America's Space Program: Grounded

By Ed Magnuson.

It had been conceived as a joyous occasion, a chance to let U.S. pride soar. The six surviving original Mercury astronauts would be reunited at a gala Los Angeles dinner, and workers at the Kennedy Space Center would gather for a ceremony. At both events, speakers would celebrate the 25th anniversary of American manned space flight and chronicle the quarter-century of achievements since Alan Shepard's historic suborbital flight on May 5, 1961. After Challenger's seven crew members perished on Jan. 28, plans for a more somber observance continued; a reminder of past successes might restore NASA's morale.

Then, on April 18, a Titan 34D rocket blew up on launch at California's Vandenberg Air Force Base while trying to lift a Big Bird photo reconnaissance satellite into orbit. And just two days before the anniversary ceremonies were held last week, yet another U.S. space failure occurred: the main engine of a $30 million Delta rocket carrying a $57.5 million weather satellite shut down just 71 seconds after lift-off from Cape Canaveral. The Delta was destroyed by ground command. "We like to feel we're infallible," Shuttle Astronaut Bob ) Crippen told the subdued workers at the cape. "We're not. We proved that on Jan. 28 and underscored it this past Saturday."

The U.S. had suffered three consecutive launch disasters, not counting the failure of a small Nike-Orion rocket on April 25, disclosed by the Associated Press last week. That adds up to the worst string of failures since the early days of the space program. Democratic Senator Albert Gore of Tennessee saw more than bad luck at work. Said he: "There may be a quality-control problem at NASA." Gore revealed that the space agency had slashed 70% of the personnel assigned to monitor the quality of its work between 1970 and 1985. Still, the Titan failure, as well as a Titan explosion last August, were Air Force launches.

Whether the space accidents were merely coincidental or shared some human failing was not clear. A poorly designed joint in the shuttle's boosters, coupled with the refusal of officials at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., where the rockets were developed, to heed engineers' warnings about the cold weather at launch time, presumably will be cited by a presidential commission as contributing to that catastrophe. The commission disclosed last week that just five days before the disaster, the Marshall managers had virtually dismissed the recurring flaws in the joint, deciding in an unsigned internal memo that "this problem is considered closed." Three of the Marshall officials who pushed the fatal launch are leaving their posts. Stanley Reinartz, the shuttle manager, last month asked for reassignment; George Hardy, deputy director of science and engineering, took early retirement at 55; Lawrence Mulloy, the booster manager, last week was shifted to another position at the center.

The suspect in the April 18 Titan failure is also a booster rocket. But a burn-through caused by faulty insulation seems the likeliest explanation. As for the Delta failure, two unexplained surges of high current in the main engine's electrical circuits apparently lowered battery voltage, leading to the premature shutdown. This possibility had been detected in 1974. Some corrections were made then, but not to the circuit that failed.

The failures leave the U.S. temporarily without any means of getting medium to heavy payloads into orbit. "It wasn't very long ago when people were talking about there being too many satellites," says Ivy Hooks, a former NASA engineer. "When you suddenly can't launch them, you realize how critical the weather, spy and communications satellites are."

None of the three remaining shuttles, which can lift as much as 65,000 lbs., are expected to fly until the summer of 1987. The Titan 34D, which can put 27,500 lbs. into orbit, will be grounded for at least six months. The Delta, which had run up 43 successes since the last failure in 1977, has a 7,500-lb. lift capability that will be lost until August. The nation's other medium-lift rocket, the Atlas-Centaur (13,500 lbs.), was scheduled to loft a Navy satellite on May 22, but that launch has been postponed until the Delta problem is understood; the Atlas has an engine electrical system similar to Delta's. Said a top Pentagon official: "We are denied access to space, and it does impact our capabilities."

Despite that impact, insists Air Force Major General Donald Kutyna, a member of the presidential commission, "we are not, as some have suggested, in a crisis situation." He referred to the "relatively healthy" key satellites the U.S. has in orbit. A single KH-11 spy satellite, which is even more effective than the Big Bird, is still operational, keeping special watch on the Soviet Union and the Middle East. It has enough maneuvering fuel to last at least another year. Similarly, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has an orbiting weather satellite identical to the one lost in the Delta accident and expects it to continue performing for at least two years. Nonetheless, concedes NOAA Spokesman Joseph LaCovey, "the single satellite doesn't give us as good a view as we would like."

Overreliance on the shuttle for launching satellites has left the U.S. short on unmanned expendable rockets. There are just six Titan 34Ds, 13 Atlases, three Atlas-Centaurs and three Deltas left in the national inventory. The Air Force, however, has ordered ten more advanced Titans and will modify 13 old Titan II rockets to take some pressure off the future shuttle demands. The expected cost: $2.4 billion. It also intends to design its critical payloads for either shuttle or expendable rocket launches. Says Kutyna: "We want never again to be as vulnerable as we are today."

With reporting by Michael Duffy/Washington and Jerry Hannifin/Cape Canaveral