THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, July 20, 1994 TAG: 9407200388
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A6 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY JAMES SCHULTZ, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: WALLOPS ISLAND LENGTH: Long : 205 lines
Nine Julys before Apollo 11 sprinted through the interplanetary night toward the moon, H. Ray Stanley tooled up the Eastern Shore in a $200, 1953 two-tone Ford, heading toward rockets, toward history.
The young engineer had a new job, at the Wallops Island test range, where rocketeers were drafting the blueprints for the American race to space.
``I came scootin' down through the back country,'' Stanley says, his speech honeyed by remnants of a native South Carolinian drawl. ``The only thing I could see was this big marsh. I got to the (Wallops) front gate and thought to myself, `What in the HELL have I got myself into?' ''
Today, Stanley could be excused for again asking the same question. On the 25th anniversary of the first manned moon landing, the country's space program is a shadow of its former self.
To be sure, there are space shuttle missions and satellite launches. Closer to home, Northern Virginia has become a national center for small satellite and rocket design and manufacture.
But since the Apollo landings concluded in mid-December 1972, America has built no big booster to carry people or materials into space. The massive Saturn V rocket that ferried six Apollo crews to the moon is now a gutted museum piece, a popular tourist photo opportunity at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
There is no lunar base, and no plans to build one. Travel to Mars remains science fiction, not fact.
``We don't seem to be making that much progress,'' says Stanley, 63, who still works at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Wallops Flight Facility as a technical adviser on small rockets.
``That's the disappointment of it,'' Stanley adds. ``The French are coming up. The Chinese are jumping in. The Russians are making a go. Meanwhile, we in the United States are muddling along.''
Why, with all of its wealth and brainpower, hasn't the United States gone back to the moon or farther out into the solar system?
The obvious answer is money. Sending humans to space is expensive. According to Alex Roland, a former NASA historian who is now a Duke University professor of technology history, close to $140 billion was spent by NASA on manned space exploration from 1958 to 1993.
Meantime, the part of the federal budget devoted to feeding such agencies as NASA is steadily shrinking. The NASA budget is predicted to grow very little over the next five years, stuck at $14 billion annually.
``There's no way we would have gone to the moon if not for the Cold War environment of the early 1960s,'' explains Auburn University historian James R. Hansen, who has written a book on the space program. ``After Kennedy was killed, going to the moon became more a way of achieving an assassinated president's agenda, a way of vindicating Kennedy.''
Hansen adds that, having already visited our nearest solar system neighbor, we appear reluctant to muster national energy and resources to return. On a much larger scale, it's comparable to the fallout of a family vacation to the Grand Canyon: exciting, a valuable adventure, but an exhausting trek from which parents and kids need to recover.
``One way of looking at it is that usually we are homebodies after we've gone on a long trip,'' Hansen observes. ``What it's about today is staying home.''
It's fine with the critics that we keep most of our astronauts grounded until manned space travel becomes affordable - say, in the range of tens of dollars per pound of payload compared to the current tens of thousands of dollars.
``Huge budget deficits weren't the norm (in the 1960s),'' says Pete Sepp, spokesman for the 250,000-member National Taxpayers Union, which was founded two months after the Apollo 11 moon landing. ``Tax burdens were lower. We may never journey to the stars unless we bring federal budget deficits back to earth.''
Space advocates respond that the money's there if Americans really want to revisit manned space exploration.
``This year . . . we spent $57.7 billion on beer to wash down $2.6 billion of chips,'' NASA administrator Daniel S. Goldin said in a speech earlier this year. ``The buzzard is coming home to roost because we invest in survival and consumption and not in the future. And then we don't worry about it.''
Critics also fault the space agency for overestimating the dollar value of space race spinoff technologies, such as smaller computers, miniature video cameras, lighter and stronger space-age materials. NASA may have had a hand in spurring along these products, but many believe advances would have happened in any case, space program or not.
``We have been at manned spaceflight for 33 years now, and the truth is that the pot of gold we expected humans to find in space has returned to lead,'' historian Roland wrote in a Washington Post commentary in late May earlier this year. ``There is nothing there worth the risk and the cost. It is time to call a halt.''
Roland has compared the cost of Christopher Columbus' first expedition with the Apollo program. According to his calculations, 40 percent of the 1492 expedition was funded by private individuals, including Columbus himself.
Nor did the voyage break the Spanish bank. Compared to U.S. peak spending on its space program - $4 billion, or 3.4 percent of the $118 billion federal budget in 1965 - King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella spent just 0.4 percent of their kingdom's annual income to underwrite the trip.
Roland also emphasizes that, within a year of his first return from the New World, Columbus had almost completely replenished Spanish coffers with bounty from his travels. By 1524, 32 years after Columbus first sailed, the Spanish and Portuguese had established settlements in both North and South America.
For genuine space accomplishment, Roland argues, look to the military's success with reconnaissance, weather and navigation satellites. The payoff has been geopolitical - no nuclear war, at least not yet - and, indirectly, economic because of a relatively more stable world.
Not to mention slightly better weather forecasts.
``We should be sending out lots of space probes, but not people,'' Roland insists. ``Divert money to automated spacecraft. You get much more exploration.''
As NASA stares at a five-year budget plan that would hold annual expenditures to around $14 billion, the agency nevertheless has committed itself to the construction of a space station.
As far back as the late 1950s, NASA saw a space station as a way station back to the moon and then on to Mars. The space shuttle was part of the plan, originally conceived as a low-cost, reliable tug to ferry humans and materials to the station, which would grow over time into a sort of orbiting port.
Then there were shuttle cost overruns as the craft was developed in the 1970s and early 1980s. The number of shuttle flights were racheted back, as engineers discovered just how much effort was required to keep the complex vehicle flying.
When the shuttle Challenger exploded in January 1986, so did NASA's can-do reputation. Subsequent snafus with the myopic Hubble Space Telescope and the radio-dead Mars Observer probe only reinforced a general impression that the agency had grown too big, too bureaucratic, incapable of competently managing the big payoff projects.
Recently, budget constraints and political opposition have forced NASA into a series of station redesigns. The program - not one station component has yet been built - last year survived cancellation by just one vote in the House of Representatives.
This year, prospects appear brighter. In late June, the House approved 1995 station expenditures, and the Senate is expected to follow suit late this month or early in August. NASA would like to begin assembly flights sometime in 1997.
For many in the science community, continuing approval of the station sets the wrong priorities. NASA needs to rid itself of this multibillion-dollar effort so it can concentrate on more affordable and reasonable space science, they argue.
``There is no scientific justification at this time for a manned space station and, by extension, no foreseeable reason for putting human beings into space,'' says Robert L. Park, a professor of physics at the University of Maryland and director of the Washington, D.C., office of the American Physical Society, a national association of physicists.
``It makes little sense today.''
NASA administrator Goldin dismisses the critics as ``whiners'' who don't have the guts to take chances. Goldin, a Bush appointee who has survived into the Clinton administration, is NASA's chief cheerleader for what he calls a ``faster, better, cheaper'' way of doing agency business. That includes a revitalized manned space program.
``We have to take risks,'' Goldin said in a speech last month. ``We have to explore space not just for ourselves and today, but for our children and the quality of their lives in the next century.
``Great societies have taken risks and they've achieved incredible things . high technology.''
U.S. Rep. George E. Brown Jr, (D-Calif.), who chairs the House Science, Space and Technology Committee that monitors NASA programs, concedes that manned space exploration is expensive, but says projects like the space station are essential.
``We have this `live for today, the hell with tomorrow attitude' that permeates every aspect of our culture,'' Brown says. ``The space program is an excellent lever for reshaping those attitudes. I'm convinced we have a major future in space. It's absolutely essential for the economic health of our country.''
Eventually, Brown says, we must return to the moon and then go to Mars ``because the human race needs this kind of challenge . . . it stretches the capabilities and imaginations of people on Earth.''
Given the difficulty of getting into space, dreams of orbiting colonies will remain just that. The short-term future remains satellites, constellations constantly circulating Earth, beaming down information and helping the world's citizens to communicate with one another on a scale previously unthinkable.
Finding a reason to settle the high frontier is crucial. Asteroid mining or space tourism won't be enough.
Absent a spectacular crisis or discovery - a large asteroid headed to Earth or discovery of extraterrestrial radio signals - it will likely take some kind of technology breakthrough to reinvigorate America's manned space program.
``History won't repeat itself in an exact way. Circumstances will come together again - psychological, political, economic - to trigger restlessness,'' predicts Auburn historian Hansen. ``When that happens, I think there will be another significant adventure - probably a mission to Mars. That will happen at some point. It's a matter of when.'' ILLUSTRATION: Graphic
KRT graphics
A LOOK BACK AT THE SPACE PROGRAM
SOURCES: ``Space: The Next 100 Years'' by Nicholas Booth, NASA
Langley
[For complete graphic, please see microfilm]
by CNB