The Presidency

By Hugh Sidey

The dismal Washington summer din is mostly about Justice William Rehnquist's old memos and about sanctions against South Africa. None of this even starts to be as important as the question of what we are going to do in space. !

National security is no longer defined by nuclear warheads and aircraft carriers. The larger forces now shaping our globe are communications, the state of technology, economic vitality and the international respect all that creates. Weapons are secondary.

At the very heart of this concern lie our understanding of the heavens and our prowess in putting up satellites to probe and spy and report. Yet since the Challenger disaster, we have dithered like children. After six months of debate on the issue, a Cabinet council split evenly on the question of a new orbiter. Pentagon officials and others have taken to announcing their own proposals, including ideas like building unmanned rockets or having the military take over the shuttle program.

Ronald Reagan has sensed the larger picture, nagging his budget centurions to find the funds for another orbiter. This week the White House plans to announce its scheme to get going again.

But one more space shuttle will not meet the challenge. For the moment, America has lost its nerve and its vision from the top down. What we do in space now is just as important as the Panama Canal, the atom bomb, the cure for polio, the trip to the moon. The most frightening deficit is in boldness.

Last February the Soviets put up a new space outpost called Mir (Peace). In March they docked a crew on the station, then fired up a couple of supply payloads. Next the crew taxied out to Salyut 7, another of their space redoubts. They returned to Mir and landed back on earth a few weeks ago. A maneuver like that by U.S. astronauts would have made even the Senate windbags look up.

The Soviets are 15 years ahead of us in manned space experience. They outspend us up there 4 to 1. Why? Because the struggle on earth will be decided up there, as John Kennedy said a quarter of a century ago.

It is not a matter of cosmic toys for scientists. If we don't keep pioneering out there, others will shove us aside -- and anybody who cares to notice can already feel the elbows.

We don't need one new shuttle. We need three or four. The nation's sharpest aerospace analyst, First Boston's Wolfgang Demisch, suggests that a single shuttle will build us right back into the mess we are trying to climb out of. A fleet of four shuttles (three current, one new) will have to work perfectly to meet our needs. "It's like the Soviet economy," says Demisch. "If everything works 100%, it is fine. It never does. When one part fails, the whole system fails. We need a realistic program. We are approaching a national emergency. We are re-creating our own crisis."

Tom Paine, NASA's boss when we landed on the moon, came through the capital last week, echoing the same dim thoughts. NASA has tried to do too much with too little. Its $7.7 billion budget is not chicken feed. But it is not much; after all, we are spending $25 billion for subsidies that are not solving the farm problem. A NASA budget of $10 billion or even $20 billion, taken from other places, is perfectly parsimonious considering the dividends.

From Houston comes the clear voice of Alcestis Oberg, space author: "I protest the graying of NASA, the aging of thought, the middle-aged acquiescence to discouraging circumstances, the paralysis of spirit and the stagnation of vision." We should join this courageous woman.