American Space Programme Diminishes

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31656, 17 April 1968, Page 11

American Space Programme Diminishes

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter—Copyright) NEW YORK, April 15. After a heady decade of uninterrupted hiring, building and dreaming great dreams of far-reach-ing exploration, the American space programme is gearing down to a slower pace and a less certain future.

Skilled engineers are leaving, or are being laid off; some installations are closing, many are slowing their operations; and Project contracts are expiring with no new ones in sight. There is a growing feeling in the space Establishment that once astronauts have landed on the moon, they will have no other place to go for several years because of budget cuts which have trimmed to the bone all preparations for future It is as if the astronauts are heading for a dead-end on the moon.

In spite of the engine problems that bedevilled the Saturn V flight this month, the Apollo project planners still expect to land men on the

moon by the end of next year, when the nation may find itself with five or six Saturn V rockets on hand and no missions for them.

Under pressure from the war in Vietnam, civilian space spending has fallen from SUSS9OOm in the peak year of 1966 to SUS4BOOm this year, and it is expected to drop much lower in the fiscal year starting in July. Employment in space work at private companies, universities and Government centres has declined from 420,000 in 1966 to fewer than 300,000 today, and it is still dropping at the rate of 4000 a month.

Dr Weraher von Braun, the German-bom leader of the American rocket programme, has warned the nation that it is “dismantling the high competence” of its space team at the Marshall Space Flight Centre he' directs in Huntsville, Alabama. Development work there on the Saturn rocket has been virtually completed and 700 of 7086 civil service workers have already been told they will be laid off. “There’s no question but that things wil be bleak in the early 19705,” said Dr Robert Seamans, jun., former deputy administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and

now a consultant to the agency. “The question is: How bleak?”

On a recent tour of space installations across the country, from the launching pads of Cape Kennedy, Florida, to the manufacturing centres of California, John Noble , Wilfrid, of the “New York Times” news service, found signs of decline; that the shifting of talent, delays in delivery dates and the shuffling of contracts are already upsetting families, communities and large corporations. The small Missouri town of Neosho, for instance, is losing its scoutmaster, the better part of a Sunday school young couples’ class and a $USlOm-a-year payroll because a Saturn IB rocket-engine factory there is shutting down for lack of business. A rocket test site in the everglades of Florida has become a SUS2Om ghost town because there is not enough money for developing larger solid-fuel rockets. As a hedge against possible lean times after the moon landing, a SUS4OOm rocket proving ground in the backwoods on the Mississippi Gulf Coast is already looking around for new tasks in military and oceanography programmes. At the 43-acre Michoud roc-

ket assembly plant in New Orleans wide areas of floor space are empty. Under orders to “stretch out” production of Saturn 5 and Saturn IB first stages, the plan has cut employment from 13,000 in 1966 to 7000, with possibly more than 1000 lay-offs in prospect. A sense of frustration is also overcoming the astronauts, especially the junior members of the 55-man team at the Manned Spacecraft Centre in Houston. With fewer, and more wide-ly-spaced, manned flights being contemplated after the Apollo moon mission, they are beginning to wonder if they will not be too old to fly when their missions reach fruition. Some of the scientistsastronauts have even asked for leave of absence to return to the campus. In California, where aerospace projects account for a third of all manufacturing, and where more than a fourth of all N.A.S.A.’s money goes, work on the SUS24,OOOm Apollo project is already tapering off. The space division of the North American Rockwell Corporation—the prime spacecraft contractor at Downey, California—has had to pare its payroll by 3000 in the last year, to 25,000. “In 1969,” a company spokesman said, “we expect

our Apollo work force to decline more rapidly.” The company's rocketdyne division .has reduced employment to 11,500 from 20,000 in fours years, has closed a plant at Van Nuys, California, and is pulling out of Neosho, Missouri.

The Hughes Aircraft Company has cut its employment by more than 1000 since January, to about 30,000; and the Aerojet-General Corporation’s employment figure has plunged from 34,000 in 1963 to 18,400 today. Not all those who still have jobs are happy. Some engineers at the Northrop Corporation’s plant in Hawthorne, California, complain of having little to do except work on “paper studies,” research jobs financed by the Space Agency to several companies to hold talented men until ne • projects come along. “How long can a man hold his breath?” asks Charles Blandford, marketing director of Hughes Aircraft. When rocket work began petering out, Aerojet-General transferred about 50 propellarit chemists to work on water purification. They are called “retreads.” But some $U525,000-a-year physicists with highly-specialised joos had to take substantial pay cuts or leave the company and lose all the seniority and bene-

fits they had accrued. At the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, the only approved flight project is a Mariner photographic mission to Mars next year. The ambitious Voyager project, aimed to send a life-detection laboratory to Mars, was killed last year by Congress: and two new, more modest Mars projects are expected to run into Congressional opposition this year. But, unlike the civilian programme, military space operations are slowly but steadily increasing—up to SUSI9OOm is being spent this year, and SUS22OOm next year. Space Agency officials say, however, that the worst is yet to come in the civilian space field. By July, they estimate, space employment will sink to 270,000. No longer do engineers pass the situation off as just another example of the shifting fortunes and moving about that is traditional in the aerospace industry.

“You used to be able to change jobs in this business without changing car parks,” said the Boeing plant manager at Michoud, referring to the concentration of companies in California. “If your company lost a big contract, you just walked across the road to work for the other guy. But that’s impossible nowadays.”