The Next Giant Step

Hitched tightly together, the two rockets look like a mother whale uncomfortably carrying its huge baby on its back. After they lift off from the pad, their configuration becomes even more extraordinary. At an altitude of 44 miles the mother ship unleashes its offspring; then, guided by a two-man crew, it dives back toward earth, using auxiliary jet engines and stubby, finlike wings to touch down like an ordinary aircraft. The smaller rocket ship continues to soar until it reaches a "parking" orbit about 115 miles high. After a single swing around the earth, it resumes its climb, gingerly approaches its target, and then docks with a huge, slowly rotating space station. Once the passengers --several scientists and engineers, two Congressmen, a doctor and a journalist --have disembarked through an airlock, the ship frees itself from the station, drops back toward earth and re-enters the atmosphere at a sharp nose-up angle that quickly slows it down. Like the mother ship, it then fires up the fan jets hidden in its tail and flies to a landing on an ordinary airport runway.

A rerun of 2001: A Space Odyssey?

Not really. Despite its science-fiction quality, this voyage may be much closer to reality than even the movie scenarist imagined. In fact, NASA officials are so anxious to proceed with the development of the first reusable space shuttle system that a test flight may be made within five years.

It will be an expensive trip. Separate contracts for competing shuttle proposals have already been awarded by NASA to design teams headed by McDonnell Douglas Corp. and North American Rockwell Corp. Other contracts are expected to be signed in the weeks ahead.

By the time the first shuttle actually takes off, the total bill will probably have climbed to at least $6 billion. But space officials think the investment will pay off in the long run. By eliminating the need for cumbersome splashdowns in the Pacific and by allowing expensive hardware to be re-used for perhaps 100 flights, shuttles will sharply reduce the cost of putting men and materiel into space. That price now comes to more than $1,000 for every pound lifted into orbit by NASA's nonre-usable Saturn 5 boosters. Shuttles should reduce the tab to $50 per Ib. or less.

The first U.S. space station, Skylab 1, which is scheduled for orbiting with three men on board in late 1972, will not require a space shuttle. The launch vehicle will be a Saturn 5 booster left over from the Apollo program. In fact, NASA officials hinted last week that they may cancel next year's Apollo 15 moon flight and possibly one of the subsequent moon shots to free more Saturn 5s for space stations. But ultimately only space shuttles offer a really economical method of provisioning and rotating the crews of larger stations such as the twelve-man orbiting laboratory planned for the late 1970s. The Russians, who may well be testing space-station systems on the Soyuz 9 two-man mission (which at week's end had completed its twelfth day in space), are also expected to service their stations with shuttles.

Scorching Re-Entry Heat. In theory, space shuttles should be relatively easy to build. The essential "boost-glide" principle by which a rocket could climb into space and return gently back to earth was known to Nazi rocketeers, who proposed using it during World War II to send winged missiles on bombing missions across the Atlantic. But theory may be hard to put into practice. Any successful shuttle craft will have to incorporate the essential features of both high-speed rockets and ordinary aircraft. It must, for example, be able to operate in the vacuum of space, withstand the scorching heat of re-entry and land at about 140 m.p.h.

The shape of such a versatile craft could take several forms. But NASA is already leaning toward a design that looks something like a cross between a Saturn 5 and the body of a 747 jetliner. Both the launching vehicle, which is comparable to the first stage of an ordinary rocket, and the smaller orbiter would be stubby-winged and hightailed, with rocket engines and possibly the jets mounted in the aft sections of their elongated fuselages.

Spying in the Sky. As NASA's non-paying partner in the project, however, the Air Force may push for a sleeker design. While the space agency will be satisfied with a shuttle that can fly up to 230 miles to either side of its scheduled re-entry path, the Air Force wants that capability increased to 1,700 miles even at a sacrifice of payload. Reason: with its own spy-in-the-sky Manned Orbital Lab (MOL) killed off for budgetary reasons, it sees potential military applications in the space shuttle--for example, as a reconnaissance vehicle or satellite interceptor. So the Air Force understandably wants the shuttle to be capable of reaching friendly airfields in almost any emergency.

Whatever the final design, the space shuttle is unquestionably a crucial step in further manned exploration of space. Any manned expedition to Mars, for example, would probably begin with the assembling in orbit of a large spacecraft by relays of space shuttles; using that technique, NASA can avoid building the unpractically huge rocket needed for a launch directly from earth. Wernher von Braun, NASA's new chief of advanced planning, is thus one of the more enthusiastic advocates of the space shuttle. Development of such a vehicle, he says, is "one of the most exciting and at the same time most difficult problems the agency is about to tackle."

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