Requiem for The Space Station

Once upon a time, a space station seemed like a good idea. Back in 1984, when NASA first proposed to put a permanent house in orbit, it sounded like a logical next step for a nation gaining confidence in its new shuttle, flexing its space legs and preparing to go farther. After all, if we were going to send humans to Mars or back to the moon, the astronauts needed a place to assemble their giant spaceships; if we were going to monitor large-scale changes on earth, scientists needed a platform to watch from; if ultra-pure drugs and crystals produced in zero gravity were going to revolutionize industry, technicians needed a place to make the stuff. The space station was supposed to cost $8 billion and be ready in 1992.

That was then and this is now. In the meantime, Challenger exploded, Hubble blurred, and the prospective space station ballooned to a Tinkertoy-looking assemblage bigger than a football field with a price tag of $38 billion, which would require 3,700 hours a year of dangerous spacewalking to maintain. Recently NASA scaled back the space station, shaving, it said, about $8 billion off the cost, but the General Accounting Office pegged the price of this new space station at $40 billion. The long-term cost, the GAO said, could amount to $118 billion, which puts the station in the same league as the S&L bailout and the Advanced Tactical Fighter.

All this for a space station that does . . . nothing. In the interest of saving money, NASA planners stripped the station of its varied and often contradictory functions. No longer was it to be a truck stop or observation platform or metallurgical factory. The sole stated scientific rationale left for the station was to conduct biological research on weightlessness, but the plans originally omitted a centrifuge, the most important gadget needed to do that work. The National Academy of Sciences concluded that the space station had no scientific use at all. Which left as the main purpose of the station what cynics have suggested it was all along: to be a sort of WPA for the aerospace industry. In May the House Appropriations subcommittee accordingly cut the station from NASA’s budget.

Vowing to restore the space station, Administration officials contend that science has never been the whole point of the space station. Rather it is intended to maintain American prestige (would that they felt the same way about health care, say, or the arts). That’s the kind of thing we used to hear about the space shuttle when the rest of the space program was being consumed by its development costs.

There has always been a slightly strained air to NASA’s pronouncements about the space shuttle, like the comparison of last month’s Star Wars mission to a ballet — this from an agency that has been to the moon and skimmed the rings of Saturn.

Ten years after the first launch of the space shuttle was supposed to initiate an era of routine space flight, NASA still doesn’t have its act together. As of this writing, technicians are counting down for a nine-day life-sciences mission, originally scheduled for the mid-1980s. During the most recent delay, engineers were horrified to discover, more or less by accident, that sensors in Columbia’s fuel line were cracked. If one had broken loose, it could have been sucked into the spacecraft’s powerful pumps, causing the ship to explode in a replay of the Challenger disaster. Apparently nobody had ever thought of checking the fuel line’s sensors before.

As the popular saying goes, “You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to . . .” The problem, of course, is that NASA is full of rocket scientists, but its fatal flaws always turn out to be of the homely variety. The engineers can rebuild computers floating upside down in space, but they forget to talk to one another on the ground. So the managers of the Hubble Space Telescope didn’t know there may have been something wrong with the mirror’s shape, and the launch officials didn’t know O rings could stiffen in the cold. It is no knock on the spacemanship of the astronauts to admit that space is a difficult and dangerous place — just on the salesmanship of the agency that put them there. NASA’s strategy resembles George Bush’s in the Persian Gulf: get the troops over there, and then the people will have to support them. NASA has always believed it has to put people in space in order to have public support. The folly of the space shuttle was that it put human lives at the center of every space operation, no matter how trivial, outrageously expensive or — as it turned out — dangerous. Seven people paid with their lives. To paraphrase Bob Dylan, What price do we have to pay to get out of going through all this twice?

NASA for most of the past 30 years represented some of the best that America and indeed the human race had to offer: curiosity, resourcefulness, courage and a dream. But now the agency’s agenda seems bare except for what one Congresswoman described recently as an empty garage. Forty billion dollars is too much for a space station that does nothing — not when there are real adventures and real science on which to spend the money. Commenting on the brave new do-nothing space station, John Logsdon, a space policy analyst at George Washington University, said that canceling the space station would be an admission that NASA has wasted billions of dollars and years of planning. It would, he explained, destroy the credibility of the space program. Of course, exactly the opposite is true. NASA has wasted years and billions. Canceling the space station would be the best thing that ever happened to NASA’s credibility. But it would take real leadership, as opposed to the kind we’ve been getting, which consists of waving a finger in the air and saying we’re No. 1.

Once upon a time a space station seemed like a good idea. But then so did putting teachers and Congressmen in space. Once.