A Boost for NASA

For NASA and the aerospace industry, the announcement packed all the wallop of a Saturn booster at liftoff. After much backstage deliberation, President Nixon last week ordered the space agency to proceed with its long-planned space shuttle. To be built at a cost of at least $5.5 billion over the next six years, the system will be designed to transport at least a dozen passengers and cargo between orbiting space stations and the earth. The vehicle is to be a hybrid that looks something like a jet fighter, takes off like a rocket and lands like an ordinary plane.

Coming only months before the penultimate Apollo shot,* Nixon's decision sets up an important new technological goal for NASA and the depressed aerospace industry. NASA Administrator James Fletcher estimates that work on the shuttle will restore about one-fourth of the 200,000 space-related jobs that have disappeared in the past five years. There will also be a resurgence of activity at Houston's Manned Spacecraft Center and the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, which will share responsibility for the program.

It will not be easy for NASA and its major contractors to meet the tentative target date (1978) for the first flight. There is considerable opposition in Congress to expensive new space ventures, and there are also formidable engineering problems. Initially, NASA hoped to build a piggyback shuttle system in which both the passenger vehicle and launching rocket could be piloted back to earth (TIME, June 22, 1970). But combining the characteristics of a rocket ship and a jet plane in both craft would be extremely costly. Now NASA will probably settle for a less sophisticated design.

* NASA last week ordered a month's delay, until April 16, in the St. Patrick's Day launch of Apollo 16, citing problems with the astronauts' suits, the emergency jettison system and a battery in the lunar lander.

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