NASA's Fisk Vows To Lift Space Science Out Of Its Doldrums

Sometime in the next few weeks, the space shuttle Discovery should lift off into orbit. The mission will end a long and agonizing drought for the United States space program, and no group will be more eagerly watching than the nation's space scientists. For on Discovery's rocket plumes will be riding the hopes for launching such key science payloads as the Hubble space telescope, the Galileo planetary probe, and the Gamma Ray Observatory. But ending what many have called a "crisis" in space science— the result of the long failure to launch—requires more than just a functioning shuttle. It will also take, at the very least, a fleet of expend able rockets and a steady stream of new mission starts. One man who believes that the U.S. is on the verge of a new, productive era in space is Lennard A. Fisk, NASA'S associate administrator for space science and applications. Since taking over the agency's office of space science in April 1987, Fisk has put together an ambitious, long-range plan, with some 35 missions scheduled for the next five years alone. Will these missions actually fly? Can they lift U.S. space science out of its doldrums? And is the shuttle the right launch vehicle? Fisk, an astrophysicist who spent five years as vice president for research at the University of New Hampshire, addressed these questions, and a number of others, in a recent interview with The Scientist's John Carey. Q How important is the shuttle to your future plans? And will the shuttle, with its reduced schedule of flights and increased emphasis on safety, be able to do enough? A The shuttle is very important for two principal reasons. One is that we have structured a whole series of very high-priority payloads that are shuttle-unique. The only way you are going to launch and service the Hubble space telescope, for example, is with the shuttle. The Gamma Ray Observatory (GRO) and the Advanced X-Ray Astrophysics Facility (AXAF) fall in the same category. There are also missions that in principle could have been launched on something else but which were designed for the shuttle. They include Magellan [a Venus orbiter], Galileo [a probe to Jupiter] and Ulysses [a joint NASA-European Space Agency mission to study the sun]. So, we are very dependent on the shuttle's getting rid of our backlog of science missions. The second reason is that the shuttle is very important for our contribution to the manned space program and to the space station. We need to use the Spacelab series of missions on the shuttle to develop the instrumentation in microgravity and in life science that's going to be used on the space station. Now, I am optimistic that the shuttle can support us. The main reason is that I am the principal user of the shuttle. NASA has gotten out of the business of launching commercial satellites, and the Department of Defense is increasingly turning to Titans and other expendable rockets. So science is what's left. We have a whole lot of things that we would like to launch, but some are more important than others to us. So if there is a delay, we have to make sure we can get the high-priority ones off. But I don't take it as a forgone conclusion that the planned shuttle rates cannot be maintained they're not that ambitious at 11 or 12 flights a year with four orbiters. We also have substantial funds for expendable launch vehicles. Every mission that could be put on an expendable, or that we have planned to put on an expendable, has a provision in the budget to cover it. So I think we are in good shape. Q Which missions have the highest priority? A I think there are two high priorities: One is to get rid of the backlog of missions—get Hubble, GRO, and so on up in orbit. The other is to get ready for the space station. Spacelab is unique for being able to do research in microgravity and life science, so you need to give these missions high priority. Q Is the shuttle program, especially now that safety is a top priority, responsive enough to the needs of the science community? A At one point, some people thought that you could just drive down to the Cape with your payload in your trunk, hand it to the astronauts, and watch it go into orbit. That was a myth at the time, and it's certainly a myth at the moment. But I think the shuttle very much recognizes that science is the principal user; you just have to look at the manifest to see that. The main consequence of the present concern over quality control and safety—noone wants another accident—is in the time line for developing missions. And while that may appear like a constraint, it is a very easily accommodated constraint. I think NASA's space flight office has also done a very intelligent thing. They have taken Orbiter 102 and are essentially making it a dedicated Spacelab orbiter. So there are almost two different shuttle programs, the high-performance shuttles, which will be used primarily for the big missions—the Hubbles and Galileo's and Magellans— and the heavier shuttle 102, which just flies over and over again with the Spacelab. I think we can almost run it as a separate line, one that we have a lot of control over. Q How much of a loss is not having the high-performance features like the Centaur upper stage? A Well, I think the lack of the Centaur stage is a serious constraint. We had hoped to take this high-performance upper stage up in the shuttle fully loaded. Then when you got it in orbit, you could point it in the right direction, and send it off to a planet. But the astronauts didn't want to ride with all that liquid hydrogen, and the safety-conscious agency decided that it was too much excitement foaming in the back of the shuttle. As a result, Galileo will tool around the inner solar system, seeing Venus once and the Earth a couple of times to get enough boost to go to Jupiter. It's a serious loss. That's why the shuttle C [a proposed unmanned shuttle] has a lot of appeal to the planetary people, because it could take up the Centaur upper stage. Q How likely might the development of the shuttle C be? A It depends entirely on how aggressive the space program is going to be. If you keep adding development costs of this kind of thing, it adds up to real money. What's crucial is whether or not the nation wants to afford it. Q If resources are so limited, why have the shuttle and the manned space science program at all? Why not, as James Van Allen argues (see page 13) simply shoot off space probes and experiments on expendable rockets? A Van Allen has a planetary view of space science, and it's a narrower view than I would ascribe to or that many other people would ascribe to. You can certainly do planetary research—you can do space physics research—without ever having a shuttle. But if you want to do materials research in space, if you want to do life science research in space, you have no choice but to have people up there. In addition, the shuttle has the ability, which I think is a valid and important one, of being able to service in space. We are going to make a tremendous investment in the "great observatories" in space, and the way to justify the investment is to use them over long periods of time, 15 to 20 years. And that requires putting them someplace where we can get to them and fix them. Q You also believe that the space science program shouldn't be separated from the manned space program, as Tom Donahue of the University of Michigan and others have suggested? A I don't see them as separable, because what are the astronauts doing in space? There is a limit to how many pictures of the Persian Gulf or the Red Sea or wherever that you can take. That's all the astronauts did at the beginning, but now our expectation, and the public's expectation, is that we have invested in this infrastructure because we planned to do useful things in space. I view the manned programs as able to facilitate and conduct the portions of the science program that need man in the loop, like microgravity and life science research. Q How do you decide which type of space science should be funded? A That's a very difficult thing to do. You have to decide, for example, if planetary probes are more important than microgravity research. We can't do everything at once, so we have tried to mix and match to make sure that we're making a steady rate of progress in all the different disciplines. We are trying to get a new start each year for a major science mission. We have basically four fields that need that kind of mission—astronomy, earth science, planetary science, and space physics. That means basically one start in any given field every four years. We also simultaneously try and run a program that uses the Spacelab for life science and low-gravity research. Q Is there much clamor and pressure from the scientific community to do different projects? A What we try to do is be very consistent. We put together a strategic plan with a long list of things to do, and we are trying to systematically work our way through the list. So now we can tell the community, "Yes, you have an important project, but we are going to do these three first." They may grouse at first, but at least they know where they stand, and we don't have everyone pounding on us for the project they wanted to do. The next few years will determine whether we have been successful. Q How are you doing with the goal of one start per year? A Well, I've had one year and I've had one start, AXAF. But I should be careful here. We have a plan between ourselves and the Congress as to how Congress will proceed with AXAE There was a concern that the technology development on AXAF was challenging and that the last time we did a big observatory with challenging technology—Hubble—there were quite a few cost overruns. So we've set up a plan that has milestones we must pass through before we proceed with the next step on AXAE Our hope for the next start after AXAF is Cassini, a Saturn orbiter. Q Even if all your planned missions go off on schedule, many will still have been delayed for years because of the shuttle accident and other problems. A number of scientists have said that these delays have been disastrous, and that now there is a serious crisis in space science in the U.S. Just how bad is it? A There's no questions that the Challenger accident had an impact on the community. The only science mission we have launched since Challenger is San Marco D, a small satellite out of Kenya, which is studying atmospheric physics. The number of operating satellites that we have now is very small, and some are very old. So we have a community that is living on old data and suffering from lack of stimulation and new activities. Another dimension of the problem is the enormous cost of maintaining missions on the ground during the delay. You're talking in the billions of dollars lost to the science budget of NASA simply because we were unable to launch the missions on schedule. There is also the impression that the space science program in the U.S. has lost its leadership to the Soviets, that they are doing so many more exciting things than we are. Many of us find this impression very frustrating. The reality is that we have 35 flight missions under construction. So when we finally begin to launch these missions, and if the launches go with some regularity, it's going to look like the Fourth of July. We're going to have a launch rate of science missions over the next five years that will be the highest in the history of the agency. I wonder occasionally if we are going to be ready for the embarrassment of riches. Q Is a related worry, one that Tom Donahue has often raised, that because of the long delay, the space science community now lacks the expertise and facilities needed to build more spacecraft? A It is a concern. The pioneers in the space program are now in their 60s and 70s. And during this long period of inactivity, space scientists and universities were reluctant to train students because they didn't know what the future was going to be. So who is the generation that is going to actually work with the data that we are going to collect and build the next generation of spacecraft? One of the ways we are trying to address the problem is with the Scout Class missions. They are of a size that universities can get their hands around and actually build large parts of the experiments. In principle, they would be built in three years, which is a convenient time for graduate students. AXAFS and Cassinis are absolutely essential for doing science, but you don't train a graduate student on an AXAF instrument, because it probably is a seven-year development project. Q How far along is the Scout Class program? A The announcements of opportunity are out now and are due back in September. The program is funded in the budget, so we will select as rapidly as we can. Q Another way of addressing the problem of finding more for U.S. scientists to do, it seems, is through more international cooperation. Such cooperation had been discouraged until recently. Is that now changing? A Cooperation with the Soviets in particular is probably the most rapidly moving change that I have witnessed. When I got here in April 1987, there was great reluctance in the Reagan administration to even consider the possibility of flying something on Soviet spacecraft. But in a year and half, the whole situation has changed. We've got the TOMS, which is a total ozone mapping spectrometer, and which potentially will fly. There's also an astrophysics experiment, and a discussion of sharing results for potential large missions, like Mars. But you are never sure what the political climate will be. One of the hesitations about doing something like a joint mission to Mars is that it would take a long time, and we don't always stay friends with the Soviets for so long. Q Another worry is that NASA is farming out more of the space science work, such as building spacecraft, to contractors, and that the result will be less reliable spacecraft. Are you worried? A There is concern. NASA has a very broad program: We are building the space station and rebuilding the shuttle program, and we have all these flight projects, many of which are having to be maintained on the ground. It is a tremendous burden on the civil service work force. So there has been a growth in the use of contractors, and I don't think it is a good trend. We need an in-house civil service expertise—a body of long-term accumulated knowledge that is a national resource. But we have the same aging work force as does the science community. Many NASA centers have a number of people who joined the space program in the beginning and are now eligible for retirement. Since space technology is not something that you can learn in a classroom, we have to worry that people will retire, taking their knowledge with them before they have a chance to pass it on to the next generation. Q How can you tackle this problem? A It requires educating the people who make decisions about the magnitude of the problem. There is a tendency now always to think in terms of smaller government. But space and space technology is something that government is uniquely capable of doing, and therefore is different from other parts of government that could be smaller. Q Now that you have been at your job for a year and a half, and have developed a long-term plan, what do you think are your chances of following through? A You really ought to ask me four years from now. I think it's mainly a resource issue. There has to be growth in the science budget, and there has to be growth in the agency budget. If that occurs, I don't think there is any question of not being able to follow the plan.

NASA's Fisk Vows To Lift Space Science Out Of Its Doldrums

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