000 jobs and the aura of U.S. technological superiority. Overseas there are commitments to our erstwhile partners.

There is yet one slim hope for a space station that plays a positive role in the universe. The special outside panel helping Clinton evaluate these plans recommended strongly that the space station go into a high-inclination orbit so that Russian spacecraft can visit from the Baikonur spaceport and perhaps perform rescue operations. Even that, however, might be too much for our partners. Launching at high inclinations reduces the shuttle's payload because the rockets get less of a boost from the earth's rotation; as a result, the Japanese and European modules may be too heavy to get into orbit.

What's a poor space agency to do? The universe is too big for one nation to rule, even with the dedicated bureaucrats of NASA. The lesson of the universe is that we are all humans, earthlings. In space, what matters is not what language you speak but what kind of air you breathe. A truly international space station would be worth the price. Among other things, it would keep the former Soviet space industry constructively employed and less likely to peddle % its expertise to Third World troublemakers like Saddam Hussein.

In the best of all possible worlds, the space program would not be getting crushed between the defense budget, galumphing entitlements and a right-wing rebellion against government spending for anything but keeping undesirables out of the neighborhood. But this is not the best of worlds. This shrunken little station is not the glorious conquest of space once rhapsodized about in these and other pages. If it goes up we will have to listen to years of astronaut hyperbole about the joys of drawing blood from each other in orbit. The space station has stunk up the joint long enough. Let the Russians in, or stand aside and let the bum fall.