Plan for Test Site rockets flying south

Wednesday, May 20, 1998 | 10:08 a.m.

While Nevada Test Site managers dreamed of retrievable rockets launching satellites into space, Kistler Aerospace Chief George Mueller announced experimental flights will begin in Australia.

Regulation red tape is snarling progress to launch satellites from the Test Site, 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

The Federal Aviation Administration, which has to license flights at the Test Site, will not consider allowing U.S. continental flights until the K-1 craft is tested elsewhere, Mueller said Monday at a Nevada Test Site Development Corp. board meeting.

"Obviously, the safest thing for the public would be if we don't fly at all," Mueller said. "Unfortunately, the FAA begins on that premise."

Why Southern Australia for the tests?

"There aren't as many people in Australia and they are more inclined to take risks," Mueller said. It would be in mid 1999 before construction could begin at the Test Site, he said, if the FAA approves the project.

A Nevada satellite launch site would be secure, since the United States has to worry about the latest technology as it trickles into China, India and Pakistan, as the five nuclear weapons exploded in India last week clearly showed, Mueller said.

However chances of the United States resuming underground nuclear weapons experiments at the Test Site are "slim to none," even if Pakistan explodes its own device, said Troy Wade, chairman of the Nevada Alliance for Defense, Energy and Business and secretary of the NTS Development Corp. board.

What is driving India's abrupt entry into the nuclear club is the technology transferred from China to Pakistan, Wade said. "Whether Pakistan tests or not is a question of time," he said.

It would take a catastrophic failure of a U.S. nuclear weapon in storage to trigger resuming underground explosions at the Test Site, Wade said.

Instead the Test Site is preparing to host more private ventures such as the production of alternative fuels as well as defense-related programs, said Glenn Mara, director of defense technologies at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in northern California.

Design and manufacturing flaws along with aging nuclear weapons puts subcritical experiments at the center of the Test Site renaissance, Mara said.

"Underground nuclear experiments disappeared," he said. "Underground laboratories have replaced those underground nuclear explosions."