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Military influence to grow at NASA

WASHINGTON -- The head of NASA and a host of top Pentagon officials said Tuesday that beginning with next year's budget, the link between the country's civil space agency and its military counterpart will be much closer.

But other than vague platitudes about integrating research and development -- and a promise that the 2004 budget, which is due out in early February, will make everything clearer -- National Aeronautics and Space Administration chief Sean O'Keefe was tight-lipped about any practical changes. Speaking at a town-hall meeting sponsored by an industry group, O'Keefe and Undersecretary of the Air Force Peter Teets said a number of changes are coming. They see NASA and the Defense Department working together in areas such as space-based radar and communications satellites -- and, probably, the effort to build a replacement for the aging space shuttle.

The cooperative effort "may not necessarily require a formalized kind of plan," O'Keefe said

O'Keefe is meeting regularly with Teets and other military space officials, and Teets promised that when the new budget is unveiled, there would be money behind the talk.

"We're planning to get started here soon," Teets said. "You'll just have to stay tuned."

The biggest question mark about a stronger bond between NASA and the military is how it will affect the push to replace the shuttle.

The $4.8 billion program, which is supposed to develop two designs for a safer, cheaper, reusable launch vehicle by 2006, appears headed for a major revamping -- with the Air Force playing a much larger role.

But O'Keefe was cryptic about what may happen, and when.

"We're in the middle of a review right now," he said after the meeting.

The program, known as the Strategic Launch Initiative, is the latest incarnation of what has been a sore spot for NASA. Several attempts to build a new shuttle have ended in engineering problems and red ink.

Just last week, a General Accounting Office report that said NASA has done such a poor job of figuring out exactly what it wants and needs out of a new vehicle that it should not proceed with next month's scheduled winnowing of the number of designs.

On Monday, O'Keefe would not say whether NASA would postpone that selection. He said the process is now more complicated than just choosing a concepts from the larger pool.

"The question now is not, which 4 or 5 do you choose," he said. "The question now is, which path or direction are we taking?"

That direction may be vastly different with the military playing a larger role in the decision-making process. The Air Force and NASA have dramatically different needs when it comes to a reusable launcher, and trying to come up with a design that suits both will probably leave everyone unhappy, said John Pike, a space-policy expert at GlobalSecurity.org.

Pike said a similar series of compromises decades ago left NASA with a space shuttle that was more suited to military use than civilian launches.

"We're basically stuck with a lot of decisions that seemed like a good idea at the time," Pike said. "Most of the assumptions that guided the design of the space shuttle turned out to be incorrect. I think that the hazard that you unavoidably face when you do something like that is a wrong set of assumptions."

Copyright 2002 Sentinel Communications Co.