SPACE.com -- Space 1999: NASA's Annus Horribilis


	Space 1999: NASA's Annus Horribilis By Paul Hoversten Washington Bureau Chief posted: 01:08 pm ET 22 December 1999

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WASHINGTON - Two botched robot missions to Mars. A comatose space telescope. A shuttle fleet grounded for months at a time. And a space station in limbo.

It has been a difficult year for NASA as the agency closes the books on the final decade of the world's first century of spaceflight.

The jokes by editorial cartoonists and late night comics over a spate of highly publicized failures toward year's end are stinging more than usual at an agency accustomed to success.

"NASA's not the kind of agency that has typical years," says Lori Garver, NASA associate administrator for policy and planning. "We're not like the housing or transportation departments. We do some great things and we have some very visible disappointments."

Disappointments have overshadowed the accomplishments so far this year, space watchers say.

"Certainly NASA has had a lot in the success column this year but the public seems to be more focused on the failures and that's putting a little bit of a blot on NASA's armor," says Marcia Smith, a space policy analyst at the Congressional Research Service.

Nowhere is that blot more visible than on NASA's latests attempts to explore Mars. Back-to-back failures of the Mars Climate Orbiter probe in September and the Mars Polar Lander in December are forcing officials to rethink their strategy of visiting and studying that planet. Together the probes cost nearly $360 million.

"Its been a rough year for (NASA) and I think theyve got some tough questions that need to be asked that I dont see them answering."

At least three review panels - two in-house, one independent - are looking into the probes' failures and trying to hammer out a policy for Mars that not only makes good financial, technical and scientific sense but which also stands a decent chance of succeeding.

Time in this case is on NASA's side. The next opportunity to go to Mars won't occur until 2001 when Earth and Mars are properly aligned.

Silent since its final approach on Mars' surface on December 3, the Mars Polar Lander, seen above in an artist's intepretation, was the second failure failure by NASA to explore the Red Planet in 1999. In September, the Mars Climate Orbiter also vanished.

While the low-cost Mars probes never had a chance to do any work, the big-budget Hubble Space Telescope finally conked out in November after nearly a decade of stunning observations. The $3 billion Hubble shut itself down after it lost the last of its working gyroscopes.

Scientists knew back in February that Hubble was just one failure away from quitting but there was little that could be done then to launch a rescue mission.

That's because NASA's most high-profile program - its space shuttle fleet - has been unusually quiet for most of the year. Only three shuttles got off the ground in 1999, the fewest since NASA returned to flight in 1988 after the Challenger accident. And all three had problems.

The first, Discovery on STS-96 in May, had to be rolled back to the shop for repairs after a hail storm at the launch pad damaged its huge, bullet-shaped external tank.

The next, Columbia on STS-93in July, was plagued by problems in flight, including a short circuit. It later was found to have bad wiring that effectively grounded the fleet for three months.

The last shuttle, Discovery, which is flying now on STS-103 to fix the hibernating Hubble, had its launch delayed nine times over a two-month period.

Among the problems were dented fuel lines, damaged cables and suspicious welds.

"It's been a rough year for the agency and I think they've got some tough questions that need to be asked that I don't see them answering," says Rich Kolker, a space policy analyst in Merritt Island, Fla., for the non-profit Clear Lake Group.

Kolker fears NASA's shuttle managers are slipping into the same sort of complacency and carelessness that presaged the 1967 Apollo 1 fire that killed three astronauts and the 1986 Challenger disaster that killed seven.

"Is what we're seeing just a bunch of isolated incidents and NASA's been unlucky or is it a pattern that could serve as a warning for something else?

With Challenger and Apollo 1, there were warning signs if NASA could have just seen them," he says.

NASA insists it is doing all it can to make flying the shuttle safer.

The Hubble Repair Mission, is currently under way. On Monday, December 20, Discovery crew members Steven L. Smith (foreground) and Claude Nicollier checked out their space suits.

Though missions this year were few, officials say, there were some notable firsts.

Eileen Collins became NASA's first woman commander aboard Columbia. Her flight deployed the Chandra X-ray Observatory, the third of NASA's four Great Observatories and at 50,162 pounds the heaviest payload ever hauled to space on a shuttle.

On the flight before that, Discovery performed the first docking with the two-piece International Space Station. The shuttle's astronauts toted more than 3,600 pounds in supplies, ranging from food and clothes to laptop computers and cameras, to be used by the first station crew.

When that first crew will go is anyone's guess. They were to be launched in January 2000. But until the Russians put up the so-called Service Module - the crew quarters that provide the life support system for the station - no one can live on the station. The station's entire assembly sequence hinges on the fate of the Service Module, which now looks to be ready no earlier than next spring.

Artists interpretation of Chandra X-Ray Telescope

The highlights were more bountiful this year for space science.

After eight years of work, Hubble scientists for the first time determined how fast the universe is expanding - fulfilling a key goal for the telescope when it was launched nearly 10 years ago.

Astronomers also saw for the first time a distant planet passing in front of its star, providing direct proof of the existence of planet outside our solar system. Up to that point, the existence of such planets could only be inferred from the gravitational wobble of the parent star.

And Mars Global Surveyor, the lone operating spacecraft at Mars, turned in the first 3-D global map of the planet from orbit.

Closer to home, the $1 billion Terra spacecraft, the flagship of NASA's Earth Observing System, was launched into orbit Dec. 18 to study Earth's climate and environmental changes from space.

Click here to see animation of the Terra launch.

While Terra may not be the sort of mission that fires the public's imagination, Smith says, the public does seem intent on bashing NASA either.

"This is not much different than the early 1990s when the shuttle fleet was grounded for five months due to fuel leaks, when Hubble's mirror was defective and when the Mars Observer was lost," Smith says. "Then the Hubble repair mission came along (in 1993) and put NASA back on a pedestal. These things go in cycles."

If anything, the cycle now is on the upswing, NASA's Garver says.

"We read the headlines. We read the cartoons. You take those things in stride," she says. "But there's a very public show of support for space exploration and I think people are thankful for a public space agency that wears its heart on its sleeve."

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