From: utzoo!decvax!cca!Tom@sri-unix Newsgroups: net.space Title: Article-I.D.: sri-unix.1893 Posted: Fri Jun 25 13:57:19 1982 Received: Mon Jun 28 05:57:07 1982 n543 0347 25 Jun 82 BC-STATION-06-25 By Richard Gilluly (c) 1982 The Baltimore Sun (Field News Service) The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has revived the idea of a permanent manned space station. In outlining the idea, NASA chief James M. Beggs said the space station would be the next logical step after the agency's shuttle spacecraft becomes fully operational - which could be soon if the fourth and final shakedown mission of the shuttle, scheduled for liftoff Sunday, is successful. The space station ''would be small at first, assembled in orbit with modules carried to space by the shuttle,'' he said. The cost of establishing the first small station, perhaps by 1990, would be from $3 billion to $5 billion, according to a NASA fact sheet released in connection with Beggs' announcement, which was made Wednesday before a joint session of the Economic Club of Detroit and the Engineering Society of Detroit. The idea of a permanent space station was proposed in connection with the shuttle in the early '70s, but was deferred along with other space proposals when the program was cut back. Beggs said the space station could greatly improve mankind's ability not only to assess the impact of Earth activities, but to launch probes of Mars and Venus that could lead to a better understanding of the future evolution of the Earth and how it developed from the solar nebula, the diffuse mass of hot gases from which the planets are thought to have condensed. A space station also would improve commercial applications of space technology, including the gravity-less processing of materials and the servicing of communications satellites, he added. He said the stationwk5r tpe shuttle because the shuttle is an ideal vehicle with which to construct it. The shuttle lifts off like a rocketship and then returns to Earth to land like an airplane, and is able to carry large cargoes into space. It is man's first almost wholly reusable spacecraft. NASA spokesmen say the first space station would have a crew of three or four astronauts and scientists, but eventually as many as 12 crew members could be accommodated. The crew might spend as long as three months in space, and they would be taken to and from the station via the shuttle. Beggs emphasized that the station would not be a successor to the shuttle - which, he said, is a transportation system - but rather a successor to Skylab, a manned station launched in 1973 for scientific experimentation. Skylab finally re-entered the atmosphere and disintegrated because NASA had no way to boost it into a permanent orbit. The proposed space station would be equipped with maneuvering rockets which would allow it to stay in orbit indefinitely. Besides Skylab, the Soviets have operated a space station, Salyut 6, since 1977, which has accommodated five Soviet crews as well as 11 visiting crews from Soviet bloc nations. Salyut 7, recently launched, is now occupied by cosmonauts and, according to Biggs, may ''represent a larger, more sophisticated system that would move the Soviet Unon another step forward in its dominance in near-Earth space.'' Sen. William Proxmire (D, Wis.), a frequent critic of NASA proposals, wasn't available for comment, but a spokesman said it would be safe to say he would be ''negative'' toward the proposal. The spokesman, Tom VanDerVoort, said that now is a particularly inappropriate time for NASA to propose a space station in view of what he said is the uncertainty of the shuttle garnering enough commercial payloads to become a paying proposition. In connection with earlier suggestions that NASA might propose a space station, Proxmire has said the space agency ''has a bias toward huge and very expensive projects. It proceeds regardless of real need.'' Terence Finn, a member of NASA's space station task force, a group studying the possibility of deploying such a station, said Proxmire's criticisms are not necessarily valid. He admitted that NASA is starting with the idea of a space station and then working from there to specify its exact purposes, but he said this approach is preferable. The reason, he said, is that all the potential users will have ''input'' into how it is constructed. It will be a station designed from the very start to serve the purposes of its users instead of the other way around, he said. Among the potential users now being approached are military, scientific and commercial interests. But he stressed that the space station is not yet at the proposal stage. The next step, he suggested, would be more intensive studies than the preliminary ones now being conducted. These more intensive studies might cost $10 million to $15 million as contrasted with the $3 million or so now being spent on the preliminary studies. Finn said the European Space Agency, the Japanese and the Canadians had expressed interest in participating in a U.S. space station program. END nyt-06-25-82 0644edtt *************** [I understand that some of the various space groups are trying to do a mail campaign to Reagan and Keyworth to support this station --Tom]