The Once and Future Shuttle

By Frederic Golden

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.

For the time being, however, the shuttle will not lack business. The Defense Department has booked a quarter of the flights scheduled through the 1980s. The first of the Pentagon payloads was carried aboard Columbia on its most recent mission. Though officials refused to talk about the contents, the packages included a cosmic-ray detector, ultraviolet and infra-red sensors for gauging the tracks of enemy missiles, and a space sextant that will enable satellites, or even the shuttle, to navigate without guidance from earth. During the last flight, the only references to the top-secret devices came in the form of cryptic commands to the astronauts from the Air Force Satellite Control Facility in Sunnyvale, Calif. ("Switch 3-A to full auto. Bay 1 to zebra plus 3"). NASA's new security consciousness represents a sharp break with its traditional openness about space activities. It also reflects the Administration's concern with meeting the Soviet challenge in what military planners consider the new high ground of space. Already, the Soviets are believed to have developed a killer satellite that can disable or destroy other satellites by maneuvering close to them and exploding. They are also known to be experimenting with satellite-borne lasers that could blind a missile or satellite.

Chafing under inflation and budgetary setbacks, NASA officials took delight in Reagan's presence at Columbia's return from space. Though Reagan has shown only a lukewarm interest in space so far, he is the first President to watch a space landing since Richard Nixon viewed the splashdown of the Apollo 11 astronauts on their return from the moon in 1969. But Reagan in his speech at Edwards disappointed space officials by failing to order up a fifth $1 billion orbiter, or support what NASA sees as its next logical step in space: the construction of a permanent orbital station housing up to twelve people. They would perform scientific experiments, test manufacturing processes in microgravity (like the biological separation of impurities from drugs conducted aboard Columbia) and keep a watch on both the heavens and earth. Estimated costs of this habitat in the sky range from $3 billion to $5 billion. Still, Reagan did not shut the door entirely. Said he: "We must look aggressively to the future by demonstrating the potential of the shuttle and establishing a more permanent presence in space." Columbia, in its four stirring voyages to date, surely has pointed the way. --By Frederic Golden. Reported by Jerry Hannifin/Washington

With reporting by Jerry Hannifin

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.