The Future of NASA

"We are at the peril point," declared NASA Administrator Thomas Paine. With that gloomy but accurate assessment of the space agency earlier this year, he announced one more in a series of cuts in staff and work schedules. Last week the 48-year-old former General Electric executive made an even more telling comment: he quit himself. Though Paine insists that his resignation was not an act of protest against continuing reductions in the space agency's budget, he obviously sees a better future back with G.E.

Only a year after its triumphant conquest of the moon, NASA can barely coax enough money out of Congress to continue existing programs. Its budget has been slashed to $3.3 billion for fiscal 1971 compared with peak spending of $5.2 billion in 1965. Total employment by NASA and its private contractors has dwindled from 420,000 in the heyday of the Apollo program to fewer than 145,000 today. Nor has NASA gotten significant support from the White House. "With the entire future and the entire universe before us," said President Nixon, outlining the Administration's cautious new approach to space, "we should not try to do everything at once."

Planetary Probes. That is not likely to happen. NASA has already scrubbed one of the seven remaining moon missions, and it may well cancel three more. Some of the Apollo's big Saturn 5 boosters will be used to establish small earth-orbiting space stations such as the three-man Sky lab scheduled for launching in 1972. But even these schemes--not to mention more ambitious space stations--could be set back by a balky Congress. Certainly, a decision to send Americans to Mars will not be made for years to come. The only phase of the space program that has escaped the budget cutters relatively unscathed has been the planetary probes, although these, too, will be delayed. Even William Pickering, director of Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Pasadena, and one of the men in charge of these unmanned trips, admits: "If I were in the manned program, I know I would be worried."

Falling morale at NASA's major installations is readily apparent. In Florida's once booming Brevard County, site of Cape Kennedy, houses and stores are boarded up, new offices stand empty, and the most lucrative profession in the area seems to be that of resume writer for the thousands of space workers who have been looking for new jobs. At Houston's Manned Spacecraft Center, the five giant computers are working at a sharply reduced rate (operating cost: about $10,000 per hour), one of the two mission-control centers has been put in mothballs, and astronauts have been asked to cut back their pilot training flights in T-38 jets. Apollo 14 Commander Alan Shepard has publicly worried whether his ship will be properly prepared for next January's tentatively scheduled moon shot.

NASA insists that the economies will not bring new dangers. Kennedy Space Center Director Kurt Debus says that only one case of sloppy workmanship attributable to morale has come to his attention: having accidentally snapped a screw on a key spacecraft section, a workman glued the other half into place. He feared that he might be laid off if his company--a private contractor --had to go to the time and expense of drilling out the screw.

Expensive Changes. Still, for the astronauts, the cutbacks are not reassuring. The number of flight controllers at Houston--the men whose carefully honed skills are needed to guide a spacecraft --has shrunk from 175 men during the Apollo flight to only 125--"the absolute critical level in personnel," says one flight director. Tight budgeting has also had more insidious effects. Houston officials recently asked for cutoff valves on the two nitrogen tanks used in Skylab's attitude control system as a precaution against another Apollo 13-type failure. The designers at the Marshall Space Flight Center at Huntsville, Ala., refused to add the valves; the tanks, they insisted, simply would not fail. Sighs a Houston official: "Since change costs money, they won."

Paine thinks that public enthusiasm for space will be rekindled as NASA --or perhaps the Soviet Union--embarks on exciting new ventures. But other NASA officials are not so optimistic. They are especially distressed by what they consider a lack of presidential interest in space. When the three Apollo 12 astronauts visited the White House last fall, they recalled bitterly that Nixon seemed more inclined to talk about football than the moon trip.

For once, some scientists find themselves more enthusiastic about the moon than NASA's engineering hierarchy. To cut back lunar exploration so soon after the first moon landing, they say, means a delay in answering the many tantalizing questions raised by those initial expeditions. Scientists can only speculate on what they will find when they land unmanned probes on Mars, send Pioneer probes past Jupiter, and hurl even more complicated spaceships toward the other outer planets (Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto) later in the decade. But such voyages will surely challenge and contribute to earth technology in countless ways. Pickering's JPL scientists, for example, are already designing the "grand tour" computer, which, like HAL in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, will be required to repair itself during an eleven-year journey, the first voyage to the outermost fringes of the solar system. In his new role as Deputy Associate Administrator for Aeronautics, Neil Armstrong oversees NASA's research in such areas as quieter jet engines, more efficient aircraft wings, improved air-traffic control. Although the proposed space shuttle, linchpin of NASA's space-station plans, may cost as much as $14 billion, it will provide an important test vehicle for hypersonic (many times the speed of sound) aircraft.

But surprisingly enough, NASA's most important contributions may involve improvement of the earthly environment. Studying the closed ecosystem of a spacecraft, suggests Cleveland State University Biologist Robert Rolan, may help scientists solve such problems as pollution, waste elimination and the psychological effects of overcrowding. Kurt Debus argues angrily that to say sewers are more important than moon rocks, as Senator William Fulbright said last month, is far too simplistic.

In another economy move, the Nixon Administration is encouraging NASA to seek the cooperation of other nations in space. Shortly before he resigned, Paine toured Western Europe, Australia and Japan to enlist their support for the space shuttle as well as other projects. West Germany has already agreed to team up with the U.S. in sending two unmanned Helios satellites to within 28 million miles of the sun. But even such joint ventures have suffered from cutbacks. Last week the U.S. quietly announced a year's delay in implementing a much publicized agreement with India to let NASA satellites relay telecasts to remote Indian villages.

Much of the public indifference to space is, of course, attributable to the nature of the space race. Under pressure from Washington, NASA overemphasized the moon and overlooked its other opportunities. Now it is engaged in an overdue reassessment of its priorities. Last week more than 100 prominent space scientists, including Pickering and Planning Chief Wernher von Braun, met in Woods Hole, Mass.; a similar meeting was held at Wallops Island, Va., a few weeks ago. Out of these discussions may come the direction and dimensions of NASA's role on earth and in space in the closing years of the century.

But Debus, for one, wonders whether political leaders will really grasp the ultimate meaning of those goals. Like turn-of-the-century skeptics who dismissed the telephone and airplane as toys, critics of space travel cannot imagine its undreamed-of benefits. "Just in the act of getting there," says Debus, "we show our technical potential for overcoming problems by foreseeing them. Once we get there, established and at home, so to speak, we can go on to better the way of life on our own planet."

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