What Will Nasa Do for an Encore?

By MICHAEL D. LEMONICK

As the launch date for the Hubble Space Telescope repair mission loomed during the waning days of November, NASA's veteran spin controllers did their best to lower public expectations. The seven astronauts who would ride into orbit aboard Endeavour faced the toughest assignment ever handed to a shuttle crew and the most complicated mission since the moonshots of two decades ago. They would have to wrestle huge pieces of machinery into tight spaces, disconnect and connect fragile electronic equipment, and make sure no loose screws damaged the delicate telescope -- all while wearing puffy pressure suits and bulky gloves in a vacuum at zero gravity and -300 degrees F. In theory, NASA said, they could complete this orbital overhaul in five six-hour spacewalks; in practice, there would almost certainly be at least a few major flubs. If the astronauts accomplished much more than half of what they had set out to do, insisted the fretful space agency, then the mission should be counted a success.

Who were these spin doctors trying to fool? As it turned out, Endeavour's exquisitely trained crew made Mission Impossible seem as simple as building a Lego-block spaceship. The "Dr. Goodwrenches," as Mission Control dubbed them, not only breezed through every job on their work order and a few more on the "just in case" list, but they also made it look like fun. "Piece of cake!" shouted Kathryn Thornton, perched atop the shuttle's 50-ft. robot arm as she sent a mangled solar-energy panel off into space like a falconer letting her bird take wing. "Dum dum dum dum," hummed a relaxed Tom Akers, as he and Thornton eased corrective lenses, ensconced in their 700-lb., refrigerator-size case, into position a millimeter at a time.

Although whether Hubble is completely fixed won't be known until about two months of tests are finished, the crew was confident and euphoric. Said Jeffrey Hoffman after he and Story Musgrave had installed a replacement for Hubble's Wide Field/Planetary Camera: "We've got basically a new telescope up there. It's going to be exciting for the astronomical community and for the whole world to see what Hubble really can do with a good set of eyeballs."

The spacefarers did more than salvage a telescope that has cost taxpayers $2.7 billion (including the $693 million repair bill for Endeavour's house call). The astronauts also created a kind of time warp. For a few days, America was back in the 1960s, an era when space was a grand frontier to be tamed, and when NASA's technical brilliance and right-stuff bravado made the agency seem virtually unstoppable as it sent men into orbit and on to the moon.

But these are not the 1960s, and in recent years NASA's reputation has plummeted faster than a burned-out rocket booster. Ever since the Challenger blew up less than two minutes after liftoff in January 1986, killing all seven astronauts aboard, the agency has seemed lost in space. Shuttle launches have been delayed by mechanical glitches more often than not. Satellites have mysteriously stopped transmitting while in orbit. Space probes have broken down en route to Jupiter and Mars. Along with the setbacks came a crisis in the spirit of space adventure -- a loss of vision and will to probe the unknown reaches of the solar system and the universe. "How do you follow putting people on the moon?" asks Paul J. Weitz, acting director at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Thus after last week's triumphant repair mission, relieved NASA officials are now saying, "Thanks, Endeavour, we really needed that." The mission proves that astronauts can handle construction and repair work in orbit -- the skills essential to NASA's pan to build and operate a space station by the end of the decade. Yet space extravaganzas are no longer enough to keep the public and Congress behind the space program. The questions that haunted NASA before the Hubble mission won't go away. Why does the U.S. need a space program anyway? Should the nation be risking lives and spending enormous amounts of money to keep sending humans into space, and if so, why? And should NASA, with its badly checkered history, be the agency in charge? Observes John Logsdon, director of George Washington University's Space Policy Institute: "We are in the process of making a transition from a program that was exciting and was related to some broad national interests at the time of the cold war, to something different. We don't know yet what that 'something different' will be."

Some of NASA's problems, of course, are beyond its control. It does not, for example, set its own policy; it has to carry out whatever orders the President and Congress give it, and those commands have frequently stemmed more from political expediency than from reasoned analysis. Abrupt changes of direction are commonplace. Budgets are unstable. And even with the best of management, space exploration is inherently risky. So long as luck can go bad, occasional failures are likely.

But NASA's failures have been more than occasional. While it was once an aggressive, creative engineering shop, it has grown into a bloated bureaucracy, as concerned with keeping itself afloat as with serving the nation. This weakness was identified in the aftermath of the Challenger disaster, but as a committee of high-level Administration officials, including the President's science adviser, discovered last summer, little has changed. The committee was originally formed to consider what to do about the space station, which members of Congress had attacked as risky, expensive and poorly justified.

What the White House group discovered was that the space-station project was a microcosm of all of NASA. The members found that the venture was bogged down with layer upon layer of unnecessary management and lacked centralized decision making. They came to see the nine NASA centers around the country as little fiefdoms, each adding its own complications to projects. There were difficulties with contractors and terrible problems with cost control. In fact, the FBI was -- and still is -- conducting a major investigation into widespread corruption involving NASA and its contractors. Finally, a memo went to the President. If the space station was to be redesigned, it said, NASA had to be redesigned as well.

The new space-station plan, it turned out, would contain the once radical notion of asking the Russians to join the project, which also includes Japan, Canada, Italy and the European Space Agency. The formal invitation went to Moscow last week. And the revamping of NASA fell to agency administrator Daniel Goldin, the ex-chief of the space division at TRW and one of only two Bush appointees to survive the change of Administrations. Goldin's brusque style has made him few friends either inside or outside the agency, but being liked is not the point. Admits Goldin: "I'm not Dr. Happiness. I don't want to be popular. I want to be part of an organization that makes our world better."

At a time when there are so many demands for limited government resources, Goldin realizes that NASA can justify itself only if it becomes more cost- effective and relevant to the economic needs of society. Under orders from Congress to make substantial cuts in the agency's budget, administrator Goldin has trimmed NASA's annual expenditures from about $19 billion to $16 billion. Goldin has already assaulted NASA's burgeoning bureaucracy, slashing the number of U.S. managers on the space-station project from 1,300 to 330 and laying plans to reduce shuttle operating costs by 25% over the next three years. He also wants smaller, cheaper and more efficient spacecraft. For example, Goldin has asked NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory to develop a deep- space mission to Pluto for no more than $150 million, barely one third the cost of the Voyager probes to the outer planets.

In another money-saving move, the agency's Mission to Planet Earth program is being dramatically revised. Originally it was going to use a few big, expensive satellites, each loaded with multiple instruments, to monitor the earth's environment for potentially disruptive changes in climate and pollution levels. But when the mission begins in earnest in 1998, it will rely instead on small satellites, each doing at most a handful of tasks.

The hope is that these satellites can be built within three years, rather than the typical seven or eight, which would keep the cost down, and that they can incorporate the most advanced technology possible. Traditionally NASA has shied away from anything but thoroughly proven electronics and other devices, figuring that a single failure could endanger an entire satellite full of instruments. That is precisely what engineers think happened to the Mars Observer last summer, when a defective transistor evidently killed a $1 billion space probe. With only a few high-tech instruments per satellite, any failures would affect only a small piece of the program.

As for relevance, Goldin is adamant: "The agency doesn't exist for the benefit of its employees," he says. "It exists for the benefit of the American people." NASA has a new Advanced Concepts and Technology Program, designed to help private companies capitalize on the space agency's expertise. One beneficiary could be the auto industry, which could use such products of NASA technology as lightweight materials and compact power systems.

Perhaps the best single illustration of NASA's strategy for the future is the SeaStar satellite, a part of the Mission to Planet Earth. Built under dramatically streamlined management, SeaStar does double duty as a scientific instrument and a boost for U.S. competitiveness -- the "dual use" concept that President Clinton wants all U.S. research labs to embrace.

SeaStar's job is simple: it is designed to track phytoplankton, tiny ocean- dwelling plants that serve as the basis for the entire marine food chain. Scientists theorize that the phytoplankton population is governed by the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The gas is also the most important cause of the global warming that many atmospheric scientists think will trigger major climate changes in the coming century. So a careful scrutiny of phytoplankton numbers may provide a sort of early-warning system that can alert the world to a potential catastrophe.

In the past the execution would have been a nightmare. "For Mars Observer," says Ghassem Asrar, the program scientist for Mission to Planet Earth, " NASA was involved in every step from start to orbit." Obedient to its bureaucratic, cover-your-backside tradition, the agency demanded that the companies building the Observer, led by General Electric and Martin Marietta, submit endless reams of paperwork documenting every last nut and bolt.

"The new way," says Asrar, "is hands off. We tell contractors, 'We only pay you for delivering the data.' " That made sense to SeaStar's main contractor, Orbital Sciences Corp., which agreed to do the job on time and at cost, provided NASA left it alone. The result: SeaStar, which was started in 1991 at a projected price of $60 million, is due to be launched next summer within budget. Asrar believes that getting NASA involved would have doubled the development time and driven costs up 30%.

SeaStar won't be merely a scientific toy. Because fish love to feast on phytoplankton, the satellite will be pinpointing places where fishing boats might come away with a big haul. Fishermen will be able to get the tips through direct radio links to SeaStar.

Another winner in NASA's new game plan is the aeronautics industry. The agency is working with manufacturers on techniques for finding cracks in aging aircraft, on ways to warn airliners of the wind bursts that can cause crashes and on new methods for keeping ice off wings. NASA, Boeing and McDonnell Douglas are developing airliners that would fly hundreds of passengers at up to 3.2 times the speed of sound. (The Concorde carries up to 100 passengers at twice the speed of sound.) And the agency wants to build a supersonic plane that would take off horizontally, launch satellites into space and return to earth.

Where does all that leave NASA's more traditional strengths, deep-space science and human space flight? Diminished, perhaps, but not eliminated. Interplanetary spacecraft can be shrunk and adapted to serve both science and industry. Take the Pathfinder probe. Costing a reasonable $150 million, this ; robotic land rover will parachute to the surface of Mars in 1997 and roam around sampling the planet's atmosphere and geology. Says Larry Dumas, deputy director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena, California, where Pathfinder is being developed: "You're getting back to a scale of spacecraft that we really haven't seen since the early days of the space program." And the rover technology has already been copied by industry for use in places -- like hazardous-waste spill sites -- where people dare not go.

As for human space flight, some critics say it should become a thing of the past. The shuttle and the space station together eat up fully half NASA's budget, diverting resources from what the critics consider more useful programs. Yet the main justification for the shuttle is the space station, and vice versa. Supporters of manned space shots note that the Hubble could never have been repaired without human hands; opponents argue that without NASA's insistence that the telescope be launched by shuttle, the instrument could have gone up in the late 1970s, at a fraction of its eventual cost and into a higher, more useful orbit to boot.

Just as troublesome as the shuttle's cost is the fact that putting humans into space remains extraordinarily dangerous. Both the Office of Technology Assessment and NASA itself, quietly, have agreed that the chances of catastrophic failure for the shuttle are currently 1 in 78 -- not exactly reassuring for the astronauts. Among the potential dangers: the shuttle's solid-fuel rocket boosters emit irregular bursts of extra power that put stresses on the ascending shuttle. The space agency twice overrode its own safety rules to let launches go forward. It doesn't have to do that anymore -- not because the boosters have been improved, but because the rules have been relaxed.

While it might be a good idea to put human space flight on hold while the booster problem is re-examined, that isn't likely to happen. Men went into space not so much for the sake of science but because of cold-war competitiveness. Although the space race is long gone, an equally compelling foreign policy consideration has replaced it: the need to engage the Russians in international alliances and keep their technology headed in peaceful directions. That was one of the President's main motives in offering them $1 billion in return for their help on the space station. And now some members of Congress who were determined to kill the project have lined up behind it.

% For all the criticism of NASA, there are still plenty of people who believe that humanity has a basic need to explore the final frontier. Said Goldin on the eve of Endeavour's launch: "This is what we need to be doing. NASA exists to do bold, noble and innovative things. You can't make progress unless you take risks." The television audiences that watched the astronauts perform last week were much smaller than those that watched Neil Armstrong's first step onto the moon in 1969. But even the most jaded viewer had to be inspired by the sight of six men and one woman, dancing through the vastness of space, doing a job that no one could be sure was even possible.

With reporting by Jordan Bonfante/Los Angeles, Jerry Hannifin and Richard Woodbury/Houston and Dick Thompson/Washington