Painful Legacies of a Lost Mission

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The backlog of unlaunched satellites and space experiments is already mounting. The shuttle launches of the Jupiter probe Galileo and the solar probe Ulysses, originally scheduled for this May, have been put off for more than a year, and then only one of the two craft may fly. NASA has had to tell paying customers of the shuttle to look elsewhere. The Pentagon, a prime NASA customer, will have to put off plans to conduct certain top-secret experiments in space for President's Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative. Always suspicious of the shuttle's reliability, the Air Force last year won congressional approval for a $2 billion program to build ten unmanned rockets for satellite launch by 1988. A federal interagency task force set up to make U.S. space policy decided last week that the military may need to buy ten more of these missiles.

NASA began de-emphasizing unmanned rockets about ten years ago in order to push the shuttle program. "NASA put all its eggs in one basket, and the basket fell on the concrete," says Wilbur Pritchard, president of Satellite Systems Engineering, Washington consultants to satellite makers. Space agency officials now ruefully admit the error. Last week NASA Acting Administrator William Graham urged private industry to try to develop unmanned rockets to launch satellites. Some private aerospace executives, however, bitterly noted that before the Challenger disaster, NASA had actively tried to discourage private industry from competing with the shuttle for satellite business. They also pointed out that it will still be difficult for private companies to underprice the space shuttle and Europe's Ariane system, both of which are government subsidized.

The shuttle had originally been designed to construct and then service an $8 billion space station to be in use by 1992. Even before the Challenger disaster, that date had slipped to 1994. The purpose of the program is to provide a platform for conducting scientific experiments, some with commercial applications like zero-gravity manufacturing, and to provide a base for further exploration.

The new Soviet space station, named Mir (Peace), was put into orbit last month to serve as the core of a planned complex of living quarters and laboratories. Many experts believe that the Soviets, who have concentrated on space-station technology while NASA focused on reusable shuttle craft, are years ahead of the U.S. in establishing a permanent space presence. The Soviet space program picked up more plaudits last week as its probe Vega 2 passed within 5,125 miles of Halley's comet. Meanwhile, NASA's $1 billion space telescope designed to peer to the edge of the universe, originally scheduled to be launched by the shuttle this fall, sits uselessly on the ground.