Nasa's Do-Or-Die Mission

By Dick Thompson/Washington

As an astronaut for the past 26 years, Dr. Story Musgrave has learned to handle pressure and danger. He knows what it's like to sit atop a 4.5 million- lb. space shuttle as its three main engines roar to life. He remembers well that when the eight steel bolts that attach the rocket boosters to the launching pad are blown away, there's no turning back. He has felt the crushing sensation as 6 million lbs. of thrust hurl him into orbit. And he knows how sublime and scary it is to float freely in space, tethered to the ship by only a slender lifeline. But none of Musgrave's four missions have fully prepared him for the challenge he faces next week, when he and six other astronauts are scheduled to blast off from Cape Canaveral on the shuttle Endeavour. "This thing is frightening to me," he admits.

"This thing" is the most difficult and daring space assignment since the Apollo moon landings. Though NASA is trying to downplay it as a "scheduled maintenance flight," the goal is anything but routine: the crew is supposed to fix the faulty Hubble Space Telescope, a $1.6 billion disappointment that has kept astronomers in anguish since it was launched three years ago. The repair work will require that alternating pairs of astronauts go on five space walks of six hours each, which would break the NASA record of four such excursions on a mission. Since the task will be something like weaving baskets while wearing boxing gloves in a weightless environment, success is far from assured.

But the mission is more than a risky effort to bring an ailing telescope back to health. It's a chance -- maybe the last good chance -- to revitalize NASA's faltering image, which has suffered one blow after another since the Challenger explosion in 1986. Just in the past year, the beleaguered space agency has lost contact with the $1 billion Mars Observer, has had a shuttle launch aborted three seconds before lift-off and has run into serious trouble developing the GOES-Next weather satellite, which is three years behind schedule and now has a price tag of $1.7 billion, double the original estimate.

Even the Hubble repair mission has already had glitches. Last week ground technicians discovered a faulty sensor in a control device on Endeavour's right wing. After mulling over the problem for a day, NASA officials decided not to delay the mission, because three other backup sensors could do the job of the malfunctioning one. Of course, given the shuttle's recent record, a Dec. 1 launch is not exactly a safe bet.

The White House and Congress are fed up with giving NASA a blank check for cost overruns and failed missions. Two years ago, the agency asked for a five- year budget of $106 billion, but the Bush Administration chopped it to $96 billion, and Clinton's budget cutters have set a target of $71 billion for the same period. The President has decreed that Space Station Freedom will be built only if NASA teams up with its old space-race rivals, the Russians, to develop a joint project that minimizes costs.

Even a scaled-down space station will be in jeopardy unless NASA proves that it can do something right for a change. That's what makes the Hubble mission such a crucial test case. NASA figures that half a billion people around the world -- presumably including quite a few members of Congress -- will watch TV coverage of the planned 11-day flight. Says Robert ("Hoot") Gibson, the agency's chief astronaut: "This is probably a make-or-break kind of mission."

Among the Hubble's many problems is a case of myopia -- caused by a manufacturing mistake in its primary mirror. The astronauts hope to sharpen the telescope's eyesight by fitting it with corrective lenses. They also intend to revamp some faulty electronic systems, put in new gyroscopes and replace the two unstable solar-energy panels, whose vibrations are causing some of the telescope's images to blur. Fixing all this will take a repair kit consisting of 280 tools and 15,000 lbs. of equipment. The Hubble has been semifunctional up to now, but if the mission doesn't succeed, failing parts could soon make the telescope just another piece of orbiting space junk.

With so much at stake, NASA has lined up an experienced crew of six men and one woman who are overachievers even by astronaut standards. Musgrave, who is the payload commander and will supervise the space walks, has seven advanced degrees, including an M.D. and a master's in computer programming. After this mission he will have logged more space flights (five) than all but two other astronauts. Shuttle commander Richard Covey, a former fighter pilot with 339 combat missions, was the man picked in 1988 to pilot the first shuttle launched after the Challenger disaster. Navy pilot Kenneth Bowersox, who will assist Covey with the tricky maneuvering needed to rendezvous with Hubble, has made more than 300 landings on the rolling decks of aircraft carriers.

To prepare for the Hubble flight, the Endeavour crew has put in 70-hr. workweeks for 10 months. And because of the nature of the mission, NASA tripled the amount of training time normally devoted to spacewalking. The astronauts spent 400 hours toiling underwater in the weightlessness-simulation tank at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, rehearsing every step of their orbital fix-it job. Conditioning themselves for the unusually long space walks, they stayed in the tank for up to seven hours at a time.

At Houston's Johnson Space Center, the astronauts practiced in a vacuum chamber that was chilled to -300 degreesF to simulate the extreme cold of space. During one session, Musgrave worked with a tool until he developed frostbite on his fingers. NASA engineers quickly improved the space suits and put an extra covering around the gloves so that the crew could withstand ultralow temperatures for longer periods.

The four astronauts who will venture outside Endeavour to work on the Hubble -- Musgrave, Jeffrey Hoffman, Thomas Akers and Kathryn Thornton -- are all veteran spacewalkers. Thornton, a nuclear physicist and mother of five, went on the 1992 mission that repaired the Intelsat communications satellite. On that flight, the 5-ft. 4-in. K.T., as the other astronauts call her, wasn't involved in wrestling the three-ton satellite into the shuttle's payload bay. (It eventually took three men to do that job.) This time, though, she will play a key role: installing the Hubble's corrective lenses. They will be housed in a 600-lb. box the size of a telephone booth, but in the weightlessness of space, Thornton should be able to manage the load. Explains Susan Rainwater, a spacewalk trainer at the Johnson Center: "The fact that a smaller woman was selected just demonstrates that the task requires more agility than physical strength. It's fingertip forces. It's 90% mental."

The toughest job may be replacing the solar panels -- two 40-ft.-long "wings" that provide power to the telescope. During the full day needed for this task, Thornton and Akers will precisely follow hundreds of steps, using bolts, electrical connectors, Velcro and 84 sq. yds. of plastic. And somehow they must do it all while swathed in their thick space suits -- a condition astronauts jokingly compare with being mummified.

NASA has tried to choreograph every move, but these missions never go entirely as planned. "As we know when we do things for the first time in space, things can go wrong," says Swiss crew member Claude Nicollier, an astronaut from the European Space Agency who will be controlling a 50-ft.-long mechanical arm that will extend outward from Endeavour and move spacewalkers around the Hubble. Planners remain concerned about how fatigued the astronauts will become during their long stints working on the satellite. To be on the safe side, NASA added an extra day to the mission in case astronauts need a day off to rest. The agency also built in enough flexibility so that an additional day of spacewalking could be scheduled if the work takes much longer than planned.

How the crew handles the unexpected could mean the difference between success and failure. And the uncertainty surrounding this mission has stirred up more tension and anticipation throughout NASA than the space agency has seen in a long time. Says NASA administrator Daniel Goldin: "We are excited about doing very noble, risky things because that's what NASA is all about." As the mission moves toward countdown, the proud organization that put men on the moon looks forward, with fingers firmly crossed, to recapturing its past glory.

With reporting by Jerry Hannifin/Cape Canaveral