Getting Nasa Back on Track

By Anastasia Toufexis

When the shuttle Challenger exploded off Florida 19 months ago, U.S. space policy also went up in smoke. A series of unsuccessful launchings, including the loss of an Atlas-Centaur rocket fired into a lightning storm last March, has further devastated the space program and left it floundering. In a 63-page report prepared for NASA and released last week, Astronaut Sally Ride attempts to set the agency back on track. She argues for an "evolutionary" policy with diverse objectives, rather than a splashy, one-goal venture. Writes Ride, who was the first American woman in space: "It would not be good strategy, good science or good policy for the U.S. to select a single initiative, then pursue it single-mindedly."

Specifically, Ride opposes focusing on a manned mission to Mars by 2005, a project being pushed by many enthusiasts as a great adventure that could capture the public's imagination. "Settling Mars should be our eventual goal," she writes, "but it should not be our next goal." A commitment to Mars, she warns, could imperil NASA's plans to put a shuttle fleet back in operation and build a space station. It would also require a tripling of the agency's budget during the mid-1990s -- an unrealistic prospect.

Instead, Ride recommends that the U.S. begin by establishing a lunar outpost that could serve as a research laboratory and enable scientists to exploit the moon's resources. "While exploring the moon," she argues, "we would learn to live and work on a hostile world beyond earth." Mars would logically come next. Such a stepwise approach might also spare resources for other projects. One that Ride endorses: a "mission to planet earth" that would use orbiting space platforms to study the global atmosphere.

Official reaction has been reserved. Agency Head James Fletcher, who assigned Ride to the study, issued a commendatory letter but did not endorse the findings. Ride, who leaves NASA next month for a post at Stanford University, was unavailable for press briefings.

Many space experts fear the report will be ignored, as was an earlier study by a presidential commission led by onetime NASA Administrator Thomas Paine. The neglect, they say, is symptomatic of the nation's current rudderless approach to space exploration, which is ceding leadership to the Soviet Union. Declares Democratic Congressman George Brown Jr., of California, who serves on a House subcommittee on space science: "The fact is that the Administration is not ready to determine the future of the space program."

Other critics complain that NASA has become obsessed with long-term planning. "I think getting the shuttle flying and getting a space station program under way are goals enough for now," says John Logsdon, director of George Washington University's science and public policy program. "We should get on with the program," says James French, who left his job as project director at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for a position in industry. "I got out because there were too many reports and not enough flying."

With reporting by Jerry Hannifin/Washington