Care & Feeding of Rover

To many, the exchanges at the President's news conference last week must have been a bit baffling. A reporter asked about "Project Rover." The President's answer cited "Nerva" and "Rift.'' Despite the lingo, the reply carried considerable significance for the future of U.S. exploration in space.

Project Rover, one of the nation's most ambitious space programs, is designed to build a nuclear-powered rocket engine that could carry man to the moon or beyond. Nerva is the engine itself. Rift the vehicle that Nerva will push. President Kennedy had just returned from a tour of Jackass Flats, 90 miles out of Las Vegas, where work on Rover is under way. He had gone because New Mexico Senator Clinton Anderson, former chairman of the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy and now a member of the Senate Aeronautical and Space Sciences Committee, had warned him privately that Rover was sick.

Missed Targets. Everyone likes Rover --the White House, the Atomic Energy Commission, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Senator Anderson insists that nuclear-powered rocketry is as important to U.S. security as the hydrogen bomb. Moreover, the theory behind Rover is disarmingly simple. In present U.S. and Russian space rockets, thrust is produced by the combustion of highly volatile chemical propellants. In Rover, a small nuclear reactor will generate heat that will expand hydrogen. This, in turn, will be directed out of the rear of the rockets to provide thrust. Because the reactor and the hydrogen take up relatively little room, scientists estimate that Rover will be able to haul triple the loads of conventional rockets, could be adapted to shuttle flights between earth and moon.

But after seven years of work and an outlay of $257 million, Rover is in trouble. Given a go-ahead in 1955, Project Rover was to have ground-tested a nuclear rocket engine by 1960; that date has been set back to 1964. The first flight was scheduled for 1965; it is now planned for 1967. It will be at least 1969 before the rocket will be hauling payloads through space.

Trust No One. What mainly messed up Rover was a complicated organizational system that has scattered authority about like confetti. Responsibility for Rover was fuzzily divided between the AEC and NASA. Vital component work was assigned, without clear coordination, to private and Government facilities ranging from Sunnyvale, Calif., to Pittsburgh. One key program was held up for four months while an official held a contract on his desk. Said Norris Bradbury, director of the AEC's Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory: "We have seen trivial things like the wrong gaskets being used, which contaminate the system. Crud gets in there. You can trust no one."

For years, Rover was shunted aside in favor of crash programs to develop conventional rockets in a hurry. More recently, the project has been getting additional cash. In fiscal 1961, Rover got some $42 million; last year the figure was $89 million, and this year it is running at some $200 million. Put to Kennedy at his news conference was the question of whether his trip had persuaded him to seek even more money to speed up Rover. His answer: "We are going to let these tests go on of the reactor. These tests should be completed by July. If they are successful, then we will put more money into the program." In other words, Rover must do more than sit up and beg if it hopes to get fed.

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