ROANOKE TIMES 
                      Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times

DATE: Saturday, September 14, 1996           TAG: 9609160040
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL   PAGE: A-8  EDITION: METRO 
DATELINE: HUNTSVILLE, ALA.
SOURCE: MARCIA DUNN ASSOCIATED PRESS

SPACE LAB MAY NOT GET OFF THE GROUND

NASA and the Russian Space Agency are both six months behind schedule on lab sections slated for launch late next year.

A working laboratory in space by 2002 is a promise NASA may have to break.

Flaws and funding snags in both the United States and Russia are causing delays as construction looms for their international space station. The first chunk is slated for launch just over a year from now, followed - bang, bang, bang - by block after building block.

The astronauts are getting ready - Monday's launch of shuttle Atlantis will take John Blaha aloft to replace Shannon Lucid aboard Russia's Mir station - but the building schedule is increasingly iffy.

Because of a design flaw in a passageway that has cost at least $100 million to fix, NASA is up to six months behind schedule on a section supposed to be launched late next year.

The Russian Space Agency, NASA's largest partner, is six months behind on another crucial part because the Russian government, beset by political and economic travails, has anted up only 10 percent of the cost.

If funding doesn't resume in the next month or two, this preliminary live-in cylinder won't be ready for a 1998 launch and the Russians may have to drop out or, at the very least, curtail involvement in the project, NASA space station director Andrew Allen warned this week.

The agency has other minor partners - Japan, Canada and Europe - and a contingency plan to build a station without the Russians, but implementing it at the last minute would be ``unpleasant,'' Allen said.

Even small things, such as faulty software or the late delivery of bolts that were additionally the wrong finish and the wrong strength, add up to big delays, which mean overtime, which means cost overruns for NASA.

The deadlines are real, and crucial. While space might wait for the station, Congress may not. The space station is stiffly challenged every year when it's discussed on Capitol Hill as part of NASA's budget.

And far more uncertain than the construction schedule is the station's completion in the promised five years, said Marcia Smith, aerospace policy specialist for the Congressional Research Service.

In a 55-month period, 73 rocket launches, most of them Russian, are to transport every part of the station, big and small, for assembly and outfitting in space.

``It's more a political question than anything else, whether politicians will continue to support the program even if there are schedule slips and therefore higher costs,'' Smith said.

LENGTH: Medium:   57 lines
ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO:  AP. NASA administrator Dan Golden studies the hardware 
          on a space station module at the Marshall Space Flight Center on 
          Friday. color. Graphic by AP: Space station slowdown. color.