The MacNeil/Lehrer Report; Military Possibilities of the Space Shuttle

Funding for this program has been provided by this station and other public television stations and by grants from Exxon Corporation, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and AT&T and the Bell System Companies. Good evening. The Columbia Space Shuttle completed its first day in orbit today, apparently performing flawlessly.

It will land tomorrow afternoon at Edwards Air Force Base in California, the first spacecraft in history to be flown back to a conventional Earth landing. The astronauts, Young and Crippen, carried out flight tests sent back TV pictures and talked to the White House. Vice President George Bush told them their mission was a forerunner of great things to come. Just what those great things are is a matter of debate, now that the costly, long-delayed shuttle is safely in orbit. The Soviet Union has consistently charged that the shuttle represents a big military push into space. Some American critics say the shuttle will carry the arms race into outer space. Tonight, the military possibilities of the space shuttle. Jim? Robin, there is no question the Defense Department has a big stake in the space shuttle Columbia. Of the first 75 shuttle trips to space, it and its sister ships will take, 21 are already reserved for the Pentagon. Air Force and other military planners have one major use in mind. For now, to launch new reconnaissance, otherwise known as spy satellites, and repair those already up there. Satellites could be used eventually for sophisticated early warning of missile attacks and for

advanced and improved navigation and communications for ships, planes and other military equipment. Research is also underway on laser and particle beam weapons that could be employed from space, if it ever should come to that. The Soviet Union is known to be working on killer satellites, satellites that seek out other satellites and destroy them, presumably ways of getting the Soviets killer satellites before they could get ours could be employed from the space shuttle. All of this, and other military potential, caused then defense secretary Harold Brown to tell Congress last year the space shuttle was essential to U.S. military planning for the future. Robin? The former defense secretary, who is also a former secretary of the Air Force, is with us this evening. Mr. Brown is now visiting professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Mr. Secretary James Van Allen, the former NASA scientist, said recently that the military use of the shuttle is going to be dominant, so why not be honest and call it a military program? Is he right?

The shuttle was developed and will be operated principally by NASA. It will carry, can carry, either military payloads or civil payloads. Space after all is a place, it's not a function and a shuttle is a way to get things there. It can get things there to carry out civil functions. It can get things there to carry out military functions. NASA is the organization, properly in my judgment, charged with developing it and doing the initial operation. You say initial operation. Ultimately will the Air Force take over the operation of the shuttle? It will operate those missions which carry military payloads. But it won't take over the administration of the shuttle program? There's no particular reason for it too, in terms of the program itself. It depends, I suppose, on the nature of the funding pattern and the nature of the political winds that blow. There's a perfectly legitimate and indeed legally established function for a civilian space agency in the Space Act of 1958.

Do you see those political winds blowing in the direction that there would be more Pentagon involvement with the running or running arbiter? Well, without getting into the rights or wrongs of the matter, it's clear that the Pentagon is better funded, and the Defense Department is better funded than most other agencies. That was claimed to be the case, even in past administrations. Whatever it was, it's more so now, and who decides what kind of a payload goes up there depends largely on who can afford to pay both for the development and production of the payload, and also for the recurring launch costs, which will continue to be considerable, even with the shuttle, even with a reusable spacecraft. You testified last year about the practical military uses, the immediately practical military uses of the shuttle. Could you just enumerate those two systems? They're not very different from what we've been talking about in a practical sense now for 25 years, and there are the things, some of the things that Jim Lehrer mentioned: reconnaissance, surveillance, communications, early warning. How in a practical sense would

the shuttle be used for those things? Well, it would put up the payloads that do those things. I don't, it's not proper for me to go into the details of how such payloads work, but each of them, in the case of reconnaissance, surveillance and early warning, look at the surface of the Earth to see what they can see or hear or otherwise detect there. The communication satellites operate as receivers and transmitters. The principal argument for using the shuttle for those military or corresponding civil purposes, and I'll leave it to others to say the first things about what those civil purposes are, the main argument for the shuttle has been that it both allows you to put up larger payloads for the same amount of money and also by virtue of its size and by virtue of being able to carry people, also will allow you to do some unspecified things that you

haven't thought of before. I think there's some merit to both those arguments. The merit of the first one, the lower price, is eroded, of course, by the length and time and the overruns that have gone on in its development, and it's still a developmental vehicle. It's going to cost a lot more money, but in the end, I think probably it will be somewhat cheaper per pound than expendable boosters would have been. Is one of the practical uses that you could also go up and collect one of these reconnaissance satellites and bring it back down to the Earth and do anything you wanted to do to it? Or you can repair it, you can repair it in orbit with people. By taking it on board and ... Yes. Yes. And of course, preliminary experiments of this kind were related to this. We're done with earlier U.S. spacecraft, and of course, the Soviets have a semi-permanent space station to which they bring people and do things. What do you think of the more visionary military uses of the shuttle that have been talked about? Well, that's what I think of them.

They're more visionary, and I don't necessarily mean that in a laudatory sense. Death rays, particle beams, anti-ballistic missile capabilities. It is possible to design on paper such systems. The question that I've always asked myself, and when I had the authority, asked of those who were trying to sell such systems, was in what way can you do these things better by using space, or in fact do you want to do them at all? There is, in my judgment, no doubt that you can send up spacecraft, or equip spacecraft already sent up with laser beams. Laser beams to defend themselves, that's easiest of all, to defend other satellites considerably harder, but probably feasible, or even to, in principle, to destroy ballistic missiles. Conceivable, but in my judgment, not practical in that case, at least not for decades

and not without costs running into the $100 billion range, so that those schemes are, as you said, more visionary. In my judgment, it would be a mistake to promote a race to do that with the Soviets. On the other hand, it's necessary to recall that the Soviets have had six or eight tests of an anti-satellite system. The killer satellites, not using lasers or death rays, just using ordinary means. It would be very damaging to our military posture, which depends upon some of these capabilities of satellites now up there. If anti-satellite warfare should begin, and I suppose we could retaliate, in fact, in my tenure as Secretary of Defense, I insisted that we go forward with some anti-satellite capability to act in part as a deterrent. But from the U.S. point of view, partly because we depend rather substantially on space

for some things more than the Soviets do, I believe that the most desirable situation is for neither side, to engage in destruction of the other satellites. There have been preliminary discussions toward an agreement of that sort, as often happens. That one, those got to a degree bogged down in legalisms, definitions, and so forth. But again, in my judgment, it's in the long-range interest of the United States that active warfare, not extend to space. Well, thank you. Jim? There are critics who strongly, strongly object to any heavy defense involvement in the space program, particularly the shuttle, and one of those critics is Bernard Feld, Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Editor of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. Professor Feld, what bothers you about the military in space? Are you concerned about space wars?

Well, in principle, I agree with practically everything Secretary Brown said. I'm not concerned with space wars. I think it's a Buck Rogers kind of thing that is much easier to talk about, and in fact, is being talked about a great deal, rather responsibly, and would be in practice almost impossible to carry out in any sensible way. What I'm afraid of is not only the tremendous waste, which is going to go into various space enterprises if they're regarded as a primarily of military interest, and this seems to be a direction in which we're moving for a variety of reasons, but also that it is, in some sense, a very destabilizing situation and dangerous. That is, if we try to emulate what we think the Russians are doing or what we think the Russians may be thinking of doing or what we think the Russians may be capable of doing four or five years from now, and then the Russians in turn emulate what they think we're

about to do or have done, then we'll get into this back and forth increasing competition, which could actually lead into an outbreak of hostilities. It seems to me that space is of great interest from a technical point of view, although I would think that there are other things that I would do with scarce resources if I were given the choice right now, but let's assume that we want to do these things and with a space shuttle, there are some rather interesting things that can be done technically, but they can be done so much better and so much more easily and so much more efficiently in cooperation with the Russians than in competition with the Russians, and that seems to me that we are both, we would both be extremely stupid to go on all alone, each with our own programs, looking over our shoulders at the others and convinced that somehow or other everything we do has got to be done in a relatively antagonistic way towards

them and vice versa. Well, let's take the anti-satellite device that Secretary Brown was just talking about. The Russians have this capability and he says that the United States should get into that in order to prevent the Russians from destroying our satellites. Do you think that is an escalation on our part or is that just good common sense on our part? Well, I venture we have that capability now too, or very close to it, and it doesn't take a sophisticated laser beam or death ray of any kind to damage a satellite. You fly at other satellites next to it and reach out with a hammer and bang on it and you've damaged it sufficiently. I mean, sophistication is not what it seems to me what it's called for in this case. And sophistication should be reserved for really technically demanding tasks and not simple ones. Do you feel that the military needs or the military concerns truly have overwhelmed all others in terms of the space shuttle program thus far?

Well, I think thus far overwhelmed may be a slightly strong term, but it gets, it's in the right direction, it seems to me that we have spent far, far more effort not only monetary but also technical effort in people and capabilities on the military aspects. The people involved in the scientific aspects have been willing to go along because the military money is what gets that shuttle up there, what gets the spacecraft up there. If you can sneak an interesting experiment into it at the same time, you're very happy. But in the meanwhile, it really is, in my view, has been and I'm afraid continues to be primarily a military rather than a technical scientific enterprise. Well, Secretary Brown says it really all the shuttle is, is a delivery device. What you do, once you get up there, can be used for civilian purposes, can be used for

military purposes, the shuttle itself is not a weapon. Well, that's true, the shuttle itself is not a weapon, it's what goes up into the shuttle. Likewise, you know, you can do most of these things without the man, but you put the man up because there is some primarily military interest in having manned orbiting vehicles. I'm not saying that this is avoidable because the Russians have been doing it for some time and unfortunately in the world in which we live, if they do it, we almost have to. What I am saying is that we would both be, it would be to our mutual interest, how much greater mutual interest if we both did these things together. Thank you. Robin? Now scientist who's been involved with the space program since NASA was founded in 1958. He's Dr. Robert Jastrow, founder and director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City. Dr. Jastrow was chairman of the NASA committee which set the scientific objectives for the moon exploration.

Dr. Jastrow, has the American public been deceived a little into us led into thinking this was primarily a civilian scientific project when it is primarily a military one? I think no one has been deceived except for some self-deception on the part of my scientific colleagues. A few facts are helpful here and the first one is that the military share of the shuttle's payloads from 1985, that's five years, is 26%. It's by no means primarily a military transport system. And the second point I think to emphasize is that this is a transport system that plays a role in our defense and our economy analogous to that of the railroad system or the telephone system in the country. It's not an expensive foible to indulge the whims of some of my friends in the academic community. Now when you have an infrastructure that's been developed to satisfy a gut feeling on the part of Americans that they need to operate in an area of the environment in which a potentially hostile power is mounting a clearly military kind of program and you also have an enormous

dollar in sense of return in communications and earth resources in all of these other commercial applications, then it's possible to do some interesting science at very low cost because it rides on the back of these other motives and it uses all the technology that's been done and that has in fact been the way the program has developed. So to complain about it is biting the hand that feeds the science, is that what you're doing? I think it's the product of an unrealistic attitude that tends to be generated among people who live in a creative way, that you know the taxpayer's money is there for them to spend for their intellectual interests. Well how would you rank the military and commercial and scientific uses of the shuttle? Well in the shuttle's payload, 26% at this time is a military and the remainder is divided equally about a third each between commercial applications, customers like RCA and science and the science that's being done is fantastic because it involves, for example, a space telescope which will enable us to see out to the edge of the universe and back almost to the moment

of creation and who knows what we'll see at that moment? I don't know but it'll be very interesting and then we're also looking for the building blocks of life on Jupiter with Galileo, those are the two big things the shuttle is going to carry into orbit. Well does the 26% usage initially by the military, is the military usage confined to that 26%? Is that the proper proportion of its… That's the proportion of the shuttle's customers, especially in the Reagan administration a major increase in military space spending proper that relates to what Howard was talking about namely killer satellites and particle beams and so on and attempt to get back into that arena. But NASA is a… Its charter says it's an agency whose work is for peaceful purposes and the benefit of all mankind and it's developing a civilian controlled transport system, again like the railroad system which has military customers but they are the minority. How do you assess the commercial uses? There's been some discussion recently, especially

as the shuttle came near actually being launched, that potential commercial customers were being rather slow to show up? I read that in the times but I couldn't square that with the facts at all because the facts are that the flight manifests are filled up until the fall of 1985, and one third of the customers as I mentioned are private firms, and the reason for this is very easy to see in the following numbers. American industry spends and business spend about $700 billion a year on communications and transport, and you can do all of that in a cost effective way more so with communication satellites, hence the tremendous private interest here. And then another example, we in New York and my colleagues in Dartmouth have developed methods for detecting mineralized deposits under heavy covers of a tree and vegetation and this opens up remote areas in Brazil and Asia, Canada, Mexico, potentially trillions of dollars there and enormously interesting commercial development.

Well, thank you. Jim? Finally the views of Richard Garwin, a physicist and professor at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, Professor Garwin has written extensively about the military uses of space and until recently served as a consultant to the National Security Council on the subject. Dr. Garwin, what is your analysis of how valuable a defense tool the defense shuttle is? To jump into this, the middle of this, I feel that there is nothing to be done with the shuttle that couldn't be done better with expendable boosters, whether it's science or military activities. As Dr. Jastrow has indicated, there are great benefits to be achieved. It's too bad that we have this shuttle to get in the way. Let me point out to you what was promised when the shuttle was committed in the early 1970s, that it would put into orbit a pound of payload for about $50, imagine that that's a $50 chip. NASA is going to charge its customers $49 million per mission east out of Cape Canaveral. Only 5,000 pounds of payload can be put into orbit for a mere $50 million, that's $800

per pound. That stack of pennies versus the promised. That kind of cost growth is too much to bear. It just isn't worth it. The shuttle, like the Concord aircraft, is a technical marvel and an economic disaster. Now, the Soviet Union has charged that the shuttle is an anti-satellite vehicle. That's ridiculous. If we ever had any intent of inspecting and retrieving uncooperative satellites, we certainly could not and would not do that with a manned vehicle, which we'll have four or five on which the entire military and civilian space program depends. The whole thing is worthless, in other words. It's worse than that. The whole thing is a real deficit to our military capability. My criticism of the Air Force and the defense department is that we haven't moved fast enough and are not moving fast enough to make military use of space. For instance, the Air Force this last year had $0 in its budget for the NavStar navigation

satellite system. The Air Force has just this last month canceled the missile accuracy evaluation receiver for the MX, which would use those NavStar satellites to provide the capability of highly accurate launch of the MX missile from aircraft or from ships or submarines or road mobile bases. We won't have that because we are not willing to make use of space as we can. Instead, we go to fantasies of laser and particle beam battle stations to protect us against ballistic missiles. That will never work. Why not? Why won't it ever work? They're too vulnerable. They are too easy to defeat and to counter in other ways. You could have an anti-satellite laser or particle beam battle station. That could be the most difficult. The farthest off way of destroying satellites that I can imagine and the easiest to counter. So in other words, Dr. Garwin, Secretary Brown, all of his predecessors and his successors are just throwing money down a rat hole to put the space shuttle in space.

I don't think he's put any money into it. When I represented the Defense Department in 1971 at a conference in Woods Hole, I said on behalf of one of the directors of Defense Research and Engineering that the Defense Department would not put any money into the shuttle development. I feel that NASA two years ago deluded the President Carter into forcing the Defense Department to sign on to the shuttle for future missions. I think that was pernicious, but the American public having rejected for whatever reason the Carter administration should not be bound by that wrong decision. All right. Robin? Mr. Secretary. Mr. Former Secretary. Did NASA delude you into getting behind the shuttle? I was rather careful to assure that should the shuttle slip or should its capability be less than advertised, that there would be additional expendable boosters on option, and those will be used until the shuttle costs and feasibility and reliability is such that it can replace them.

I, as your listeners will know from having listened, agree with the characterization of some of the proposed uses as fanciful, or at least not cost-effective. But I do think that since the shuttle's been built and is flying, it would be foolish of the Defense Department not to take advantage of it. But what about Dr. Garwin, sort of main charges, seems to me that it's worthless, it's a real deficit to military capability. I don't quite understand it, because given that a good deal of the cost is already sunk to throw that away and rely entirely on expendable boosters, I judge would make things cost more. And it would not cause the dreams of space wars to go away. Dr. Garwin? Well, I agree that if we want to build laser battle stations or whatever else in space, the shuttle is irrelevant and in fact worse, because it minimizes our capability, it increases

the cost, it increases our vulnerability. But I think like the Concord aircraft, where all the money has been sunk, they cannot keep those aircraft flying with passengers paying what they are willing to pay without a continuing subsidy. And it will be like that for the shuttle. I heard Senator Schmitt say yesterday that when the shuttle was proposed by NASA, he and other ex-NASA people had gotten together and agreed that it would cost about four times as much as NASA was proposing. We didn't hear that from those ex-NASA people then, but we do not have the shuttle that was promised. We have the first step toward a technology. We are promised the capability in the great buy and buy without further costs, which we will surely have to pay. Dr. Jastrow? I must say, according to the distinguished occupant of the White House and another occasion, Richard, there you go again, because the cost of a shuttle launch is $30.9 million, $81. And the cost of the competing Atlas Centaur launch is $38 million.

And that's for a launch of Atlas Centaur that can only bring up one satellite into orbit, whereas the shuttle can bring up two and three and four payloads. That would be to rebut Dr. Garwin's point that the payoff will be much less than advertised. Yes, it's a very cheap and very effective method. Dr. Garwin? Well, that's 65,000 pounds out of Cape Kennedy. Most of the military launches are going to be out of Vandenberg, north, and the shuttle capability, certainly degrade astonishingly to less than half. But if they're charging $30 million, I would have to tell my friends that because they're being charged $40 million and they'll have to resolve that discrepancy. We have just a moment left. Do you want to make a final comment here? Yes, I think what we have been hearing is that primarily until now, in spite of the fact that the first payload on the first shuttle is some 70% for so-called civilian interest experiments,

nevertheless, this shuttle is primarily until now a military venture. The money is certainly coming from th defense department, and 70% of the cost is not being borne by the scientific laboratories in the industry. But to go back to Dr. Jastrow's point of view, do you object to riding on that back as percentage of the interest? Well, what I object to, I guess, is to riding on the back of something which in the end may make everybody less safe by heating up, by heating up a military confrontation in the space atmosphere, where, in fact, we should be playing down the military aspects I'm playing up the civilian. I'm sorry that we have to end it there, but that is our time for this evening, and I'd like to thank you all for joining us. Goodnight, Jim. Hi, Robin. It's all for tonight. We'll be back tomorrow night. I'm Robert McNeil. Goodnight. For a transcript, send $2 to the McNeil Lehrer Report, box 345, New York New York 10101. The McNeil Lehrer Report was produced by WNET and WETA.

They are solely responsible for its content. Funding for this program has been provided by this station and other public television stations, and by grants from Exxon Corporation, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and AT&T and the Bell System Company.