After 30 Years Of Dreams, A Wake-Up Call For NASA

In March, a panel of experts, convened by the National Research Council to advise the administration on the latest redesign of the space station Freedom, concluded that the proposed $30 billion monster was unsuited for scientific research. Surprisingly, space station proponents made little attempt to refute this harsh judgment. In a letter to NASA administrator Richard Truly, Vice President Dan Quayle, head of the National Space Council, simply dismissed the concerns of the scientific community; science, he shrugged, is only one motivation for building a space station--and not even the most important one. In an apparent reference to the panel's concern that there would be insufficient electrical power on board for scientific experiments, Quayle wrote: "The importance of the Space Station is not in the power of its circuits; it is in the size of the dream." There you have it. It's the dream that matters. And so it was at the birth of the space station initiative, Jan. 25, 1984, on the occasion of President Ronald Reagan's State of the Union address. "We can follow our dreams to distant stars," he said, "living and working in space for peaceful economic and scientific gain. Tonight I am directing NASA to develop a permanently manned space station and do it within a decade." The Reagan dream, at least, was justified on pragmatic grounds, even if the expectations were wildly unrealistic. The space station was to be a sort of microgravity research and development laboratory, turning out wondrous new alloys and medical advances and collecting important scientific data. Space, they were fond of saying in the Reagan White House, is just another place to do business. But while there were plenty of companies eager to get a piece of the contract for building a space station, industry showed no interest in its commercial potential. And science, everyone agreed, would best be done on automated space platforms, free of the disturbance of astronauts bumping about. The space station seemed to be nothing more than a make-work welfare program for the aerospace industry and an upscale fitness center where astronauts could cavort in zero gravity. Freedom was left without a mission. Then President Bush began having dreams. In a speech delivered from the steps of the National Air and Space Museum in Washington on July 20, 1989, the 20th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing, Bush called on the youth of America to "raise your eyes to the heavens and join us in a great dream--an American dream---a dream without end." Summoning up the voyage of Christopher Columbus to the New World, he called for a return to the moon and a manned expedition to Mars. "Like Columbus," he said, "we dream of distant shores we've not yet seen." His dream gave Freedom a new mission; a laboratory would be needed to seek ways to overcome the debilitating effects of prolonged exposure to a space environment. It took the Apollo astronauts three days to reach the moon; Mars would take nine months. Space is a harsh environment; muscles atrophy, bones that no longer resist gravity lose calcium, nerves degenerate, bouts of space sickness are a persistent problem, the body is constantly exposed to high levels of radiation, and the prolonged stress induces severe depression. Ways would have to be found to prevent or cope with these conditions before a mission could be launched to the red planet. Freedom began its transformation from a microgravity R&D facility to a space-medicine laboratory. That transformation is now complete. In October, Congress sent NASA back to the drawing board with instructions to trim 15 percent off the cost of Freedom, which had swollen to an astronomical $38 billion. NASA obliged by cutting the crew from eight to four and jettisoning what little science remained including a planned centrifuge that was to provide the capability of controlling exposure to gravity. The new design pleased no one, but a consensus began to emerge: * Processing materials in space is not likely to produce economic returns in the foreseeable future. * Human habitation of the space station is incompatible with microgravity experiments--which, in any case, are of microimportance. * The only scientific justification for the space station is to find means of maintaining human life during long space flights. For that, a centrifuge is needed. But does it make any sense to send humans to explore Mars? In the exploration of and utilization of space, humans have proved to be an expensive and time-consuming burden. The uses of space for communications, weather monitoring, surveillance, navigation, and astronomical research all use unmanned satellites. Manned programs consume two-thirds of the space budget, yet the only thing we have learned from putting people in space is how to keep them alive. Our machines are the logical extensions of our frail bodies. They go unhesitatingly through environments no human could survive. Beyond the orbit of Pluto, the aging Pioneer 11 spacecraft, launched 18 years ago, has completed its voyage of discovery among the outer planets. In the course of its long, one-way journey, while surviving on less energy than it takes to operate your porch light, it discovered new moons and rings and radiation belts. Pioneer 11 now suffers the usual infirmities of old age: Some of its senses have grown dim from the battering of mircro-meteoroids and encounters with the radiation belts of the giant planets; other circuits have been shut down to conserve energy; its mechanical limbs are arthritic. Yet it still responds to commands from Earth, faithfully reporting back on the last traces of the solar wind. Soon it will pass the heliopause, beyond which the solar wind is offset by the stellar wind; Pioneer 11 will then truly be in interstellar space. It does not matter that it will not return; it is expendable. If we had waited for an astronaut to make the journey, it would not have happened in our lifetime. Perhaps the flight would never have happened at all. Yet, ignoring the lessons of Pioneer's success, the administration dreams on, of a costly, unproductive, human presence in space. Robert L. Park is a professor of physics at the University of Maryland, College Park, and director of the Washington, D.C., office of the American Physical Society.

After 30 Years Of Dreams, A Wake-Up Call For NASA

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