Science: Commuting in Space

In the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, scientists with business on the moon board a Pan American space liner and make the flight as casually as today's businessmen take the Eastern Airlines shuttle between Washington and New York. U.S. airlines may never offer trips into space, but NASA is well on the way toward achieving regular space flight, pointing toward the day when craft will shuttle men and materials between earth and orbiting space stations. The agency is assembling the first reusable spaceship, and has begun to train astronauts to fly the new space shuttle, which will be ready to go into orbit in 1979.

Quite Economical. The basic concept of the shuttle has changed little since the $5.25 billion project was approved by President Nixon in 1972. The plan calls for five airplane-like orbiters that can fly up to 100 missions without major overhaul, and the aim is to mount some 60 missions a year. The first of the 122-ft.-long, delta-winged ships now being assembled at Rockwell International in Palmdale, Calif., is about the size of a conventional DC-9 passenger jet, but double the weight. It will lift a pay load of 65,000 Ibs. in a cavernous cargo bay big enough to hold two of the fighter planes that flew from the decks of World War II aircraft carriers. This capacity, and the fact that the shuttle is reusable, should make the orbiter quite economical by space-age standards. On Apollo missions, it cost $600 to lift each pound of pay load into space. The cost with the shuttle is estimated to be only $160.

The shuttle was also designed to be comfortable. Its spacious three-level cabin will provide ample room for seven, including pilot and copilot, to move around in shirtsleeve comfort in an earthlike pressure and atmosphere. It also contains enough amenities to shatter any sex barriers to space travel. "We've been asked if we would be able to fly women," said one NASA official. "The last guy who said no got fired."

Should a mission run into trouble, the shuttle has some unique rescue equipment. Stranded or disabled crewmen will be transferred to a rescue shuttle in pressurized 33-in.-diameter spheres of Neoprene-coated nylon. The transfer will be made either on a clothes-line-and-pulley system or by a cranelike device operated by pressure-suited, space-walking astronauts from one of the ships.

Dead Stick. Launching the shuttle should be relatively easy. Fastened piggyback style to two 149-ft. boosters and a 154-ft. tank of liquid propellant, the ship will lift off from Cape Canaveral. After separation, the solid fuel boosters will be parachuted back into the ocean, to be picked up and reused. The liquid-propellant tank, jettisoned after sending the shuttle into orbit, will not be reused.