”I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth.”
–President John F. Kennedy, May 25, 1961.
With those words, President Kennedy challenged Congress to launch Americans on a bold mission to assume world leadership in space exploration by putting astronauts on the moon.
A quarter century later–after spending $120 billion on 55 successful manned space flights and probes that scouted every planet but Neptune and Pluto, after U.S. astronauts walked and drove on the lunar surface, and just as space travel seemed almost routine to a whole generation of Americans–the nation is grounded in history`s worst space disaster.
Six astronauts and an eager 37-year-old high school social studies teacher from Concord, N.H., on her first space flight, died in full view of the world as their Challenger spacecraft exploded 73 seconds after takeoff Jan. 28 and plunged nine miles into the Atlantic Ocean.
A presidential space study group, almost as though it was oblivious of the Challenger tragedy, urged President Reagan and Congress two weeks ago to commit vast new U.S. resources to a 21st Century enterprise of exploration, mining and initial colonization of the inner solar system that would include putting human outposts on the moon by 2005, and on Mars by 2015.
This group, appointed 18 months before the fatal Challenger flight, is asking yet another president to spend billions of dollars on a new expedition into the unknown–to launch a new, futuristic space project at what will be astronomical cost.
Yet, as one presidential task force talks of civilian space exploration to the edge of the envelope of man`s imagination, another presidential commission will report June 9 on the gritty reality of the Challenger accident and on the actual state of civilian space exploration.
The four-month investigation by the presidential commission on the Challenger accident has found a beleaguered National Aeronautics and Space Administration reeling from allegations of flawed judgment, mismanagement, launch pressures and exaggerated plans for space operations. Its report will talk of a space agency having difficulty carrying forward even mundane operational matters amid dwindling national support for its venture.
Once again, the United States is at a crossroads on space policy as crucial as any since Americans began their journey to the moon.
The different visions of the future of the space program will set the parameters for the debate that will follow the publication of the Challenger commission`s findings.
”My reading of the American public is that they`re worried about the deficit all right, but they want to move out into space. They`re excited,”
NASA administrator James Fletcher said in an interview last week.
”It`s going to take a lot of hard work in the months to come,” Fletcher had said when he was sworn in May 12 for a second time as NASA administrator. ”But I am confident that we will get going again.”
Polls show the public still is enthusiastic about space, but very cautious. Until the Challenger explosion, NASA`s near-perfect in-flight safety record for moon expeditions and shuttle missions had lulled the public into a trusting familiarity that bordered almost on apathy.
”That`s one of NASA`s problems,” said Mercury astronaut Donald ”Deke” Slayton. ”They are victims of their own successes.”
The debate will play out, in part, before a Congress driven by the demands of cutting government cost and eagerly trying to gauge the public`s appetite for the costly venture. At minimum, Congress seems to be winding up for a lengthy examination of how public money is used in space and how it should be invested in the future.
The very survival of NASA has seemed in question. Some lawmakers are questioning why taxpayers appear to be funding two space programs: one at NASA at $7.5 billion and another, about twice its size, in the Pentagon budget.
Even the specter of the Soviet Union and other nations leading the U.S. in space no longer seems to galvanize national support in the same way the Soviet launching of Sputnik in 1957 spurred the space race.
This time, the President is a second-term conservative facing space policy choices in an era of fiscal restraint that will constrain his chances of leaving as grand a space legacy as Kennedy, even if he decided to do so.
If Kennedy entered America in a major space race, President Richard Nixon slowed the pell-mell competition in the waning days of the Apollo era when he settled on a modest shuttle program and postponed plans for a space station.
Reagan revived the space station goal, and his ”Star Wars” missile defense research will add momentum to U.S. space exploration and assure continued funding.
Many space experts argue that since Nixon`s retrenching, the space program never was given the funding it needed to lead world space exploration, and that the agency made unrealistic claims and set unrealistic goals in trying to wrest more support.
”Trying to skimp on a highly visible, prestigious activity on the frontier of technology inevitably leads to highly visible and damaging failures,” said Thomas Donahue of the University of Michigan, chairman of a National Academy of Sciences panel that recently called for scaling back shuttle flights in favor of unmanned rockets for science missions. America should spend the money necessary ”to do this program right or not do it at all,” Donahue said.
This time, too, NASA appears markedly different from that agency of high- tech wizardry and safety-first slogans that repeatedly put U.S. astronauts on the moon.
Chief astronaut John Young charged that ”launch schedule pressure” had overridden safety concerns on the Challenger mission. The death of astronaut- teacher Christa McAuliffe, who was on a mission to promote civilian interest in the space shuttle, opened a raw national nerve.
”It has badly shaken the nation`s confidence in the organization charged with carrying out the space program,” said John Logsdon, author of ”The Decision to Go to the Moon.” ”There is a distinct and pressing need for organizational revitalization.”
NASA`s decision to push the shuttle as the nation`s sole vehicle for launching satellites left it ill-prepared to deal with the current crisis. A return to heavier reliance on unmanned rockets to complement the orbiters seems inevitable, despite the recent indefinite suspension of rocket launches because of the failure of two Air Force Titans and a NASA Delta in the last year. For years, NASA had opposed this mixed fleet concept to promote the shuttle.
Meanwhile, Reagan has called for the development of a permanently manned space station within a decade and a next-generation aerospace plane to replace the shuttle by the turn of the century.
The Challenger commission will recommend a redesign of the failed booster rocket joint that caused Challenger`s midair disintegration, and a major overhaul of the management system that ”glossed over” a history of problems with the joint, including pre-launch warnings it might fail in unusually cold weather.
Commissioners have indicated during the investigation that they think NASA set overly ambitious launch schedules to pitch the shuttle to the public and Congress and to attract military and commercial users.
Many space experts think Congress is in part to blame, because key committees had too many cheerleaders and too few critics. NASA`s public relations gambit to draw support by sending civilians into space started with key members of congressional space oversight panels: Sen. Jake Garn (R., Utah) and Rep. Bill Nelson (D., Fla.). It was put on hold with McAuliffe`s death, though back-up teacher-in-space Barbara Morgan is waiting in the wings and the journalist-in-space selection process has continued.
Sen. Albert Gore (D., Tenn.), a strong recent critic of lax oversight on Capitol Hill, said that after the Apollo program, which ended in 1972, ”the agency began to drift because of inattention by policymakers as to what our new goals should be. Originally, the agency wanted a mission to Mars. Budgetary constraints made that infeasible. The shuttle became the principal mission.”
Gore also said that it was an ”obvious mistake” to attempt to combine the routine satellite launches with the ”more exotic missions taking human beings into space for tasks that only they could perform.”
But even more disturbing questions have been raised in the four months since the accident about whether a civilian space agency like NASA can survive in peacetime as it is presently structured. When the shuttles fly again, the emphasis will be on military payloads, which many in Congress find ”a dubious proposition” for a civilian program.
NASA was born in 1958 as the country went through a wrenching reappraisal of its space effort in the face of spectacular Soviet successes. It was created expressly to provide civilian control over space exploration for peaceful purposes that would complement defense space programs.
But NASA`s ascent in public popularity, as it raced for the moon with the Apollo program, fueled an often bitter rivalry with the Pentagon. Late into the 1960s, the civilian space program clearly dominated both public imagination and congressional fancy. But after Apollo and with the onset of the shuttle program, the military fought for, and won, congressional funding for its own arsenal of unmanned rockets for secret space payloads.
Times are bleak for space explorers. The three remaining shuttles are grounded for at least another year. Ten or more military payloads expected to fly aboard them this year have been delayed. Some commercial users who reserved space on the shuttle have jumped over to the European Space Agency`s unmanned Ariane rocket system to launch payloads, and Japan and China are becoming competitive players in that world market.
NASA`s launches of scientific planetary probes to the sun and Jupiter and of the space telescope that will see to the edge of the universe, all scheduled for this year, have been sidetracked. NASA, strapped for money because of the shuttle`s unrealistic schedule, played an uncharacteristic second-string role when unmanned probes from the Soviet Union and other nations tracked Halley`s Comet this year.
Finally, the Soviet Union has launched Mir (Peace), a soon-to-be permanently manned space station, into orbit almost a full decade before the U.S. will be able to follow suit with its planned modular space station.
Though Reagan promised to continue the space program after the Challenger accident–”Nothing ends here,” he vowed–he remains largely silent in the Cabinet-level debate over how to pay for another orbiter with a price tag of almost $3 billion, and whether to bump commercial users of the shuttle in favor of defense payloads when flights resume.
The other presidential panel, the National Commission on Space, called for placing human outposts ”from the highlands of the moon to the plains of Mars” in the next half century.
Even space boosters like Sen. Slade Gorton (R., Wash.), who heads the Senate subcommittee on Science, Technology and Space, said, ”it`s unlikely that we`re going to be able to create enough interest to reach that kind of goal or even that kind of really costly increased support for NASA. But setting goals like that is important.
”Now, I would be happy to settle for the goal of a good sophisticated space station by the mid-1990s and the determination of whether or not we can build the aerospace plane,” he said.
Whether those goals are lofty enough to attract the best and the brightest young engineers to NASA in the coming years, the way the Apollo program did in the 1960s, remains to be seen. Thomas Paine, a former NASA administrator who headed the National Commission on Space, warned that NASA has been trimmed back ”to a third of what it was when we went to the moon
(making it) simply impossible to attract the kind of minds we had during Apollo.”
A large portion of NASA`s top-level managers and engineers are aging and eligible for retirement.
Since Kennedy`s vision of space, Paine said, ”we`ve had a lot of weak-vision presidents. In order to have a long-range program, you need vision and leadership and someone who can enunciate those things. . . Now we have a strong president, and Reagan has an excellent opportunity to set some long-range goals on what will be an appropriate space program for the 21st Century.”
But Kennedy`s speech delivered to Congress 25 years ago this past week contained a less well-remembered warning that has proven prophetic.
”. . . It is a heavy burden, and there is no sense in agreeing or desiring that the United States take an affirmative position in outer space, unless we are prepared to do the work and bear the burdens to make it successful,” Kennedy said.
”If we are not, we should decide today and this year.”
