Space: The Once and Future Shuttle

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After Columbia's successful flight, new tests and new dreams

When veteran Astronaut Tom Mattingly, 46, piloted the space shuttle Columbia to a textbook landing in the California desert last week, it was more than a star-spangled finale to a stunningly successful mission. And not just because of the enthusiastic presence of Ronald and Nancy Reagan and half a million other Fourth of July revelers. With Columbia 's fourth and last test flight, NASA declared its own independence from such costly and inefficient vehicles as the Apollo moonships that can make only one trip. Pronouncing its flying machine fully operational, the space agency signaled the shuttle's readiness to. carry cargo and passengers on a regular basis into space.

To underscore that message, NASA barely let the dust settle from Columbia's landing before dispatching its second ship, Challenger, to Cape Canaveral. Hitchhiking atop a specially adapted Boeing 747, the new or biter passed low over the reviewing stand at California's Edwards Air Force Base while a military band played God Bless America. Reagan likened the conclusion of the shuttle test program to the driving of the golden spike that marked the completion of the first transcontinental railroad.

For all the trouble with balky tiles, erratic engines and, on this last mission, the exasperating and puzzling $32 million loss of two jettisoned solid-propellant boosters that sank into the Atlantic Ocean, the shuttle remains a unique vehicle, an emblem of national technological excellence unlike anything in the Soviet space arsenal. That would include their Salyut 7 space station, which was pointedly visited by three cosmonauts, one of them a Frenchman, while Columbia circled the earth several hundred miles below it. As Reagan noted, the space shuttle shows the world that "Americans still have the know-how and Americans still have the true grit that conquered a savage wilderness." Yet the space agency, which has planned 98 more shuttle flights through 1989, realizes that the program faces a new round of challenges.

The shuttle must prove it can do the job it was built for: hoisting. satellites into orbit. The critical test will come during Columbia's next flight, scheduled for Nov. 11, when it will carry aloft two communications satellites—one American, the other Canadian. And even if Columbia passes this milestone, other questions will persist. NASA's initial justification for building a vehicle that wedded the technology of planes and rockets was to reduce the cost of space travel. However, the calculations depended on projections of extremely heavy traffic into space, with flights as frequent as every two weeks. Now, as a result of spiraling costs, scant demand from private industry for cargo space and the unexpectedly long turnaround time for getting the ship ready between missions, NASA will not reach this goal before the end of the decade. Critics wonder whether the shuttle will be competitive economically with Western Europe's expendable Ariane rocket, which has already grabbed some of NASA'S potential customers for satellite launches by offering users government-aided financing.