AIAA San Francisco Section Newsletter
June 1993

"Station Redesign: Deja Vu All Over Again"
A Cynical Prediction
by
Brenda Forman

	It is early May as I write this and the Great Space 
Station Redesign Effort is the space news of the day.  In the 
immortal words of Yogi Berra, it's deja vu all over again.  
This time, redesign teams are agonizing over three options, 
each of which has a maximum cost ceiling set by the White 
House.  One of them (the "B" option) resembles the ritual to 
which we've all become accustomed over the years, namely, 
squeezing a shrunken version of the same basic station into 
an ever-smaller budget bag.  But if either the "A" or "C" 
option is the official choice, we could be talking a clean-
sheet-of-paper redesign.
	So today, a colleague asked me which of those options I 
thought would win.  And I told him that no matter which 
option is chosen at this stage, the one that we'll end up 
with is the one that most resembles the current design -- 
because that's the only one with a constituency.
	Oh, sure, a brand-new design might make excellent 
engineering and technical sense -- but make no mistake, 
folks, the space station is a political challenge, not a 
technical one.  No matter what its technical virtues, a 
radically new design won't be politically viable.  Why?  
Because it won't satisfy the constituency that supports the 
current design, and it won't be able to build a new 
constituency for itself in the current budgetary climate.
	The station we've supposedly been trying to build for 
the past nine years definitely has a constituency -- 72,000 
jobs in 37 states for starters, and all the Congressional 
support that implies.  The major NASA Field Centers (and 
therefore their state Congressional delegations) are on board 
because they each have their piece of the station "pie."  The 
station contractors have a stake in the program by virtue of 
the large contracts already let.  Those contracts represent 
thousands of jobs, and therefore thousands of voters across 
the country.  And only the current design adequately 
addresses the international partners' interests.
	If a completely revised station design is now proposed, 
this existing constituency will dissolve -- and nothing will 
take its place.  The most likely result would be no station 
at all.  Face it, folks, you couldn't cobble a constituency 
together now for any brand new space station -- not even the 
one we're supposedly redesigning (again).  The constituency 
now in place is there because it's grown up over the past 
nine years.
	Meanwhile, the House NASA authorization committee is 
saying it may even forbid the redesign by law.  Of course, 
forbidding the redesign doesn't mean we've suddenly decided 
we can afford the current design.  So ok, what do you do when 
the only politically viable design is budgetarily 
unaffordable?  Easy!  You stretch it out!  You can't afford 
to do it right and you can't afford to cancel it.  So you 
just keep it going -- only slower.
	This, of course, only guarantees greater cost growth 
over time.  Furthermore, it in no way guarantees that a real, 
tangible orbiting platform will emerge from the other end of 
the process.  But it has one overriding political virtue:  it 
avoids choices in the present that are too politically 
painful.
	So cynical or not, here's my prediction for the space 
station's fate:
-	The Blue Ribbon review panel will choose one of the 
three options. (It doesn't matter which one; take your pick.)
-	When this option goes to the Congress, the result will 
be an excruciatingly confused argument over actual (as 
opposed to optimistic) costs, capabilities and affordability.
-	No matter which option is involved, it will not fit it 
into its budget ceiling except by the most contorted efforts 
of creative accounting. The Congress will discern this 
readily.
-	The fractionation of the existing station constituency 
will accelerate as each segment seeks to preserve its own 
piece of the action at the expense of the others.
-	After a long, bitter and agonizing debate -- including 
at least one move to cancel the program altogether -- the 
Congress will choose some variant of "B" that amounts to an 
even less capable and more seriously underfunded version of 
the design we now have.
-	The program will survive, but just barely.  Like a 
patient after a blood-letting, it will be alive, just weaker.
	And will we get a space station out of it all someday?  
I'm not betting on it.  I'm not at all certain we'll have a 
space station by the end of this decade.  I'm pretty sure 
we'll still have a space station program.