NASA's Plea: Help!

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The fiery, Jupiter-bright object that flashed across moonlit skies from Florida to New York early last Thursday morning was neither star nor planet nor UFO. It was the space shuttle Discovery putting on a spectacular light show on its way into orbit for eight days of atmospheric research. The successful -- at last! -- launch was a big relief for NASA. Two days earlier, Discovery's countdown was halted 11 seconds before lift-off because of a faulty computer circuit. Two weeks before that miscue, a mission by sister shuttle Columbia was scrubbed just three seconds before launch, after a valve got stuck. Columbia is still sitting on the ground at Cape Canaveral.

These latest glitches are mere footnotes in the seemingly endless litany of NASA's woes: the Challenger disaster, the nearsighted Hubble Space Telescope, the crippled Galileo probe to Jupiter, the badly designed and perpetually redesigned space station Freedom. By now, the U.S. space agency has a firmly established reputation for mounting expensive, ambitious projects that don't quite work right. At a time when Congress is looking at every possible way to slash the budget deficit, NASA has become an obvious target.

That is why an idea that was at first unthinkable and then unlikely now seems almost inevitable. The space agency has grudgingly agreed to pool its brainpower -- and perhaps hardware -- with its former archrivals the Russians. Last week the White House ordered NASA to bring Russian experts into discussions on how to scale down the planned space station. With its current $30 billion price tag, Freedom will never get off the ground.

The idea sounds eminently reasonable: the former Soviets are experts at launching heavy objects, while the U.S. hasn't tried it since the mid-1970s. They already have a working space station; the U.S. does not. And the Russians have far more experience in the physiology of long-term space flight than their American counterparts have. If this bold collaboration comes off, it could lead to even more ambitious projects, like a joint manned mission to Mars, and forever change the way space research is done. Says John Logsdon, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University: "Cooperation is a win-win opportunity. Space exploration only makes sense if it's done on a cooperative basis."

The Russians have been pushing for a shared space effort for more than a decade, but until recently NASA wasn't interested. At first there were security questions. The U.S. didn't want Soviet scientists to have access to American electronics for fear it would be used for spying. After the cold war ended, another objection surfaced: Russian hardware was too unsophisticated to be of much use on U.S. missions.

That was before NASA came under severe pressure to cut costs dramatically and justify its decisions on what missions to fly. Budget constraints have already led to the cancellation of some projects and to the development of a bargain-basement mini-spacecraft that could scout out Pluto for a fraction of the cost of a typical planetary flight.