COVER STORY

Rising ambitions and falling budgets

R. RAMACHANDRAN

ACCORDING to NASA, the shuttle's orbiter frame is good enough to last a100 flights. And all the four orbiters - Columbia, Atlantis, Discovery and Endeavour - had three-fourths of their lives left. This would keep the shuttle operational for decades beyond 2012, the year it is targeted to be phased out and replaced with a new reusable launch vehicle.

However, while four phases of shuttle safety upgrades, over a five-year period, have been proposed to operate the shuttle until 2012 (costing a total of $1.6 billion), the upgradation programme has been declared ineffective by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) of the United States government. In its report on the budget for fiscal 2003, the OMB observed that this was despite the fact that the shuttle programme had received the requested funding of $3.7 billion for fiscal 2002 from the total NASA budget of about $15 billion in 2003.

A cut of $600 million in the budget for fiscal 2003, bringing the proposed spending down to $1 billion, has impacted the upgrade programme, which is where NASA could absorb the cuts without compromising on other programmes, including the International Space Station (ISS). In fact, the safety upgrade plans have been deferred for some years now due to the nearly flat NASA budget since 1990 and the competing requirements of keeping the shuttle operational at the rate of four or five flights a year without compromising on safety (each flight requires 1.2 million test procedures), and keeping the ISS assembly operations going so as to get complete its core by 2004. While the U.S. is committed to the ISS programme, a domestic law puts a ceiling on the total ISS spending, at $25 billion. But the cost overrun of $4.8 billion in the ISS programme, was bound to impact NASA's other programmes, particularly safety upgrades. In 2002, the proposed spending of $1.85 billion on the ISS had to be slashed to $1.7 billion in order to fund other programmes.

Last year, the cutback on safety upgrades invited strong criticism from the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP). The ASAP Annual Report for 2001, while recommending the retention of many safety upgrades and criticising their deferment, said: "The current and proposed budgets are not sufficient to improve or even maintain the safety risk level of operating the space shuttle and the ISS. Restorations and improvements cannot be accomplished under current budgets and spending priorities."

In an April 2002 testimony to the House panel on space and aeronautics, Richard D. Bloomberg, the then chairman of ASAP, observed: "(T)he defined requirements for an acceptable level of risk are always met (by NASA). Unfortunately, as systems continue to age... they may fail more often and with new and unanticipated failure modes. The well-established characterisation of the system is no longer fully valid. The ASAP believes that the space shuttle is heading in that direction. That concern is not for the present flight or the next or perhaps the one after that. In fact, one of the roots of my concern is that nobody will know for sure when the safety margin has been eroded too far. All of my instincts, however, suggest that the current approach is planting the seeds for future danger."

However, for fiscal 2004, the budget has been raised to $15.5 billion, with the shuttle programme receiving $3.97 billion, an increase of $600 to $700 million. In the wake of the Columbia tragedy, however, this increase, which is about the cost of sending a shuttle up once, would be consumed by the overhauling of the three orbiters that have been grounded.

Budgetary cuts and upgrades has been not the only issue. The funding cutbacks have also impacted NASA's workforce adversely. In a 2000 report on the space shuttle, the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) observed: "Since 1995, the shuttle workforce has decreased by more than one-third to about 1,800. The shuttle programme has identified many key areas that are not sufficiently staffed by qualified workers and the remaining workforce shows signs of overwork and fatigue. (A)ccording to NASA, it poses significant shuttle programme flight safety risks."

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