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Revitalizing a Faltering U.S. Space Program
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11641 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
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9 / 1986 |
2,718 Words |
| Author
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William Welling
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The reasons for the current state of suspended animation that grips the nation's space program are many, not all of which are readily discernible.
Eclipsed, for the time being anyway, is the national euphoria built up during the past 25 years when U.S. astronauts first orbited the earth, flew to the moon, and conducted 24 almost flawless shuttle missions (nine of them by Challenger) that culminated in Challenger's loss on January 28 with its crew of seven and a $100 million satellite that was to have been placed in orbit for use as a space communications relay base.
From the investigative commission headed by William P. Rogers, the former secretary of state and attorney general, has come many disturbing revelations. The shuttle program was ill-managed and suffered from overconfidence and communications breakdown between National Aeronautics & Space Administration (NASA) offices and personnel at Morton Thiokol, the chief rocket contractor. There were even charges of a cover-up of some of the misdeeds revealed in the investigation.
At first, the options before the administration and congress centered on building a fifth shuttle as a replacement for Challenger, on developing alternative means of transporting people and equipment into space, and on focusing a greater portion of space program expenditures on expendable launch vehicles and unmanned spacecraft.
But in April and May there followed two additional launch failures by expendable rockets that have had serious repercussions on military space reconnaissance and weather forecasting capabilities. In the first accident, a $65 million Air Force Titan 34D exploded 8.5 seconds after its launch on April 18 from Vandenberg Air Force Base 170 miles northwest of Los Angeles. While there has been no official word on what comprised the lost payload, there appears to be general agreement among informed military correspondents that it was a spy satellite designed as a replacement for, or complement to, the surveillance operations of a spy satellite already orbiting the earth. There appears to be general agreement, too, that the United States now has only one spy satellite in orbit, and that it has a life expectancy of only another one to two years.
Just 15 days after the Titan 34D failure, at Cape Canaveral a $40 million NASA Delta rocket with a $57 million GEOS (geo-stationary operational environmental satellite) aboard experienced engine failure and had to be destroyed 91 seconds after lift-off. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Washington had counted heavily on the successful orbiting of the GEOS, since only one of the GEOS vehicles presently orbiting the earth if functioning properly. GEOS broadcasts back to earth the geographical pictures that show cloud formations moving jerkily across formations moving jerkily across the U.S. continent that are currently used on televised weather forecasts. It also carries infrared sensing equipment, which provides weather forecasters with a vertical profile of the atmosphere, including variations in temperatures and moisture content according to altitude. Unless or until a single remaining GEOS can be launched (hopefully by the year's end), NOAA's satellite data and information service will remain unable to provide hurricane warning coverage for portions of the Atlantic, the Caribbean islands, and portions of the Pacific west and south of
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