n545  0355  29 Aug 81
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    ADVANCE FOR SUNDAY
    By William Hines
    (c) 1981 Chicago Sun-Times (Field News Service)
    PASADENA, Calif. - As Voyager 2 heads away from Saturn and into a
53-month period of silence far out in the solar system, the question
of the future - if any - of deep-space missions haunts the Jet
Propulsion Laboratory.
    There seems to be no doubt the lab will have a piece of the action
if America has a future in deep space. But ample grounds exist for
wondering if there is any such future worth talking about.
    JPL had a leading role in the U.S. space program from the beginning.
It was this laboratory (then under Army control) that put together
the 31-pound Explorer 1, America's belated successful entry in the
space race.
    A picture of rocket expert Wernher von Braun, JPL Director William
H. Pickering and physicist James A. Van Allen, of Van Allen belt
fame, is a classic memento of the early Space Age. The date was Feb.
1, 1958; the place, the National Academy of Sciences in Washington;
the occasion, Explorer 1's successful completion of its first orbit
of Earth.
    Since then, JPL has opened the solar system to human exploration.
Its credits include fly-bys, orbiting flights and landings on six
bodies in the solar system (Mercury, Venus, the Earth's moon, Mars,
Jupiter and Saturn). Its futures book contains two more planetary
visits - to Uranus and Neptune - by Voyager 2, which cruised past
Saturn last week.
    But what is this $253 million engineering complex on a California
hillside going to do for an encore? As much as a budget-conscious
administration will allow it to do, certainly; nowhere near as much
as technologists here would like to do if they could.
    Without a trace of false modesty, the present director, Bruce
Murray, calls his lab the unrivaled center of ''world-class
engineering,'' the pinnacle of U.S. technology.
    There is precious little on the lab's plate these days, and what is
there has been trimmed and delayed by factors beyond the control of
anyone here. Far more than anything else, the multibillion-dollar
space shuttle is responsible for the low estate to which the
interplanetary space effort has fallen.
    This is ironic, because the promise of the shuttle was low-cost
rocket power that would make all kinds of space programs easy and
cheap.
    It hasn't turned out that way. JPL-based projects have been delayed,
cut back and even eliminated because the shuttle needed more money,
or couldn't lift the promised weight into deep space, or both.
    As a result, a spacecraft that should have been launched toward
Jupiter in January, 1982, to do prolonged exploration of that planet
and its moon system, will not be launched until 1986, '87 or '88.
What is left of this project, called Galileo, is less ambitious than
was planned five years ago.
    A Venus-orbiting radar explorer has likewise been delayed for
several years. And the U.S. half of an international program to
explore the sun's polar regions has disappeared.
    Murray, in an interview last week, bluntly termed promises made for
the shuttle ''a fake,'' and said whatever other case could be made
for the big airplane-like spacecraft, ''it's a lousy way to launch
interplanetary payloads.''
    Pickering, Murray's predecessor as lab director, agrees the National
Aeronautics and Space Administration made a mistake by forcing
shuttle launchings on the managers of the interplanetary program.
Like Murray, he prefers old-fashioned, non-reusable rockets.
    Director from 1954 to 1976 and now retired, Pickering supervised the
early successes and failures through which JPL evolved into the
world-class center it is today. Its triumphs in Pickering's time
included eight unmanned moon landings; three Mars fly-bys; one
orbital mission around Mars, and two fl
ghts past Venus, one of which
went on to visit Mercury not once but three times.
    Pickering also was in charge when the Viking Mars landers were built
and launched, but had left by the time they landed. And, of course,
he supervised the first four years of Voyager development that
culminated in twin launchings in the summer of 1977.
    Clearly, Pickering is entitled to his opinion about launching
spacecraft. His argument for using expendable rockets goes this way:
    ''I don't have to worry about launching from a moving platform in
space; I have a good, solid launching site in Florida.
    ''Sure, I need a bigger booster rocket instead of just upper stages,
but I have a feeling that as long as we're dealing with spacecraft of
about the size we use now - in the neighborhood of 1 ton - our
booster technology is in pretty good shape.
    ''Perhaps we'd be better off to continue to exploit that technology
rather than go off in this new (shuttle) direction.''
    (MORE)
    
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n546  0402  29 Aug 81
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    X X X NEW (SHUTTLE) DIRECTION.''
    Pickering and Murray are confident the lab will survive in some
form, but many of those who work here have qualms about just what
form. Murray said publicly last week that as interplanetary space
activity cools, JPL will take on increased work for the military.
    Under the military-oriented Reagan administration, this is the
survival instinct at work. But does it not raise the possibility of
military domination of a facility that has become great doing science
largely for science's sake?
    Murray says no, and Pickering agrees. Both express confidence that
JPL can control the force of military demands, and will be able to do
only the things it really wishes to do.
    ''People at CalTech (which manages JPL for NASA for a fee of $6.6
million a year) are very concerned about that,'' Murray said in an
interview.
    ''There's a valid issue abou  JP BV S 
ALSO FOR BEING PART OF A PRIVATE UNIVERSITY IN PEACETIME. I'm not
saying how I feel personally, but as an issue it needs to be
addressed.''
    The unquestioned and unparalleled excellence of the U.S.
interplanetary space program stems from the initiative of scientists
here; it is not something that someone else dreamed up and handed to
JPL to execute.
    Whether such imaginative folk will be inclined to weather a
half-decade or more of doldrums remains to be seen. The team that
built and flew trail-blazing spacecraft for almost a quarter-century
could not be easily re-assembled if its members drifted apart.
    The so-far triumphant flight of Voyager 2 through outer space is an
outgrowth of a CalTech graduate student's discovery that a rare
conjunction of outer planets in the 1970s would make it possible to
explore the entire solar system beyond the asteroid belt using a
single spacecraft.
    This developed into a program proposal called ''The Grand Tour,''
which had to be done about now or not at all until the middle of the
22nd century. Grand Tour didn't get off the ground, but a less
ambitious Voyager version did.
    Launched in July and September, 1977, the twin Voyager spacecraft
studied the mini-solar systems of Jupiter and Saturn in detail. Then
Voyager 1 went north out of the solar system while Voyager 2 headed
toward Uranus and Neptune. Pluto, the fifth target of the Grand Tour,
will not be visited at any time in the near future. JPL planners have
developed a ''wish list'' that envisions deep-space explorations as
far in the future as 2004. To which Murray just laughs.
    ''It's very good to do planning, but a long-range plan doesn't
exist. There is no U.S. future in space,'' he said.
    Lest that sound overly pessimistic, Murray explains that a future in
space comes into being when politicians in Washington approve
specific projects. And approvals these days are few and far between.
    It is a telling commentary on a once-vigorous space program that the
next big newsmaker from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory will not occur
for almost 4 1/2 years: the flight of Voyager 2 past the distant planet
Uranus.
    END
    
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a204  0928  29 Aug 81
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A Five-Year Hiatus in Space Exploration After Voyager
Laserphoto NY22
By ROBERT LOCKE
AP Science Writer
    PASADENA, Calif. (AP) - It began when Mariner 2 sailed past Venus on
Dec. 14, 1962.
    Then came the Rangers, Surveyors, Pioneers, Vikings and Voyagers
until the solar system was abuzz with American spaceships - robot
explorers that bolted free of Earth and looked on the wonders of
strange new worlds.
    Scarcely a year went by without an American machine probing the
frontier of the heavens.
    They watched the barren hell of Mercury. They tasted the sulfur
clouds and chemical fires of Venus. They sat in the raw, red dust of
Mars and searched in vain for life. They saw the psychedelic swirls of
the Jupiter's windblown clouds and watched volcanoes spew from a moon
called Io. And they looked into the dazzling rings of Saturn and
found rings inside rings inside rings.
    And now it is ending. For half a decade no new world will bare its
secrets for American spaceships.
    Now begins ''The Hiatus,'' as it is being called by scientists who
gathered this past week at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for Voyager
2's rendezvous with Saturn - last of the unbroken string of
explorations.
    ''It's something we've all been thinking about: This really is the
end,'' said Bradford A. Smith, a University of Arizona astronomer who
heads the Voyager photography team. ''It's an emotional experience.
It's sad.''
    Voyager 2 is the only American spaceship still en route to another
world. The ship is sailing away from a dramatic tour of Saturn that
included a triumphantly flawless pass just above the planet's churning
clouds Tuesday, a crippling and unexplained mishap that left its
cameras useless for three days and finally, on Friday, its apparently
successful repair by earthbound engineers a billion miles away.
    After covering another 1.7 billion miles, Voyager will arrive in
January 1986 at greenish, gas-filled Uranus. Three years later the
veteran explorer is due at Neptune, which appears a little more than
blue-green disc in even the largest telescopes on Earth.
    ''We're not going to get anything new for five years,'' said JPL's
Richard Terrile of the Voyager team. ''And what we'll get in five
years will be from a mission that was launched in 1977 and was planned
in 1972.
    ''We're harvesting trees we planted 10 years ago . . . and there's
nothing else growing.''
    The five-year break cannot be filled. It takes too long to plan,
build and sail a spaceship across the incredible distances of space.
    Missions of all kinds have been proposed and rebuffed, victims of
delays and cost overruns with the space shuttle, of ever-tightening
federal purse strings and of some officials who argue the money could
be better used at home.
    Two Voyagers that have explored two worlds apiece, with two more
coming up for Voyager 2, cost a total of about $500 million. Ellis
Miner, Voyager's No. 2 scientist, said it's been costing each American
about 20 cents a year.
    JPL director Bruce Murray, who fights budget battles for the world's
premier center of deep space exploration, says, ''Now we're down to
just Galileo and they keep trying to kill that.''
    The mission, once planned for next year, is still funded but now
scheduled to launch in 1985. It will take two years for the spaceship
to arrive at Jupiter, where will orbit the giant planet and drop an
instrumented probe down into the churning, colorful atmosphere.
    Planning money also continues for a Venus orbiter that might be
launched in 1988.
    But frequent pleas to send a spacecraft to chase and probe Halley's
comet, most spectacular and famous of the comets, have so far fallen
on deaf federal ears. NASA Administrator James Beggs, who visited JPL
during the Voyager encounter, said the comet chase isn't dead yet and
options are still being considered.
    Halley's trip around the sun and out to the far edges of the solar
system brings it past Earth once every 76 years. When it returns in
February 1986, it will be met by Russian, Japanese and European Space
Agency spacecraft. Unless NASA acts this year, Americans will watch
from the sidelines.
    Beggs vowed that America remains committed to exploring the solar
system. However, he added, ''It would be nice to go back and have the
kind of money we had in the late '60s, but I don't think that's going
to happen.''
    Murray said, ''If they don't do anything at all, then we're doomed -
doomed in the sense that the momentum will be lost. The team (of
scientists and engineers who have spent their professional lives with
the robots) will be dispersed.
    ''There will be no new encounters for so long that I think the
American people will forget their own greatness.''
    He worries that the next generation of Americans may look at museum
replicas of the Voyagers and Pioneers and Mariners much as they look
at the ruins of Greece and Rome: ''It will be part of the past, a
past that no longer connects to the future. They'll admire them (as
something that's) beautiful, but done by a different people - not by
us.''
    ''I just can't imagine how in the hell we got into this
predicament,'' said Voyager scientist Larry Soderblom.
    NASA officials like to talk of space exploration in terms of
''spinoffs,'' from non-stick frying pans to weather forecasting.
    But most scientists seem to agree with Soderblom: ''The people who
are selling the program don't understand the real values - the value
is philosophical. The exploratory challenge is the real thing.''
    
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