Space: Squabbling over Astro Turf

In Vienna, a U.N. conference takes up star-war concerns

For several days last week, pretty American Astronaut Anna Fisher was the hit of Vienna. In Austria for the Second United Nations Conference on the Exploration and Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (Unispace 82, for short), the pert, 33-year-old physician, who has been training for a shuttle flight and may become one of the first American women in space, attended parties and even lectured to children at the Vienna planetarium. At week's end, however, Fisher's star was eclipsed by a 34-year-old acrobatic pilot and parachutist named Svetlana Savitskaya, who blasted off with two male crew mates in the Soviet spaceship Soyuz T-7 on Thursday. She was only the second woman, after fellow Soviet Cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova in 1963, to make such a flight. With a superb sense of timing, the Soviets had sent Savitskaya into orbit in Unispace 82's closing hours.

Not since 1968, when space exploration was still in its infancy, has the world organization held such a major conference on the new technology. But as the conference's exhibits, among them a one-third scale model of the Soviets' Salyut6 space station, clearly demonstrated, space technology has made huge strides since then, and many nations are eager to share in the benefits. Thus the conference's major theme: how to use for the good of all mankind what U.N. Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar of Peru archly called the tool of a privileged few.

No answers came forth in Vienna.

Though conference planners hoped Unispace 82 would concentrate on practical matters, like establishing more satellite ground stations to improve global communications and finding ways of sharing earth-surveying data, the meeting turned into a verbal free-for-all. In gibes at the superpowers, especially the U.S., many of the 94 nations represented at the meeting voiced fears over what Perez de Cuellar described as the increasing and rapidly escalating militarization of outer space.

That is not likely to slow down any time soon. In the past twelve years, the Soviets have conducted at least 17 tests of their ASAT system to disable or destroy enemy satellites. In these experiments, a so-called killer satellite approaches its target and explodes, sending out a spray of deadly shrapnel. To match this threat, the U.S. is now working on its own antisatellite system of an even more advanced design, to be launched from a high-flying aircraft that could not be easily targeted by enemy missiles like the Soviets' ground platforms.

But these star-war technologies were not the only concerns at Unispace 82. Most communications and many weather satellites are parked high above the equator at an altitude of 23,300 miles in "geostationary orbits," hovering over the same spot on the ground. Many Third World nations are afraid that by the time they are capable of launching satellites, all the orbital parking spots will have been taken. Reason: communications satellites cannot be placed closer than two earth degrees apart lest their signals interfere with one another.