The Magic Is Back!

On a thundering pillar of fire, Discovery carries the nation's hopes aloft again

By Leon Jaroff Monday, Oct. 10, 1988
    • RED MORGAN

    Oct. 10, 1988 TIME Cover: Whew! America Returns to Space

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    But behind NASA's confident facade, reality was beginning to set in. Beset by technical problems and delayed launches, the agency reduced its estimate of annual launches from 60 to 40, then to 24, but was unable to attain even that. Given the shuttle program's tremendous overhead and fewer flights, the cost for each launch rose from a promised $10 million to as high as $300 million. In a frantic effort to accelerate its schedule, NASA began to cut corners. Officials at the Marshall Space Flight Center responsible for certifying the launchworthiness of the external tank, the boosters and the main engines of each shuttle began issuing more and more waivers on questionable "criticality" items like the O rings that had shown signs of erosion and charring on earlier flights. In fact Challenger was flown with at least four procedural waivers.

    The Challenger explosion confirmed what some critics had been saying from the outset: the U.S. had grievously miscalculated in putting all its space eggs into the shuttle basket. The Pentagon, long suspicious of the shuttle's reliability, wrangled appropriations from Congress to build eleven Titan 34-D rockets for military missions. The nation's scientists, for their part, despaired as the eagerly awaited shuttle launch of the Hubble space telescope, which could revolutionize astronomy by extending our view to the edges of the universe, fell years behind schedule. Crucial deadlines were missed for shuttle launches of the planetary probes Magellan, designed to map the surface of Venus, Galileo, to survey Jupiter and its moons, and Ulysses, to conduct solar studies from a polar orbit around the sun.

    As a result of its difficulties, NASA has lost potential commercial clients to the European Space Agency, which will put payloads into orbit aboard unmanned Ariane rockets at bargain prices (cost: about $40 million per payload). Even more galling was last month's decision by the Reagan Administration to allow China to launch two U.S. communications satellites, a move that stunned the fledgling U.S. commercial rocket industry. "That hurt, and hurt hard," says an executive of one U.S. firm. "We wanted those birds."

    Belatedly aware of the folly of total dependence on manned launch vehicles to deploy spacecraft, the U.S. has been forced to play a catch-up game. Since January 1986, the Soviets have launched scores of satellites, sent two / scientific probes to Mars, and ferried a stream of cosmonauts between the earth and the space station Mir -- all with the aid of antiquated but tried- and-true expendable rockets. In the process, they have pushed far ahead of the U.S. in knowledge of the effects of extended space flight on humans.

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