Fixing NASA

By Ed Magnuson.

What's been achieved in space is extraordinary. If you laid out a proposal to do in the next 25 years what has been done in the past 25, no one would believe you.

--Joseph Loftus, assistant to the director, Johnson Space Center

Whether recalling the glories of the past or peering with lofty vision into the future, the men and women who have led America to the high frontier of space still marvel at what they have wrought and yearn restlessly to get on with what they are certain will one day come to be. In a mere quarter-century, the human race has broken its immemorial bond to the life-sustaining surroundings of the home planet. U.S. space pioneers have been able to orbit the globe, walk on the moon, ring the earth with communications satellites and send a machine nearly 1.8 billion miles to inspect the planet Uranus. Such wonders are indeed extraordinary.

Then came Challenger. On Jan. 28 the fireball in the blue skies over Florida, after 24 seemingly routine shuttle launches, was seen at first as an inexplicable aberration, akin to an act of God. It was widely assumed that a Government agency with NASA's can-do spirit and engineering wizardry would never permit six crew members and a schoolteacher to perish through some avoidable human error. Surely a mechanical glitch would be found and speedily fixed.

Within days the mechanical problem was located: a joint on one of Challenger's two solid rocket boosters had failed. But the root cause of the tragedy ran deeper. A presidential commission, headed by former Secretary of State William Rogers, discovered NASA itself was deeply flawed. Far from representing the best of American know-how, the twelve-member commission found, NASA had become a bureaucracy that had lost its way. Before the first shuttle was launched, the agency had known of the fatal seal problem but had buried it under a blizzard of paper while permitting schedule-conscious managers to keep the orbiters flying. In retrospect, it began to seem, the Challenger tragedy was all but inevitable.

The problems worsened. On April 18, a startled Air Force watched its once trusty Titan rocket explode at California's Vandenberg Air Force Base. Lost in the fiery metallic shower was a Big Bird spy satellite, intended to keep a keen polar-orbit eye on the Soviets. The explosion was the second successive Titan 34D failure within a year, after nine perfect flights. NASA bravely tried another launch, and on May 3 was dismayed when its long-reliable Delta rocket, carrying a hurricane-spotting satellite, had to be detonated over Cape Canaveral after its main engine shut down prematurely and the vehicle tumbled out of control.

Suddenly the U.S. had no way to lift even a medium-size payload into orbit. Temporarily, at least, the nation's vaunted space program has been grounded, its wondrous space future receding. "How bad is it?" asked Bruce Murray, former director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "It's really terrible --worse than some Government officials realize."

Amid the deepest gloom since three Apollo astronauts died in a gruesome launch-pad fire at the cape in 1967, the U.S. space program has been forced into a long-needed reassessment of its goals and the means to reach them. Not since President John F. Kennedy insisted, just 25 years ago last month, that America should place astronauts on the moon within ten years have national leaders concurred on what the U.S. should be doing in space. "That was the last presidential policy for space," contends former NASA Administrator Thomas Paine, who now chairs a Reagan-appointed National Commission on Space.

In surprisingly rapid sequence, events are converging to stimulate the dialogue and potentially shape the U.S. space program well into the next century:

President Reagan may soon decide to replace Challenger with a fourth shuttle orbiter. A new bird will cost nearly $3 billion and take three years to build. The controversial decision would be a resounding victory for NASA and a presidential gamble that the shaken agency can recover from its ills.

The Rogers commission report is to be given to the President later this week. In unsparing detail, it will lay out, in the words of one commission member, "the awful failures and compromises that ended in that January disaster." Strict new safety procedures and accountability will be recommended, as well as increased astronaut involvement in the decision to launch a shuttle.

The Space Board of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences issued a report that called the overreliance on the shuttle for launching large payloads "devastating to space science" and urged a return to unmanned rockets as the primary vehicles for lifting space probes.

The National Commission on Space, after a yearlong study, sketched a detailed timetable for colonizing the moon and Mars during the next 50 years. The report was scorned as unrealistic by a White House aide, but Paine, the commission's forward-looking chairman, predicted that if his panel reassembled in 15 years it would "severely criticize" its own report as insufficiently visionary. "Somebody will be mining the moon by the year 2005," he declared. "The only real question is what language they'll be speaking."

The U.S. expects to have the space program restored to at least minimal launch capacity this summer: NASA hopes to use an Atlas-Centaur rocket combination later this month to lift a Navy fleet communications satellite, although the similarity of the electronics in the Atlas engine to those in the failed Delta remains a concern. At the earliest, Delta and Titan could be back in the air in six months. On NASA's part, the agency's newly appointed administrator, James Fletcher, has said he expects to correct the flaws in the shuttle and resume flights by July 1987.

Beyond the mechanical fixes, however, is the need to retool NASA. The consensus in Washington and the aerospace community alike is that NASA needs to be stripped of its near monopoly over U.S. space operations and returned to its former pre-eminent role as a research-and-development agency.

The Reagan Administration has already started to reverse a disastrous decision made in 1972 by the Nixon Administration to develop the shuttle as the sole vehicle for putting both humans and payloads into orbit. Instead, the U.S. will move to a mixed launch fleet including both shuttles and expendable rockets. Ten new advanced Titan 34D7 rockets are already on order, and the Air Force wants at least ten more to provide an increased launching capability beginning in 1988. Within a week or so, a National Security Council-led Interagency Group on Space is expected to recommend that NASA severely restrict or even abandon the launching of foreign and commercial satellites. The Reagan Administration believes private enterprise should compete for at least some of this business. More important, the Administration wants NASA to dedicate the bulk of its future shuttle payloads and research programs to the military, particularly missions for the Strategic Defense Initiative.

Under any circumstances, Fletcher will be hard-pressed to meet his deadline for relaunching the shuttle. The problems demanding urgent solutions involve far more than redesigning the rocket joint that failed. NASA has identified about 50 potentially dangerous faults that will require remedies before a flight can be scheduled. They range from long-standing braking problems that have made many landings risky ventures to a basic question about the reliability of the orbiter's three main engines. Rogers Commission Member Eugene Covert, a professor of aeronautics at M.I.T., headed a joint government-industry team in the late 1970s that solved the problem of these engines' repeatedly blowing up in ground tests. But he still worries about how long they can continue to perform under the stress of repeated launches. So does J.R. Thompson, the senior expert on these engines at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. The engines "have been working," says Thompson, "but they always can come back and bite you." In the view of NASA Chief Engineer Milton Silveira, the various shuttle problems will cost at least $500 million to fix.

This checklist of difficulties raises questions about the wisdom of committing money to a replacement shuttle. When the Interagency Group on Space visited the White House last month to propose a new orbiter, Chief of Staff Donald Regan suggested that the shuttle might represent outmoded technology. Yet most aerospace experts still consider the shuttle an engineering marvel and the best available technology for a vehicle that can return from space and fly again. Nevertheless, some scientists consider a replacement unwise until the U.S. knows what it wants its shuttles to achieve.

"To build another orbiter when the whole purpose of the shuttle program has been thrown into question is illogical," contends Caltech's Murray. "The shuttle has become a substitute for a goal instead of a means of obtaining a goal." Murray and many other space specialists argue that manned flights should be confined to those missions that require a human presence. Placing satellites into orbit, they argue, rarely requires that astronauts go along on the dangerous ride.

Still, the U.S. is left without an immediate practical alternative. Many multimillion-dollar satellites, which can take years to develop, have been designed for shuttle deployment. Not only the Pentagon but the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and numerous private communications companies are eager for NASA to resume shuttle operations. So is the agency, which has already lost some $200 million in fees it would have collected from launch contracts that it has been forced to cancel since the Challenger disaster.

But is NASA ready to resume its inescapably risky role? The Rogers commission report is not likely to revive public confidence in the agency. The expected tone was indicated by one commission member, who told TIME, "The system suffered a breakdown under the people in charge." Confronted with tighter budgets and more demands, he said, "they skimped and made do in the wrong places--and that includes launch safety." Indeed, Tennessee Senator Albert Gore released a study showing that NASA had trimmed 70% of its safety and quality-control staff in recent years.

No one charges that venal managers at NASA deliberately decided to ignore known problems that endangered the shuttle astronauts. But to cope with its unfamiliar duties in operating a dual-purpose passenger and cargo service, NASA created a decentralized structure that the Rogers commission is expected to criticize. Its headquarters in Washington lost effective control of its operational arms at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. The centers, in turn, seemed uncertain about their relation to one another. At the same time, the private contractors supplying and supervising the assembly of the shuttle's vital hardware often fell behind in their deliveries and succumbed to the pressures to produce, even if testing and quality suffered.

Trying to get a grip on its system, NASA set up elaborate reporting channels that produced reams of paper. Quickly the paper became so plentiful that it masked rather than exposed the problems. The Rogers report is expected to detail the extraordinary tale of the now famous O rings, the synthetic-rubber circles, .28 in. thick and 37.5 ft. in circumference, designed to make certain that the superhot gases generated within each solid booster could not escape through the joints of the rocket's segments. When flames did penetrate a rocket joint on Challenger, they ignited the shuttle's external liquid-fuel tank, causing the explosion. The commission will cite the O-ring history not only as the cause of the catastrophe but also as an exemplar of the agency's fatally faulty system.

NASA had carefully tracked the O-ring problem on paper since 1978, some three years before the first shuttle flight, on April 12, 1981. As early as Jan. 19, 1979, John Q. Miller, chief of the solid motor branch at Marshall, where the boosters were developed, complained to his superiors that the seal was functioning "in a way which violates industry and Government O-ring application practices." On May 29, 1980, a NASA engineering panel noted that the O rings had failed in a ground test and called them "inadequate" for reliability and "marginal" in their safety. On Feb. 28, 1984, Miller warned his bosses that the putty used in the seal might not "provide a thermal barrier." If so, he said, this would "lead to burning both O rings and subsequent catastrophic failure."

NASA was even warned by outside experts that its booster joints were a serious problem. On March 9, 1984, George Morefield, then chief engineer for United Space Boosters, wrote to Lawrence Mulloy, then the booster manager at Marshall, to explain that the Titan rockets produced by his company for the Air Force had a similar joint problem. Although a thousand of the Titan joints had flown without a failure, Morefield told Mulloy, on a shuttle flight "the potential for failure of the joint is higher."

What did NASA do about its problem? Not much, even though boosters recovered after several flights showed O-ring erosion, indicating that the hot gases were reaching them and threatening to burn through the seal. NASA did ask its booster contractor, Morton Thiokol, to seek a solution. Thiokol set up a seal task force at its plant in Utah. This work received more attention after a shuttle was launched on Jan. 24, 1985, following the coldest overnight cape temperature of any flight to date: in the 20s. This launch produced the most extensive ring damage. Morton Thiokol concluded in a postflight summary that "low temperature enhanced probability" of seal erosion. After testing the resiliency of the rings at various temperatures, the company told NASA on Aug. 9, 1985, that the rings did not even work properly at 50 degrees F.

While the search for a fix proceeded, Bob Ebeling, manager of the booster- ignition system at Morton Thiokol, wrote a plaintive interoffice memo on Oct. 1, 1985, saying, "HELP! The seal task force is constantly being delayed by every possible means . . . The allegiance to the O-ring investigation task force is very limited to a group of engineers numbering 8-10 . . . We wish we could get action by verbal request, but such is not the case. This is a red flag."

Meanwhile NASA's paper work continued to track the problem. On Dec. 17, 1982, the joint was moved to the agency's "criticality 1" list, meaning that it lacked a reliable backup part and that if the joint failed it would lead to "loss of mission and crew." While that presumably should have alerted NASA's flight officials to the urgency of the matter, there was a complication: fully 748 parts of the shuttle carried the same criticality-1 designation, including 114 on the booster motors. None was given any priority in urgency, so none stood out as demanding a quick remedy.

There was yet another roadblock to action: despite the documents, top flight officials at Marshall, including Mulloy, believed that the seal had redundancy in the critical early stages of ignition. Dutifully, however, Mulloy slapped a formal launch constraint on the joint problem. That meant that there could be no shuttle flight until the seal was fixed. But few above Mulloy even knew the constraint existed; worse yet, having imposed the restraint, Mulloy routinely waived it before each launch. So the shuttles flew, its astronauts innocently unaware of the lingering joint danger.

Then came yet another bizarre twist in NASA's paper shuffle. The Marshall managers grew tired of dealing with so many open problems listed for the shuttle that they asked Morton Thiokol to try to winnow the items. Brian Russell, Thiokol's manager of special projects for the boosters, promptly filed a memo last Dec. 6 to the director of the solid-rocket project at Thiokol, recommending that the O-ring erosion be dropped from the critical- problems list. Mysteriously, an unsigned paper produced by Marshall's problem- assessment system declared that "this problem is considered closed" on Jan. 23, just five days before the Challenger launch. Although others still were watching the O rings, Rogers complained that the Marshall memo further reduced the urgency to find a fix.

Confronting Mulloy with the documents in a closed hearing, Rogers asked how this dismissal of a crucial difficulty could happen. Mulloy replied that the closeout had been a mistake, "a failure of the human being within the system." Snapped Rogers: "It was a little more than that. It's a failure of the whole system if one letter and one human being can close out a constraint that has been concerning you for many years." Rogers asked Russell why he had recommended the closure. "Because I was asked to," Russell answered. "Well," commented Rogers with biting sarcasm, "that explains it."

The joint's troubled history was completely dismissed on the eve of Challenger's launch. The seals had long been flagged as a problem that could be aggravated by low temperatures. Yet George Hardy, Marshall's deputy director of science and engineering, declared that he was "appalled" by Thiokol's reasoning that the cape's cold weather, predicted to be in the 30s at lift-off, should lead to a delay. In the now notorious teleconference, four Thiokol vice presidents at first concurred with the fears of their engineers. But when they heard the NASA objections, they decided to take a "management" vote in which the engineers seated beside them had no voice. Even though Thiokol had taken the seal problem seriously enough to spend more than $2 million seeking a remedy, its top officers involved in shuttle work now ignored the Florida chill and approved the launch. The NASA managers had won the argument. Six astronauts and Schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe lost everything.

How could this happen? Richard Feynman, the Caltech physicist who turned out to be one of the commission's most insightful members, probably explained it best. The joint hazard was often discussed before a flight, Feynman pointed out. "It flies and nothing happens," he theorized at a commission hearing. "Then it is suggested, therefore, that the risk is no longer so high for the next flight--we can lower our standards a bit because we got away with it last time. It's a kind of Russian roulette." In fact, with each pull of the launch trigger, the odds of a catastrophe increased rather than diminished.

Challenger had blasted off even though the temperature at the cape was 38 degrees . During the night, a subfreezing cold had chilled the shuttle, and surface winds of 30 m.p.h.. had aggravated the problem. Chunks of ice floated in water tanks laced with antifreeze. Once aloft on its tragic 73-sec. flight, Challenger was assailed by 75-m.p.h. gales, producing, even before the explosion, what one NASA engineer called "an extremely rough ride, maybe the roughest yet." At sea, ships assigned to recover the $25 million boosters were heading for safe harbors as waves broke over their gunwales. All those facts should have been known by launch officials. Yet Challenger was given its go.

Why? The Rogers commission will assign its own reasons, but one former insider offers a credible theory. Contends Jerome Lederer, founder of the private Flight Safety Foundation and a onetime NASA safety director: "There was social pressure: they had thousands of school kids watching for the first school lesson from space. There was media pressure: they feared that if they didn't launch, the press would unfavorably report more delays. And there was commercial pressure: the Ariane (European launcher) was putting objects in space at much lower cost. NASA was also trying to show the Air Force that they could operate on a schedule. The pressures were subtle, but they acted upon them."

How can these fatal procedural flaws be corrected? Rogers is trying to protect his commission's proposals against premature disclosure. "These are for the President," he told his commissioners. Still, some recommendations seem almost obvious. NASA headquarters must take firm control of its sprawling agency, even while cutting back on its paper flow. Anyone in the system holding a strong view on a safety problem must feel free to raise it at any level, rather than being limited to his own reporting channel.

Conversely, top officials should take the initiative to raise questions orally and directly, rather than sending paper inquiries down through the ranks. Oldtimers at NASA yearn for a return to the days when Air Force Lieut. General James Abrahamson, now Reagan's director of the Strategic Defense Initiative, ran the shuttle program. When he sensed a problem, he awaited no "criticality" rating; he barged into the office of even the lowliest technician to ask how to fix it. Perhaps unfairly, one commissioner insists that "Abe was replaced by wimps."

Despite NASA's cheery post-Challenger insistence that another teacher and then a journalist will be sent into orbit, the commission is likely to discourage such public relations ventures. Astronauts told the panel that their work load was too heavy for such extravagances. Privately, they described their civilian passengers as operational liabilities. One astronaut confided that Senator Jake Garn was a "space invalid" on his flight. Florida Congressman Bill Nelson was described as "a pain." Saudi Prince Sultan Saud was "a nice guy, but he was a problem for everybody. He was lost, totally lost."

The commission will insist on new launch rules, some of which NASA is already developing. All preflight discussions of whether a launch should go will be recorded. That will avoid the kind of "misunderstanding" that developed, for example, when Rockwell International executives insisted that they had opposed the Challenger launch out of fear that ice on the pad's gantry might break off and damage the shuttle's protective heat tiles, while NASA officials contended that no such flat objection had been raised. (Rockwell has since provided its own tapes, which seem to cinch its case.)

Weather will get a much closer scrutiny, including readings of on-site temperature and wind in the hours preceding flight and of high-altitude winds in the lift-off path. The commission believes that some of NASA's temperature measurements may have missed the extent of Challenger's cold soak. Finally, the astronauts who are to fly will be involved in the go-or-no-go discussions.

The commission will probably urge that the redesign of the shuttle's faulty booster joints be supervised by independent experts. Recently the panel was outraged when it learned that NASA had contracted for new booster casings that may not accommodate the necessary fixes. The commissioners stopped the order. They fear that NASA's haste to get going again may lead to more mistakes.

Fletcher, 66, the former University of Utah president who headed NASA from 1971 to 1977 and was called back by Reagan to lead the beleaguered agency to recovery, has accused critics of conducting "a witch-hunt," and complained that some of the press coverage of NASA's problems may be inflicting "irreparable damage, not only to the agency . . . but also to the nation as a whole." If the U.S. space program is in turmoil, Fletcher said last week, "most of that chaos is external to NASA."

That optimistic viewpoint is in keeping with Fletcher's outlook. During his first stint at NASA, he projected payload-launching costs for the shuttle at $100 per lb.; they never got below $3,500. After heading a study team that urged Reagan to proceed with his Star Wars shield against Soviet missiles, he recently predicted that a "near perfect" system had a fifty-fifty chance of being deployed by the year 2000. Few if any of SDI's scientific proponents expect anything near perfection to be possible.

Still, optimists usually make the best pioneers. While reluctant to return to NASA, Fletcher is now gung-ho. "I didn't want the job," he says. "But the President persuaded me. He's not called the Great Communicator for nothing." Fletcher sees his short-term priorities as fixing the shuttle ("Ironically, that's the easiest part," he said), improving NASA's management practices, and then rejuggling a backlog of shuttle payloads. He intends to set up a panel of experts from the National Academy of Sciences to oversee the shuttle redesign, and has already appointed other outsiders to review the agency's management. On his return to his old post, he says, he was surprised to discover that top officials "didn't seem to be talking to each other." He intends to "get to the bottom" of the communications problem. As for the impending Rogers report, Fletcher expects that "it will be pretty harsh."

The NASA boss is noncommittal on proposals that the agency stop lifting payloads for other countries and for private commercial purposes. While conceding that "somebody's got to take some of the backlog," Fletcher expressed doubts that "there is a good way" for private industry to step in quickly and develop its own expendable rockets. Still, plenty of private entrepreneurs seem willing to try.

"We're certainly ready, willing and able," declares Richard Brackeen, vice president for Martin Marietta's space launch systems division. His firm and its chief competitor, General Dynamics, have long experience in producing rockets for the Air Force and NASA and, with the unexpected new demand for such launchers, would like to reverse their role. They would rent Government launching facilities and use their own rockets to orbit commercial satellites. The potential benefit: providing competition that would force lower launch prices and, in turn, lure more private business.

While there is no shortage of commercial satellites in space--off which signals for TV, telephone and even printing plants can be bounced for instant arrival at distant points--the cost of launching replacements is rising because of the U.S.'s launch failures. A few U.S. companies have shifted from the shuttle to Europe's Ariane system, operated by the French from launch pads in French Guiana. Arianespace has raised its prices by nearly one-third, to $35 million a launch, and has at least 29 orders on its books, worth some $1.2 billion. But the consortium has only eight slots open through 1988, so its - ability to lure business from the U.S. is limited.

Beyond that, the French discovered again last Saturday that space mishaps are not confined by national boundaries. An Ariane II rocket had to be destroyed by controllers when its third stage failed to ignite 4 1/2 min. into its flight. Lost with the rocket was a $90 million telecommunications satellite. It was the fourth failure in 18 Ariane launches and the third malfunction of its third-stage engine, suggesting a possible system problem. So Ariane, too, was grounded while the accident's cause is sought. Most American companies seem willing to wait out the shuttle's return. Hughes Communications, a subsidiary of the largest private American satellite maker, has sent one launch to Arianespace but has committed some $500 million for the use of NASA facilities, including eleven projects over the next five years. Says the company's president, Steven Dorfman: "I want to launch all our systems on the shuttle. It would be potentially disastrous to the communications-satell ite business if NASA no longer were permitted to launch them."

While insisting that it faces no immediate crisis, the Air Force deeply regrets its overreliance on the shuttle. "We have learned a lot, the hard way, from the Challenger mess," admits one general. "It was wrong to mix both civilian and military payloads in that unreliable, complicated system." Air Force Major General Donald Kutyna, a member of the Rogers commission, has estimated that even if shuttles resume operation next summer and make an improbable 18 flights a year, there will be a defense-payload backlog of some 45 needed flights by 1992.

The Pentagon is worried about the delay in lofting experiments for SDI research. It also frets about its diminished ability to keep a clear space eye on the Soviets and Middle East hot spots with its KH (keyhole) and Big Bird spy satellites. The Air Force has sent seven KH craft into polar orbits over the past nine years, but only one is still operational. The satellites are normally used in pairs, and a replacement for the last one to go dead was lost in last August's Titan rocket explosion. The single eye is expected to function for at least another year. Until its new Titans start to become available in 1988, the Air Force has some crisis protection: a known stock of 13 older Titan IIs that are already being refurbished as launch vehicles, and some 40 Titan D2 missiles that are being removed from their silos and could be modified.

The Pentagon's appetite for devouring all available launch capacity deeply concerns many civilian space scientists. The report by the National Academy of Science's space board points out that relying on the shuttle for scientific launches has seriously delayed projects such as the Galileo and Ulysses probes of Jupiter and the Hubble space telescope. The last major scientific space mission by the U.S. was the 1977 Voyager 2, launched on a Titan-Centaur rocket; Voyager's bypass of the planet Uranus in January provided the U.S. with its only space success this year.

Other scientists fear that the U.S.S.R. has seized the lead in the next stages of space exploration. The Soviets' Mir (Peace) space station, manned on March 13, is operational, while the U.S. is not yet fully committed to developing such a permanent space platform. The Soviets, long ahead of the U.S. in the lift capability of its superrockets, will soon have a new SL-W booster that can push 220,000 lbs. into orbit, about 3 1/2 times as much as the U.S. shuttle. The Soviets have, of course, one huge advantage: their authoritarian government provides long-term planning and consistently high funding for its priorities. "The Soviets worship only certain things," observes George Jeffs, president of Rockwell's North American Space Operations. "Lenin's tomb is one and space is another."

In hopes of stimulating similar long-term thinking and national commitment, the Paine commission produced a glossy, colorfully illustrated 211-page report that implicitly dismisses the worries about America's current space failures as the product of small minds and faint hearts. Calling the solar system "our extended home," the document urges the U.S. to take logical, sequential steps toward colonizing space over the next 50 years. It assumes that NASA's proposed orbiting space station will be in place by 1994. Simultaneously, research would proceed on both an aerospace plane (President Reagan's so-called Orient Express), capable of taking off from runways and soaring into orbit, and a new generation of reusable rocket-powered craft that would reach orbit with a single-stage engine. These two new vehicles would compete to see which would become the shuttle's successor, carrying passengers and cargo between earth and the space station. Yet another craft, a kind of space truck, would also be created to move crews and material from space stations to geosynchronous orbits (22,300 miles up) and the moon.

In this futuristic concept, the first space station would be expanded into a spaceport. Other such ports would be deployed in more distant orbits, including one some 35,000 miles from the moon, where the gravitational pull of the earth is canceled by that of the lunar body. This base would provide the jumping-off point for manned flights to Mars. Eventually, two "cycling spaceships" would be in continual operation. Depending on the trajectory chosen, they would take five to seven months to make the one-way trip. Blithely explains Marcia Smith, executive director of the commission: "You'd have an up escalator and a down escalator."

But why go to all the expense and bother? The 15-member commission contends that, beyond the sheer accumulation of new knowledge, exotic types of manufacturing can be done only in the conditions of space, the moon and Mars, and that useful organic materials can be recovered from these surfaces. While at first people, living in enclosed "biospheres," would explore the distant bodies and set up factories there, many of these operations would later be controlled from earth. The sciences of robotics and artificial intelligence, in particular, must be accelerated to make all of this possible.

The cost? To sustain the timetable, the annual NASA budget would grow from its nearly $8 billion today to about $23 billion by the year 2000. This, the commission predicts rosily, will be only about one-half of 1% of the gross national product and would be "reasonable in relation to the expected benefits to our nation."

The U.S. public may well wonder if the commissioners are merely blowing heavenly smoke with such thoughts at a time when America seems unable to put any object, much less people, into orbit. But without such visions, most space scientists agree, vast sums and a marvelous, ever developing technology will be wasted in aimless wandering. Yes, they also concede, there will be more deaths in the hostile environment of space. But if goals are clear, the sacrifices at least will have advanced a widely accepted purpose.

Virtually without dissent, the otherwise often competing voices of America's space leaders declare that if the national space program is to regain its bearings, the direction must come from the Oval Office. Insists Moustafa Chahine, chief scientist of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory: "We need a clear enunciation of our priorities by our President." As the reports from scientists, commissions and study groups are delivered to the White House, Ronald Reagan will have to decide how he views America's future in space.

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With reporting by Jonathan Beaty/Los Angeles, Michael Duffy/Washington and Jerry Hannifin/ Cape Canaveral