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Turf Wars

© Laurence B. Winn

In Washington D.C., where the official secret is the ultimate status symbol and the power pyramid has more levels than a Babylonian ziggurat, bureaucrats battle over crumbs of influence. U.S. civilian imaging spacecraft are perceived as a threat (while similar foreign spacecraft are not) because their use breaks an existing government monopoly on the information they provide. Washington watchers have seen the U.S. Commerce, State and Defense Departments locked in acrimonious turf wars over what exports should be controlled and by whom. Here we will examine what may be the most visible and damaging conflict of all, that which exists between civil and military space enterprises.

NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, was the chief architect of the U.S. space program at its best. As recently as 1986, it enjoyed a kind of technological supremacy, unchallenged in its dominion over matters extraterrestrial. In fact, mostly behind the scenes, the Air Force and NASA were entrenched in mortal combat to determine which organization would be preeminent in space, and NASA was losing. Since the early seventies, the post-Apollo moon project years, NASA has been the victim of Defense Department manipulation of Congress to the detriment of capability, cost effectiveness and safety in spaceflight.

America's most expensive technological project during the '70s, and NASA's reason for being, was the space shuttle. Congress, however, was reluctant to fund it. So the Air Force, wanting access to space, worked out a deal with NASA. The Air Force would intervene in Congress on NASA's behalf. In return the civilian space agency would increase the shuttle's payload to 65,000 pounds, provide a larger cargo bay to accommodate military payloads and design in a longer cross-range capability -- the ability to glide to a landing at points distant from the orbiter's ground track. The Air Force wanted enough added cross-range, 1500 miles, to make possible shuttle operations from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The requirement that all of this be done, at essentially no additional cost, resulted in the shuttle's present partially-recoverable configuration, with strap-on solid rocket boosters and a throw-away external fuel tank. The weakness of the shuttle's politically-driven design became obvious with the loss of the Challenger in January 1986.

By 1987, the Air Force role in space had become conspicuous. Its space budget had become larger than NASA's entire budget, even excluding the "Star Wars" research to develop a high-technology space-borne defense against missile attack. It was proposing to develop its own heavy-lift booster, independent of NASA, to serve its own needs. In addition, then Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger was attempting to usurp control of the U.S./International space station for military operations of an unspecified nature.