Robin McKie

Underfunding, unnecessary errors and a growing debt have left America's space agency on the brink of collapse, reports Robin McKie.

AMERICA's space agency NASA - once a synonym for US high-tech supremacy - is struggling for survival. In the last few days, it has lost its chief, been revealed to have a $5 billion debt, and been blasted by a committee, including several Nobel laureates, for its inept management.

Rudderless, and crippled with debt, the agency that put Americans on the Moon is wobbling like a stricken spacecraft in orbit. Few observers can now see the National Aeronautics and Space Administration surviving - at least not in its current form.

The agency's main hopes lie with persuading Congress to bail it out. It is estimated it needs $8bn to fulfil its commitments, an improbable sum given that America is on a war footing and has priorities far removed from space travel. Instead, cutting costs and missions seems the agency's likely future.

It will be 'like throwing children to the wolves', chief administrator Daniel Goldin admitted last week, before he handed in his notice.

Most blame NASA's woes on Goldin's philosophy of pushing through 'faster, cheaper' unmanned science missions while promoting the expensive construction of the manned International Space Station. In the former category, most projects were so underfunded and ineptly managed they failed. For example, in one 10-week period in 1999, NASA lost a Mars orbiter; a spacecraft intended to land on the Red Planet; and two robot probes designed to burrow into Martian soil to search for water.

In one case - the Mars orbiter - the mission failed because engineers simply mistook metric measurements for those in imperial units. The debacle was blamed on lack of resources.

By contrast, the space station - being put together 250 miles above Earth - has sucked in cash like a black hole. Originally touted as costing $17bn, its pricetag has spiralled to$22bn, and is expected to reach $30bn.

And for this, America will get little more than an orbiting Portacabin. The ISS requires a crew of three to operate its solar panels, power supplies and other services, while a further three were expected to run zero-gravity experiments and carry out research.

But now NASA can afford to supply only the first of these astronautical trios, so that for the foreseeable future - at least five years - the station will have no one on board to carry out the research. At best, its skeleton crew will be able to carry out 20 hours of experiments a week.

Criticism of NASA will reach a peak this week when the US Congress's science committee will debate a report about the agency's space station activities, which blasts its 'deficiencies in management structure, institutional culture, cost estimating and program control' and concludes NASA cannot move forward 'without radical reform'. One plan would be to strip the agency of running its space shuttle, and give it to a private operator. NASA would simply pay a fee to run missions on the spaceship it had developed.

As one official at the European Space Agency - which has become irate about NASA's inability to meet its obligations - pointed out, the idea is reminiscent of the Railtrack fiasco in Britain. 'In fact, NASA is just like Railtrack, except it operates spaceships not trains,' he said.

Source: OBSERVER UK 04/11/2001