The engines were not the only source of problems. Another was the ceramic tiles that were supposed to dissipate the fierce heat generated by friction as the shuttle re-entered the Earth`s atmosphere. Rockwell engineers had been struggling for months to find a satisfactory way to glue the ceramic tiles to the outside of the first operational orbiter, the Columbia, but nothing seemed to work.
As the day of the Columbia`s scheduled first launch approached, a kind of controlled panic ensued. When the unfinished orbiter was put on top of NASA`s 747 jetliner and flown to Florida, 600 California-based Rockwell employees climbed into their cars and headed for Florida to finish the job.
When they arrived they were put on around-the-clock shifts, helping create cost overruns that eventually approached $500 million. (The workers later charged the government $3,700 apiece for having driven their own cars from one coast to the other, nearly five times the cost of a round-trip airline ticket).
The tiles finally agreed to stay put, but Columbia`s zero-gravity graphite doors wouldn`t close. The long, thin doors had warped. Only when NASA put the shuttle on a rotisserie and spun it around so that the sun could heat all sides evenly did the doors return to their original shape.
Finally the shuttle was ready to go. Or was it? ”There was a lot of soul-searching going on, everything that could be done, and we finally got to where we had done as much as humanly possible,” one NASA official recalled.
”There were many more things to do to that orbiter, but we had to have a cutoff somewhere, so we finally arrived at the date for the launch.”
In 1972, NASA had promised Congress that the first shuttle would carry a two-member crew into orbit by 1978. By the time astronauts John Young and Robert Crippen finally rode Columbia on its two-day, 36-orbit maiden voyage, it was April, 1981. The shuttle program was already more than two years behind schedule.
THE PUBLICITY MACHINE SWINGS INTO HIGH GEAR
As the space agency`s engineers and technicians raced behind the scenes to get the shuttle program ”on track,” NASA publicists were working just as hard to portray the shuttle as the next logical step in the glorious history of American aviation, the heir apparent to the Wright brothers, Charles Lindbergh and the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo astronauts.
The NASA public relations machine, honed to perfection during the Apollo program, was truly awesome. While agency officials, particularly the astronauts, criss-crossed the country to make speeches and television appearances extolling the space program, staffs of writers and artists churned out an endless stream of books and pamphlets explaining how the space program and its hardware worked and how it had benefitted the country.
Public relations had taken on such importance in part because of the private, and mistaken, belief of many senior NASA officials that their agency lacked broad public support. When Americans asked how it was that a nation that put a man on the moon could not feed the hungry, build enough schools or cure cancer, such remarks were usually intended as a compliment to American technology.
But to NASA officials it sounded like a criticism of wasted resources. Rightly or not, NASA thought that Americans liked the idea of space exploration. They just didn`t like paying for it, and it fell to the NASA public relations bureaucracy to help them understand why they ought to like both.
For more than a decade, the essence of the nation`s technological prowess, its thirst for adventure and its native need to seek the unknown had been distilled in a portrait of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin planting a plastic replica of the American flag on the surface of the moon. But long before Columbia`s first flight, the NASA publicists had begun their campaign to annoint the space shuttle as the new American icon.
Overnight, the space agency became a fountain of confident declarations, like this optimistic scenario described in a 1979 NASA publication: ”An unlikely looking flying machine stands on its tail above the watery, thicketed Florida sandscape. The time is the mid-1980`s, and the Space Shuttle preparing for launch is one of a fleet of four that now plies routinely, about one round trip a week, between the United States and Earth orbit.”
As envisioned by NASA, it was all quite amazing. Now that bulky pressurized space suits were a thing of the past, any man or woman ”in reasonably good health” could ride the shuttle. When they did, they would
”see the shape of India, the Australian continent and the California coast” before ”racing across the United States in just 12 minutes, perhaps noticing a hurricane over Cuba or sighting a sandstorm over a desert area.”
NASA said the menu for the shuttle crews was ”larger than that in the average restaurant and provides a variety ranging from shrimp cocktail to steak.” Unlike previous astronauts who had to sleep in their seats, those aboard the shuttle would be able to ”lie down” in bunk beds equipped with reading lights and individual air vents. These were ”merely a few examples of the giant strides that have been made to improve the standard of living in orbit since the space program began only 20 years ago.”
But NASA was careful to portray the shuttle as not just another fanciful excursion into outer space. Because of its ability to repair broken satellites in orbit and even return them to Earth for overhaul, the shuttle would actually save the taxpayers money. Because it could be ”prepared for launch on relatively short notice” it could save lives as well, one orbiter being sent up to bring home the crew of another that was stranded in space.
And since ”scientists no longer will be Earthbound,” NASA noted, the shuttle would further the frontiers of knowledge by carrying them into space to perform research that could not be done on Earth. Spaceflight would be a particular boon to astronomers, whose ”seeing” would no longer be hampered by the atmosphere.
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But scientists would also be able to learn about more practical things like the body`s responses to prolonged weightlessness and how plants grow in very low gravity. The shuttle would detect crop and timber diseases, insect plagues, map ocean currents, ”maintain a worldwide watch on air pollution,” even forecast the global production of food crops.
NASA reminded the public of the earlier ”spinoffs” of the space program, things like Teflon, Velcro and Corning Ware. The shuttle, it said, would only provide more modern miracles by allowing the manufacture of products that were difficult or impossible to make on Earth–more pure pharmaceuticals, better semiconductors, improved metal alloys, the list seemed endless.
The bravado was familiar. But to many of the younger engineers and scientists who had grown up watching the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo astronauts on television, something important was missing. Now that most of the real work on the shuttle program been contracted out to private industry, NASA had become a nine-to-five place, a cumbersome bureaucracy of paper-shufflers.
The unwieldiness was built in, since NASA`s major facilities were spread across the face of the Sunbelt. Twenty-five years before, it had seemed logical for the newly minted agency to locate its launching pads at the Air Force`s intercontinental ballistic missile test range at Cape Canaveral, Fla. It seemed just as natural to put its space vehicle development facility at what was then the Army`s Redstone Arsenal at Huntsville, Ala., where the German rocket team headed by Wernher von Braun had been laboring for years.
But the Johnson Space Center, the mission control and astronaut training facility, was built at neither of these places. Rep. Albert Thomas, a Texas Democrat who chaired the House appropriations subcommittee with authority over NASA`s budget, thought it ought to be in Houston, and so it was.
The far-flung NASA bureaucracy created both logistics and communications problems. It also engendered a hefty travel budget, more than $4.5 million for agency executives last year alone, as officials and engineers traveled constantly between NASA facilities from California to Maryland. One result of the agency`s political balkanization was more than miscommunications and delays; there also was an unnecessary and sometimes wasteful competition among the various installations.
`THE EMPHASIS WAS, LET`S KEEP TO THE SCHEDULE`
When the engineers at Marshall were told they had responsibility for developing a ”cheap and dumb” expendable external fuel tank for the space shuttle, for example, they balked at being assigned such an uninteresting and unimportant task. The finished tanks were much more complex and cost $30 million apiece, three times the anticipated price.
But the real disillusion was far less tangible. During the Apollo program, a former agency official said, there had been a strong sense of purpose, a conviction that NASA was ”doing something significant in the history of mankind. You wanted to do everything you could to make it work.”
The same was not true for the shuttle program. There, the former official said, ”the emphasis was no longer on let`s do it right. The emphasis was, let`s keep to the schedule. Everything was very budget dominated. To one degree or another, everybody felt that that was–is–a hell of a way to run a program.”
For many of those involved in the early years of the space program, NASA had been a lifelong career. But now the younger engineers and specialists began leaving in droves for private industry, which not only paid more but was where the real work was being done.
So great has been the turnover in recent years that many of the shuttle`s programs were not completed by the managers under which they began; some programs have had as many as four and five managers. NASA itself has had four top administrators over the last decade, and it may soon be given a fifth.
The current chief administrator, James Beggs, took an unpaid leave late last year after his indictment on charges that he conspired to defraud the government on a contract for an anti-aircraft gun in his previous job with General Dynamics. Beggs may soon be forced to step down.
As the public relations machine ground away, inside the agency it was becoming alarmingly apparent that NASA would be unable to meet the cost and performance goals it had set for the shuttle program at the urging of Congress. NASA had originally predicted 116 shuttle flights between 1981 and 1985. But more realistic estimates showed that the agency would be lucky to put 24 into orbit by the end of 1985.
A large part of the problem was research and development, but a substantial portion had to do with simple economics. NASA`s budget for fiscal 1971, the year the shuttle program was announced, had been a bare-bones $3.3 billion. By 1974, it had fallen to $3.1 billion, and though it would rise in the years to come, the increases were not enough to keep up with inflation. Its 1986 budget was $1.7 billion short of what would have been needed merely to maintain the same purchasing power the agency enjoyed in 1971.
Like his predecessors, President Reagan publicly supported the idea of a space shuttle. ”Just as the oceans opened up a new world for clipper ships and Yankee traders,” the President said during his State of the Union address in 1984, ”space hold enormous potential for commerce today.”
But the Reagan administration was even more committed to reducing the size of the federal deficit, and it privately stepped up pressure on NASA to transform the shuttle into an ”operational” vehicle that would begin to pay its own way.-MORE