Billion-Dollar Blowup

By Bruce van Voorst/Washington

The spectacular fireworks high over Southern California last week couldn't have come at a worse time for the Central Intelligence Agency. Just as Congress was debating the size of the intelligence budget for 1994, $1 billion worth of spying equipment disappeared in a flash above Vandenberg Air Force Base -- the costliest space accident since the 1986 Challenger disaster. A new Titan IV rocket carrying a supersecret intelligence-satellite system inexplicably blew up two minutes after launch. Space-spying expert Jeffrey Richelson, author of America's Secret Eyes in Space, called it a "huge embarrassment for the intelligence community."

The mishap made clear once again the enormous price tag on space ventures. Dennis DeConcini, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, noted bitterly that Congress had struggled to trim about $1.3 billion out of intelligence appropriations this year only to see almost that much blown away in the accident. Even before the explosion happened, CIA Director Jim Woolsey wanted $1 billion added to the $27.5 billion intelligence budget for 1994, but that will now be a tougher sell in Congress -- the extra money is earmarked for more space equipment.

/ By itself the Titan's three-satellite payload -- code-named Pacea -- was not indispensable to current intelligence operations. The solar-powered satellites, each about as big as a midsize car, are part of a continuing surveillance program called Classic Wizard, which is designed to track ships at sea, especially those from the countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. If the three satellites had been deployed as planned into a triangle in space, their electronic sensing devices would have calculated the position of ships on the basis of radio and radar transmissions. But the U.S. has two such systems already in place and a spare set available if needed.

The worst fallout of the explosion was the doubt it created about the reliability of the newly designed Titan IV booster, on which both the Air Force and CIA are heavily dependent. The 12-story-high booster is the only rocket capable of launching a whole family of space-surveillance systems. Martin Marietta has delivered or has under construction about half of the 41 Titan IVs currently on order. Colonel Frank Stirling, director of the Air Force's Titan IV program, immediately grounded two other boosters scheduled for launch and said the delay could last up to a year.

Systems waiting to go into orbit include the first of the new Milstar communications satellites, designed to maintain military communications in a nuclear war; a Defense Support Program heat-sensing satellite to give warning of hostile missile launches; and a Lacrosse satellite with a special radar system to provide detailed pictures of the ground even through clouds and at night. One of the two Lacrosses currently in orbit has been up for more than four years and needs to be replaced. "Any lengthy delay in getting the Titan IV operational could be critical to the U.S. surveillance capability," said Richelson.

What do not need replacing are the Pacea satellites destroyed last week. The Air Force tried to launch them because they were already mostly built when the Soviet Union collapsed. Now, tracking the Russian navy is less critical than it was at the height of the cold war. Says John Pike, a space expert at the Federation of American Scientists: "We know where the Russian navy is -- it's in port and rusting."