Battlestar Columbia?

Forget Star Wars, with future shuttles zapping each other with lasers and death rays. Those are far, far off, and may never be feasible. But in the wake of Columbia's triumph, no one at the Pentagon--or the Kremlin--is minimizing the shuttle's military importance. Even Columbia's commander, John Young, a former Navy test pilot, could not resist plugging the space shuttle's military possibilities. Said he, at a homecoming in Houston last week: "I think the American public is going to get their money's worth out of this baby. It will allow us to do in the '80s and '90s things we must do for defense."

The Pentagon hopes to replace the Titan, Titan-Centaur and Atlas-Centaur boosters that have long been used to hurl military payloads like the Big Bird spy satellite into orbit. Such rockets are strictly one-shot throwaways, costly to use (up to $75 million a launch) and not entirely foolproof (5% of the launches have failed). For the military, the shuttle is a reliable new lift vehicle that can be employed again and again to put hardware into orbit. But it is much more than that. The Air Force has long dreamed of a permanent, manned orbital platform that could act as a sentry in the sky. In the next five years, at least 21 of the 68 planned shuttle flights have been booked by the military, with the number likely to go up if the Soviets mount a new challenge in space.

Military payloads will include new and sophisticated satellites: for photographing, electronic eavesdropping, ensuring secure communications with military units around the world, and providing early-warning systems as well as pinpointing navigational accuracy for everything from ships and planes to nuclear-tipped missiles. Says the commander of the Air Force's new space division, Lieut. General Richard Henry: "Space is the high ground. It is crucial for collecting and disseminating information, for reducing the confusion of battle."

As early as next year, during the shuttle's scheduled fourth flight, it will carry an experimental military payload in its cargo bay: infra-red and laser tracking devices designed to guide future shuttle pilots to orbiting satellites for repair or retrieval--or perhaps for destruction. The experiment's disclosure has already brought a pained outcry from the Kremlin. Though the Soviets are actively experimenting with military lasers, they charge that the U.S. is planning to introduce laser weaponry into space.

By 1985 the Pentagon hopes to be lofting at least some of its own shuttle flights from a military spaceport now under construction at Vandenberg Air Force Base, near Santa Barbara, Calif. The $200 million installation will include a launch pad and a new three-mile-long shuttle landing strip, as well as fuel tanks, shops and other support facilities. It will operate under the control of a new military space center at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs, hard by the North American Air Defense Command's underground headquarters deep in Cheyenne Mountain.

The shuttle could hardly have got off the pad without military support. In the early 1970s, when the space agency first sought funding for a reusable space vehicle to succeed the costly and expendable Saturn rockets that carried the Apollo astronauts to the moon, many congressional leaders strongly opposed the ambitious new space adventure. Only when the Air Force threw its full political weight behind the shuttle did Congress vote funds.

In exchange for this crucial backing, the space agency was compelled to change the shuttle's design, vastly complicating the job of building it. The Air Force insisted that the payload capacity be expanded to 65,000 lbs. (the better to carry big spy satellites). NASA also had to extend the orbiter's "cross range" so that it could glide a full 1,200 miles either to the right or left of its original orbital trajectory after re-entering the atmosphere. That would enable a Florida-launched shuttle, which travels about 1,000 miles south of Vandenberg on its first circuit of the earth, to land at the military field after only one orbit--and also reduce the risk of an unwelcome descent into hostile territory in case of an abort.

Unlike the Soviet space program command, which is military and rarely announces a space launch beforehand, civilian NASA has carried out its shots in the full glare of publicity. But under the terms of NASA'S new partnership with the military, security is being tightened at such key facilities as Cape Canaveral and the Johnson Space Center in Houston in anticipation of military launches. Military observers are now regular participants at shuttle planning sessions and have their own facilities inside Mission Control. At the height of the shuttle's development problems, there was even talk that the task of getting the spacecraft off the ground should be turned over to the Air Force, a step that would no doubt have scuttled the civilian space agency for good.

Now that Columbia has finally flown, NASA--like the returning shuttle--seems to be "right on the money." But the military role of the program is surely going to increase because the Pentagon hopes eventually to send up almost all of its payloads by shuttle. Air Force planners are thinking of buying one or two shuttles for their exclusive use. They are also developing a new portable booster to be carried aboard, thus overcoming one of the shuttle's notable limitations. It can operate only in low earth orbit (at altitudes from 115 to 690 miles). But the new booster rocket, attached to satellites to be carried into space, will be able to hurl them into geosynchronous or stationary orbits at an altitude of 22,300 miles. In such orbits, a surveillance satellite's speed almost exactly matches the earth's rate of rotation; in effect, the satellite remains motionless over a single spot on the earth.

The Soviet Union regularly protests the shuttle program as a plot of "U.S. elite classes to place weaponry in space." But at the same time, the U.S.S.R. is known to have demonstrated "killer" satellites that can knock other satellites out of the sky. To meet this threat, the U.S. is considering anti-satellite weapons of its own. Eventually these may even include high-powered laser and particle beams that could destroy a hostile satellite or an incoming missile. In 1980, then Secretary of Defense Harold Brown declared the shuttle essential to future U.S. military planning. However true that was a year ago, it is a great deal truer now.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.