Long-Term, Severe Cost of Shuttle Loss Emerging

The nation’s space program will be severely handicapped for years to come, even if the investigation of the Challenger explosion determines what caused the disaster and how to avoid it in the future, senior aerospace leaders say.

The loss of Challenger will cause a substantial and long-term shortage of launching capacity, the implications of which government and industry have begun to grasp fully only in the last week.

National security requirements for placing military payloads in orbit are likely to usurp more than 75% of the capacity of the remaining three shuttles for the next five years, intensive studies being conducted by NASA, the Defense Department and the National Security Council have found.

“This will cause a crunch,” said Verne Orr, recently retired secretary of the Air Force. “The needs of the Defense Department are not flexible. There are times when we have to get to space.”

Commercial and scientific launchings, meanwhile, would be slashed by more than half, thus some payloads that have taken years to develop and build will have to be put in storage for an indefinite period. Competition for the remaining shuttle space is expected to be fierce.

“There are going to be very severe problems,” says Harry S. Dawson, a staff scientist on the House Space, Science and Applications subcommittee. “This is going to have a lot of ripple effects. There are clearly going to be satellites sitting on the ground for years as this whole thing unfolds.”

The remedies available--building another orbiter and expendable rockets--would take a long time and be very expensive. Some cost estimates of a crash program to restore launching capacity reach as high as $10 billion over the next five years. That cost burden would come in an era of shrinking budgets and must be balanced against other compelling space program needs, such as the proposed space station.

None of the alternatives, however, can prevent the coming crunch. Like a freeway that is blocked during rush hour, the grounding of the space shuttle fleet will cause a massive traffic jam on the nation’s principal route into space.

And, each month that the shuttle fleet remains grounded, the traffic jam will worsen. Some experts say that it is improbable that the shuttle will fly again this year. If it does not, a backlog of 13 missions will be left from this year alone.

Worse yet, when the remaining three orbiters finally resume operation, they will not have the capacity to launch all of the satellites scheduled from that time on, let alone reduce the backlog.

“This is the thing I was worried about,” said Richard DeLauer, former Pentagon chief of research and engineering. “We really are committed to the space shuttle and now we are short one vehicle. There’s no way around that.”

Defense and NASA officials would not discuss the mission studies that suggest that the military will get three-fourths of the shuttle flights, but the computations are not difficult to understand.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration had planned to fly the four space shuttles 16 to 24 times each year. The Air Force had agreed to fly at least eight of those missions.

The best NASA can expect now is to fly 12 missions each year, because it has suffered a 25% reduction of the fleet of orbiters. If the military continues to take its eight missions, it will have 75% of the available shuttle flights. Meanwhile, commercial and scientific missions would be cut from eight each year to four, a 50% reduction.

The Jan. 28 disaster is likely to force NASA to be more conservative in the frequency of launchings, and that will make the shortage all the harder to deal with.

Moreover, launching capacity is likely to be crimped further as NASA slows its efforts to increase the payload capacity of the orbiters by trimming weight off the spacecrafts and boosting the thrust of their engines.

Conservatism is dictated partly because the shuttle, since the accident, has a lower statistical reliability. The upshot is that NASA may choose to fly with fewer than seven astronauts aboard a shuttle, as it did early in the program. NASA may also curtail experiments by civilian scientists on flights.

“The ripple effects of this are much worse than we had calculated,” said a top-level official of the space industry who requested anonymity. “No matter how you figure it, something has to give. It’s commercial, plus NASA science, the planetaries and everything else.”

That prospect is threatening to touch off a fight within the scientific community over whose projects are grounded.

“The interactions between the programs are ferocious,” the official said. “Somebody will say ‘I’ve got first priority’ and everybody else will groan, because they will have to slip all of their programs by some amount of time, at quite a cost per month.

“If we bump off science and we bump off the Europeans and we tell the American scientific community that ‘If you thought it was bad when the shuttle was just chewing up money, now we can’t offer any flights to you,’ it’s going to be uncomfortable.”

NASA already has canceled the scheduled March launching of Astro-1, a scientific satellite that was to have observed Halley’s comet this summer. Some principal scientists on the project have already been assigned to other work or are taking long vacations.

“The program has gone into limbo until they decide what to do next,” said Sherwin Anderson, a manager on the program at the Marshall Space Flight Center.

Others who were depending on the shuttle are similarly concerned about potential long-term effects. One is EOSAT Corp., the private venture that has taken over the Landsat system. It plans to launch a $124-million satellite in 1989.

“We simply can’t wait,” said Chuck Williams, EOSAT president. “We have a launch window between December, 1988, and March, 1989. We already are expecting a data hiatus between the death of the existing satellite and the launch of the new satellite. We have international commitments with 23 nations to provide a program and down-link data.”

Robert Berry, director of space systems operations at Ford Aerospace & Communications, said that the severity of the problem depends on the length of the shuttle “stand down.” Ford had planned to launch communications satellites for India this year and next year, and meteorological satellites in the late 1980s, Berry said.

But such commercial users face a powerful competitor in the Pentagon for scarce launching capacity in the latter part of the decade.

“Either we are going to defend the nation or not,” says Dawson, the House staffer. “Which part of our national security needs are we going to delete? Are we not going to launch early-warning satellites that will tell us if the Russians are attacking us? We cannot function without these military satellites. This puts the country in an untenable situation.”

In addition, the military will play a major role in deciding when launchings occur.

“It is fine to say we will take off the next civilian load and put a Defense Department payload on it, but it isn’t that easy,” said Orr. Defense missions often need to go up on precise schedules, so trading payloads may not solve the problem, he said.

The space agency and the Pentagon are conducting their studies for future schedules far from the public eye, because domestic and international political repercussions are expected to be sharp when the shuttle becomes principally a military vehicle.

“The Russians have already said we built it for military purposes in the first place,” said one aerospace industry official who asked not to be named. “Now, with Defense getting three-fourths of the flights, I’m not sure that people have come to terms with that kind of a number yet. It certainly makes it a military vehicle.

“On the international scene, you’ve changed the impression rather dramatically. That’s a problem.”

Righting the space program will be a difficult, time-consuming and costly task, experts say. Few aerospace experts agree on what to do next, and age-old rivalries will make reaching a consensus all the more difficult.

In the last six years, the Air Force has bitterly fought efforts to make the shuttle the nation’s sole means of access to space. It finally received authorization to buy 10 expendable Titan rockets to launch military payloads, but the rockets are not expected to be available until 1988, according to an Air Force spokesman.

“It was an acrimonious struggle,” recalls Orr. “I was never enthused about a fifth orbiter. I wouldn’t be too surprised if this situation points up the need to buy more Titans.”

“The country has no alternative--it should decide tomorrow to build another orbiter,” said Robert Cooper, former director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

DeLauer, the former Pentagon research chief, says that the nation should stand ready to order a new orbiter and to reactivate production of expendable rockets.

“You probably couldn’t do anything for less than $10 billion these days,” DeLauer said.

“It is an alternative that is so expensive that nobody would accept it,” argued Cooper.

A new space shuttle orbiter to replace Challenger will cost between $2 billion and $2.5 billion, but it would take at least three years, perhaps five, to make one, from the moment production starts.

“There is no question that one more orbiter is not going to solve the kind of problem the statistics are beginning to call for,” says one official in the Air Force program. “Suppose we say an orbiter ought to last for 50 flights. It is going to wear out. There is only so much you can do with these things.

“NASA said at one time that it wanted 24 flights per year. That says you buy a new orbiter every two years. It also says you are going to spend about $2 billion every time you buy a new orbiter and that is going to be written off against 50 flights. So, that says $40 million per flight to write off the purchase cost.”

But Dawson, the House aide, said that there is almost no support in Congress for buying two orbiters.