NASA’s space station a multi-billion dollar disappointment

SCIENCE FORUM

When it comes to selling Congress a pig in a poke, no one can do it better than the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. On April 20, if there are no further delays, the Hubble Space Telescope will go into orbit five years behind schedule and costing more than $1.4 billion. Even now the computer software that is to run the instrument is being debugged and some of the hardware aboard is a decade old and suspect. In other words, no one is sure just how well the instrument will function.

Even at that, the telescope is a better bargin than NASA’s proposed space station. Late last fall the Congress appropriated a $1.8 billion installment on a project that could run as high as $30 billion. For that astronomical sum, nobody, politicians, NASA officials, or scientists who would ultimately use the station, can say what the public is getting for its money. The problems that have beset the space station project make those of the Hubble Space Telescope seem trivial by comparison. Eliot Marshall, an editorial writer for the AAAS journal Science, recently reviewed the status of the star-crossed space station.

Since the space station was first put into the NASA budget in 1984,the project has had four different directors, undergone 11 planning reviews, and spent $2 billion with very little to show for it. In the last three months of 1989 alone, NASA scrapped and did over the plans for the station twice — and is again in the process of changing the top management. As a result, the mission of the space station still has not been defined which means that its actual physical makeup, and the type of experiments it will be able to conduct, is an unknown after five years of NASA planning. All of this has understandably upset scientists who have seen their experimental programs added, dropped, revised, or put on indefinite hold. Equally disturbed are European partners in the project who stand to lose nearly $300 million because of the most recent delays. It has also upset several congressional members, even among those were the project’s staunchest supporters.

Rep. Robert Roe, D-N.J., chairman of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, gave NASA program chiefs an ultimatum after the second revamping of the station in three months. He told them that they would have to freeze the design and live with the consequences in 1990, otherwise his committee would recommend that Congress kill the project. “I wanted to make it clear to them,” said Roe, “that, if you’re going to change direction every time Congress turns around, we have a space station project driven by funding politics rather than technology.” Another member of the committee said that the latest revisions, designed to absorb congressional budget paring of the NASA budget, was turning the world’s most advanced scientific laboratory into “a giant orbiting recreational vehicle.”

Much of the politician’s anger is directed toward NASA’s appearing to use cuts in the station’s capabilities as a lever to restore budget cuts. Initially, the House had passed a $400 million cut in the project’s appropriation. In response, NASA made several unilateral cuts that deeply affected their European partners who had signed agreements with the U.S agency. The Europeans protested that they stood to lose on power supply, communications links, and hookup priorities. When Congress returned $150 million of the cuts, NASA began restoring some of the items it threatened to cut. Many in the House were angry at what seemed to be an attempt to blackmail Congress into restoring the funds. More serious is the fact that the constant changes in mission have left the station’s physical integrity in disarray.

Laurence Young, chief of the man-machine laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and head of a NASA biomedical research advisory group, illustrated how the lack of direction is affecting his area. A centrifuge to be used in biomedical studies is slated for early deployment into the station, however, racks of freezers and other equipment needed to hold specimens, and without which the centrifuge is useless, has been cut from the budget. The presumption is that the cost of the equipment “will be picked up again,” says Young, but Lennard Fisk, who heads the responsible agency, the Office of Space Science and Applications, has not made any move to restore it.

Another of Young’s concerns is a system to carry live animals from Earth to the station and move them quickly from the shuttle to the orbiting laboratory. At the moment, Fisk is not willing to begin funding the development of this system before 1992 although he joked that, “The station won’t be of much use if we have to use freeze-dried animals.” Young warns that if funding for development is delayed much longer, “the whole space biology program will disappear.”

The Japanese, major investors in the project, have expressed concern over the cutting of the permanent station crew from eight to four and the substitution of toxic hydrazine for hydrogen and oxygen as fuel for the station’s thruster jets. Takehiko Kato, Japan’s liaison officer to the project, harbors doubts about the program’s management and Congress’ willingness to continue funding it. Kato’s counterpart from the European Space Agency had a problem with NASA’s plan to attach the European laboratory to the station a full year before power would be supplied to it. This appears to be resolved, however, Karl Doetsch, director of Canada’s space station program, says power continues to be “an unresolved issue of great concern.” Canada is supplying the Mobile Servicing Center, a huge mechanical arm costing $1.2 billion that is vital to the construction of the space station. If NASA goes through with its plan to cut the crew from eight to four, it will mean a bigger investment in automated equipment than the Canadian agency is prepared to make.

Beyond these specific complaints, the still-undefined mission of the station has many of those involved, American and foreign alike, deeply worried. At present, NASA intends to have the initial station construction done by 1999. Then such problems as the biology research facility will be addressed, is the official line, but nobody at NASA can give any specifics as to what is meant by “complete assemblage.” The fuzziness of the stated mission gives researchers an additional concern. The station is supposed to be an orbiting scientific laboratory. President Bush has stated, however, that the U.S. will build a lunar base early in the 21st century. Fears are being expressed that, instead of being a research facility, the orbiting laboratory will simply become a way-station on the way to the moon.

This is the make-or-break year for the space station, at least as a scientific research facility. While Congress may not carry out its threat to scrap the project if NASA does not get its act together, the odds are good that the space station will face lean budgets over the next decade pushing its ultimate start-up date far into the next century.

Clair Wood, a science instructor at Eastern Maine Technical College, is the NEWS science columnist.