Inspiration but Also a Question

The docking of the U.S. space shuttle Atlantis with the Russian space station Mir 245 miles above Earth represents both a great technological triumph and inspiring testimony to the distance the onetime foes have traveled in bridging their political differences. But that cannot dispel the uncertainty that clouds the American space effort.

Three decades after the manned space program began, NASA has launched a mission of bureaucratic cost-cutting as harrowing, in its own way, as any blastoff from Cape Canaveral. President Clinton backs a plan to trim NASA’s budget from $22 billion to $13 billion a year by the end of the decade, cutting 42,000 government and contractor jobs. Republicans are pushing for even deeper cuts.

Still, NASA plans seven more shuttle missions over the next two years and then to join Russia, Japan and European countries in lofting a permanent manned space station. Scientists complain that the huge costs of putting humans in space cannot be justified in light of the praiseworthy results of unmanned probes. But NASA’s hard-driving administrator, Daniel S. Goldin, urges the nation to press on with both kinds of missions. “NASA does not exist for scientists,” he has said. “If the space station is canceled, we walk away from the space program.”

Goldin knows that the tax-paying public thrills to “Star Trek”-like adventures, not to unmanned galactic voyages that take years. But where is the real payoff? At the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, which faces a 22% budget cut over four years, scientists are struggling to comply with Goldin’s dictum to do things “cheaper, better, faster.” Though there may not be enough money to complete the project, JPL technicians are dutifully constructing the $1.3-billion Cassini planetary probe, which would take 6 1/2 years to reach Saturn’s moon Titan in seeking clues to life’s origins in that satellite’s organic compounds.

JPL has mounted a project to produce low-cost miniaturized space probes yielding more bang for fewer bucks. That is a worthy effort, to bring business discipline to government workers used to a culture in which money was no object. But the President and Congress ultimately must come to grips with the difficult question of whether human space flight is worth it.