Blueprint For Disaster

U.s. Space Shuttle Program Had Flaws From The Beginning


WASHINGTON — For those who gathered there that autumn weekend, the little town of Tullahoma, Tenn., must have seemed at first an unlikely destination. Among the travelers were some of the country`s most inventive minds--white-haired German rocket experts who had given the country its first guided missiles, key executives from the aerospace industry, a few senior Air Force officers and some top officials of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

But Tullahoma, halfway between Nashville and Chattanooga, is a placid, pretty place, and the congregants had come in search of peace and quiet. At the direction of the president, they were there to chart the future course of the American space program.

What finally emerged from the discussions and debates was the first rough draft of the space shuttle program that was put on indefinite hold a month ago when the shuttle Challenger exploded in mid-air, scattering itself and the bodies of its seven crew members, including a New Hampshire schoolteacher named Sharon Christa McAuliffe, across the chill waters of the Florida Gulfstream.

As a presidential commission and a Senate subcommittee seek the causes of that tragedy, serious questions are being raised about the haste with which NASA sent the Challenger aloft in near-freezing temperatures on the morning of Jan. 28.

Whatever errors or omissions the investigations may eventually uncover, present and former space agency officials describe a program crippled from its conception at Tullahoma in the fall of 1969 by a lack of time and resources, shortcuts in research and design, interagency bickering, foreign competition and a multitude of technological conundrums.

The previous July, while most of the civilized world held its breath, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin Jr. had stepped onto the surface of the moon, fulfilling a promise made by President John F. Kennedy nearly a decade before. What those assembled at Tullahoma feared most was that Americans might choose to see the historic feat as a culmination rather than a beginning, and they had reason for concern.

In addition to the ethereal wonder of the moon landing itself, the Apollo astronauts had given the world a priceless gift, a televised self-portrait of a surprisingly small blue-green ball suspended in the inky void of space. The photographs were transfixing, but they also brought home the reality of a human race trapped on a fragile and sorely troubled planet.

Halfway around the globe, American involvement in the Vietnam War had reached its peak, and so had the antiwar protests in the streets of the nation`s cities. Richard Nixon was the new president, but Lyndon Johnson`s war on poverty was only beginning to achieve full flower. On the far horizon, the faint beginnings of the environmental movement could be detected, spurred by the astronauts` photos of ``spaceship Earth.``

Since the launching of the first Soviet Sputnik a dozen years before, the American space program had been a cause for national urgency and, later, a source of national pride. But more than any other, the 1960s had been a decade in which momentous national issues were addressed, and many had begun to question the wisdom of expending many millions of tax dollars on huge rockets whose useful lifetimes could be measured in minutes.

The manned space program was all but over. Six more Apollo missions were planned to different parts of the moon`s surface--the Fra Mauro region, the Apennine Mountains, the Descartes Highlands. But the last, Apollo 17, was scheduled for December, 1972. After that would come four Skylab missions, put together from leftover Apollo parts and mainly intended to measure the effects of prolonged weightlessness. Already congressional critics were asking whether Skylab was an efficient use of resources or merely an effort by NASA to maintain its public presence.

To the men at Tullahoma, manned space flight was a biological inevitability. Once the human organism became used to the benefits of weightlessness it would never again be content to dwell in what one of them called ``the abysmal pit of gravity.`` The question of the hour was not whether humans belonged in space, but how best to continue their quest.


A permanent moon colony was one possibility, but it was quickly discarded as far too expensive and impractical as well. The moon landings had provided science with some important information, including tantalizing evidence that the moon was not merely a chunk of the Earth that had broken away and spun into orbit. But further manned moon landings would have relatively little scientific usefulness and no commercial value at all.