Space Research Advances on 3 Continents

WASHINGTON—Experimenters starved for spaceflight opportunities may find all the lab space they need in Earth orbit if a small Colorado company is able to turn the space shuttle's giant external fuel tanks into privately owned orbiting science facilities. Next week a group of 40 scientists, government officials and engineers will attend a closed workshop in Boulder to take a first crack at defining science requirements for the "Labitat," as the External Tank Company (ETCO) has labeled its proposed facility. The meeting is sponsored by the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR)—a consortium of 55 universities that owns 80 percent of ETCO's stock—NASA and several other cosponsors, including Martin Marietta, which builds the shuttle fuel tanks. Although the idea of salvaging the tanks was first proposed many years ago, NASA had never expressed any particular interest in pursuing it—in part because no one had shown any clear use for a tank, stranded 125 miles above the Earth, that would quickly become a dangerous piece of space junk unless its orbit were raised and stabilized. Currently, the tank reaches 98 percent of orbital velocity before being dropped to burn up over the Indian Ocean. That attitude has softened, however. In February a NASA study group concluded that the engineering and operational requirements to take the 150-foot-long tanks safely to orbit and convert them to useful volume are within the "current state of the art" of the shuttle. A specific use has been found as well. Under a grant from NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, David Koch of the Harvard/Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and Martin Marietta are studying the use of a refurbished tank to mount a 30-foot telescope mirror called GRITS, for Gamma Ray Imaging Telescope System. Once in orbit, the tank would be emptied by letting residual fuels boil out and then repressurized with gas. Astronauts would enter the tank through portholes (underwater training studies at Marshall have shown that this is possible) to install the GRITS detector and other science equipment brought up by the shuttle. Attitude control, communications and other support equipment would be attached, and the tank would be raised to an altitude of 300 to 400 kilometers. The total cost would be $200 million, divided evenly between the hardware and the operational expenses. A Space Sieve No one claims it's going to be easy. "Space debris is one of my biggest worries," said Koch. At the altitude planned for GRITS, there is a 90 percent chance that micrometeoroids would penetrate the tank's thin metal within a year, rupture the pressurized vessel and ruin the experiment. "If you leave it up there long enough," says Koch, "you're going to have a sieve." ETCO officials must overcome that problem before realizing a much more ambitious marketing dream—selling its space. They estimate scientists will be able to lease room inside the cavernous Labitat at a projected cost of $1 per cubic foot per day. President Randolph Ware said ETCO eventually "wants to involve the whole university community in civil space activities." But one knowledgeable scientist, who said he supported the company's goals, was skeptical that anyone but NASA would be able to afford to use the Labitat. "University people don't have the money," he observed. Ware admitted that the company, to succeed, must attract a lot of customers. ETCO officials say they can keep the costs down by making the facility spartan, unencumbered by bureaucracy and closely tailored to basic experimental needs. The Labitat is not competing with NASA's Space Station for customers, Ware emphasized. "Our facility is more like a large warehouse at the edge of an industrial park," Ware said. "Our success is going to depend on their success." Reichhardt is a Washington freelance writer and editor at Space World magazine.

Space Research Advances on 3 Continents

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