Plans for Manned U.S. Space Station Run Into a Snag

Plans to build an orbiting space station that would give the United States a permanent presence in space have hit a snag because its estimated cost is soaring far beyond the original $8-billion estimate, leading to concerns that any effort to pare the cost could jeopardize the lives of the crew and compromise the scientific importance of the station, according to many experts.

This will probably cause delays in the construction schedule as the space agency searches for scarce federal dollars while grappling with such fundamental questions as whether an emergency escape vehicle should be provided for the crew.

The orbiting laboratory, intended to be a model of international cooperation with major components supplied by Europe, Japan and Canada, is also under attack in the international arena, especially by the Europeans, who have been stung by past joint space ventures with the United States and have suggested that they might pull out of the program.

In a series of meetings between officials of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the European Space Agency, European leaders have sought a larger role in overall management of the station, insisting that they should no longer be treated as a second-rank space power.

NASA has maintained from the beginning that it would manage the station while leaving individual components supplied by other countries to the autonomous control of those countries. Europe is planning to provide a $2-billion laboratory for the station that would be used for experiments by European scientists, as well as several other components.

In recent weeks there have been repeated meetings between U.S. and European leaders to try to resolve the differences. NASA sources said there has been some progress in those discussions, but the space agency has not yielded its control over the station.

“It’s still a U.S. program,” a NASA official said. “We’re the majority stockholder. There’s a difference of opinion, but we don’t see anything that can’t be worked out.”

That optimism is not universal.

“There is every possibility they (the Europeans) will pull out if we can’t convince them there is a commitment” to move aggressively ahead with the station, Rep. George E. Brown (D-Colton), a member of the House subcommittee on space sciences and applications, said in a telephone interview.

Brown, a physicist, is one of Congress’ leading supporters of the U.S. space program, but he sees a difficult road ahead, both politically and financially. NASA expects to award contracts for the first stage of construction early next year, but Brown indicated that there may be some delays.

“There is substantial question over whether we are going to be able to get past the design stage right now,” he said.

Cost Forecast Soars

NASA is having serious problems in keeping the cost of the station near the original projections. Recent NASA cost estimates were running 50% higher, and that has forced the space agency to consider ways of cutting back on the “capabilities” of the station. A financial review now under way at NASA is to be completed by the end of January.

But the suggestion that the station might have to be built on a tight budget has alarmed some observers, including some astronauts, who fear that cost-cutting measures could jeopardize the safety of the crew.

“When you reduce the capability of something in orbit, you are playing with human lives,” said author Ben Bova, president of the National Space Society, a citizens’ activist group that keeps tabs on the nation’s space program. “It’s being whittled down to the point that it’s far less than it should be.”

Concerns among the astronauts who would operate the station surfaced last July in an internal NASA memorandum by astronaut C. Gordon Fullerton. The memo was made public after parts of it appeared in the trade journal Aviation Week and Space Technology.

“NASA has been criticized severely recently for letting program objectives override good judgment--is it happening again?” Fullerton’s memo asked. “There is great concern that NASA is misrepresenting what we can do, to the Congress and the public.”

Fullerton, a veteran of two shuttle flights, is now a NASA test pilot at the Dryden Flight Research Facility at Edwards Air Force Base.

He has expressed concern in the past over NASA’s desire to make the station a technological showplace, equipped with showy devices such as robotic arms that would allow astronauts to “feel” the texture of whatever they are trying to grasp. Astronauts have noted that such gadgets have compounded their problems aboard the shuttle by failing just when they were needed.

Fullerton said he is satisfied that NASA management is trying to resolve the concerns he laid out in his 20-page memo, which he said reflected the thoughts of many astronauts.

One area that particularly concerns Fullerton, as well as many others, is the lack of an escape vehicle for the crew.

Members of the crew will be assigned to the station for lengthy tours. As the station is now designed, if something were to go seriously wrong, there would be no way for the crew to return to Earth unless a space shuttle just happened to be there. Normally, shuttles would visit the station only when delivering supplies or changing crews every month or so.

The prospect of American astronauts stranded in a disabled space station may not sit well with the nation as a result of the Challenger shuttle disaster, and astronauts are not too wild about the possibility of being stranded without an escape vehicle. Seven crew members died when the shuttle exploded shortly after launch last January.

“That’s something we ought to have,” Fullerton said bluntly. “There ought to be a way to get back to the ground.”

A NASA spokesman said that although the escape vehicle is not included in the plan, it could be added later if deemed necessary.

“We didn’t feel that was a decision that had to be made right now,” spokesman Mark Hess said. One option being considered is to provide a self-supporting capsule near the station where astronauts could take refuge while waiting for a shuttle to get to them.

NASA sees the station as the obvious next step in manned exploration of space, giving the United States and its partners a permanent facility to carry out long-term experiments and begin manufacturing materials that can best be fabricated in a weightless environment.

Only the Soviet Union has anything like that, and only Soviet cosmonauts have been exposed to prolonged periods in space approaching those required for manned expeditions to other planets.

Although that would seem to place the Soviets far ahead in space exploration, the fact is that the Soviet Union and the United States chose different routes to reach similar milestones in space. In the late 1960s, both nations had come to the same fork in the road: Whether to next build a space station or a reusable launch vehicle.

The Soviets opted for a station, flew the first Salyut in 1971 and have had Salyut 7, a small station that is manned periodically, in orbit since April of 1982. Last February the Soviets launched Mir, the first element of a large modular station that is to be permanently manned. The United States chose to build a reusable space fleet first, and the Soviets are reported close to launching their first space shuttle.

The United States is now reaching toward a “permanent presence in space.” The space station would be a massive facility, assembled in orbit by teams of astronauts who would be carried to their work stations by the shuttle. NASA estimates that it would take 32 shuttle flights to build and equip the station from 1993 through 1995. Seventeen flights would be needed just to assemble the main base, according to plans released last month by the space agency.

All shuttle flights have been postponed as a result of the Challenger accident, and will not resume before early 1988.

The station itself would consist of three laboratories--one Japanese, one European, and one American--plus crew quarters and support facilities. It would be manned at all times. The modules would be attached to a center boom, which would be part of an elaborate scaffolding that would support antennas, solar collectors and various experiments. In addition, there eventually would be several “free-flying” platforms to house “man-tended” operations so delicate that they would be harmed by activities causing minute vibrations and other disturbances aboard the manned facility.

The Europeans have also planned to supply a platform that would work with the station but would fly in a polar orbit as opposed to the station’s equatorial orbit. The platform would cross the station’s orbit twice daily and repeatedly pass over the entire surface of the Earth.

But the history of such European-U.S. space ventures has been checkered, at best. The United States and Europe had planned joint probes to Halley’s comet, for example. But after the Europeans had already begun work on their spacecraft, NASA backed out, forcing the Europeans into a solo operation, which they carried out with great success when Giotto flew within a whisker of the nucleus of the comet last March.

Similar joint expeditions were planned to simultaneously study both poles of the sun, but again the United States backed out. The European probe, Ulysses, was to have been launched by the shuttle last May, but it is still on the ground in the aftermath of the Challenger disaster, and its launch is now several years away.

But nothing has rankled European space scientists more than the fate of the $1-billion Spacelab built by the Europeans for the space shuttle. The lab fits inside the shuttle’s cargo bay, greatly expanding the scientific capabilities of the shuttle. It was to have been carried aloft many times as a major component of an international space program.

Flights Scaled Back

But the number of times Spacelab will fly in the years ahead has been scaled back significantly because of the reduction in the number of shuttle missions in the post-Challenger era and the fierce competition between the military and civilian sectors for space aboard the shuttle.

The fate of Spacelab, according to the National Space Society’s Bova, “has left many European scientists feeling they have suspended their careers for four or five years.”

He and others are also concerned that history may be repeating itself with the space station.

“The Europeans are watching the U.S. do to the space station what they did to the shuttle, cheap it up until it is too dangerous to use,” Bova said.

That charge had been repeatedly leveled at the shuttle long before the Challenger explosion. The shuttle is still considered a multipurpose vehicle that Congress had mandated would be the nation’s sole access to space.

That mandate, according to critics, resulted in a complex, failure-prone vehicle that required human participation in space ventures that could just as easily have been done with unmanned rockets.

Rep. Brown said he will fight to be sure Congress does not send the space station down the same road as the shuttle, something he termed “a distinct possibility in the present climate.”

“I don’t want us to repeat the fiasco of the shuttle,” he said.

NASA is to award the first contracts for construction of the station early next year to one of two competing Southland firms, McDonnell Douglas of Huntington Beach or Rockwell International Corp. of Downey.

The eventual construction of the station is “inevitable,” Brown said. But he added that he doubts the station will meet the schedule sought by NASA.

“We have a very critical period for the next year or two,” he said.