PALMDALE SHUTTLE LANDING `FEASIBLE'; UPGRADES WOULD BE NECESSARY.

Byline: Jim Skeen Daily News Staff Writer

Picture this scene: hundreds of people gather at Sierra Highway and Avenue N and watch as a space shuttle drops out of orbit and lands on Air Force Plant 42's runway.

The scene is not far-fetched, shuttle officials say: it is feasible, with up to $20 million in improvements, to land an orbiter at Plant 42, then roll it into the Boeing Reusable Space Systems hangar for modifications.

For an orbiter about to undergo modifications at Palmdale, the present routine is this: the shuttle lands at Kennedy Space Center in Florida at the end of a mission; it's prepared and mounted on a modified 747 for a piggyback flight to Palmdale; goes through several months of modifications and then is prepped and ferried back to Florida.

``If you land in Palmdale you don't have to reconfigure the vehicle for a ferry flight,'' said Mark Johnstone, Boeing's Palmdale shuttle site director.

Plant 42 has two 12,000-foot concrete runways, each with 1,000-foot asphalt ``overrun'' sections on each end. The runways can support up to 1 million pounds of weight.

Shuttles typically use about 9,000 to 10,000 feet of runway to land and weigh about 240,000 pounds at landing.

To make Plant 42 shuttle-landing ready, special navigation aids from NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center would have to be brought in; the installation would have to find a way to handle hydrazine, a propellant that is a hazardous material; and a fire suppression system would be needed.

The plant would also need equipment to unload shuttle cargo.

What Johnstone believes will ultimately determine whether shuttles will land in Palmdale is how busy Kennedy becomes.

At present, the shuttle fleet performs eight to nine missions a year, but with work on the International Space Station, the manifest could go to nine to 12 flights a year by 2002.

``Then Palmdale becomes a player,'' Johnstone said.

The idea of landing at Palmdale came out of efforts to find ways to trim costs of shuttle modifications and to strengthen the Antelope Valley's position as the home of orbiter modifications.

Boeing workers are now about midway through a $70 million modification effort on the orbiter Atlantis. The shuttle, which arrived in Palmdale on Nov. 14, is scheduled to be delivered back to NASA by Sept. 28. Boeing is shooting to deliver the vehicle back perhaps as much as three weeks earlier.

``At $70 million it is close to the most expensive modification we've done and it is the most complex we've done to date,'' Johnstone said.

Boeing delivered the last four orbiters modified at Palmdale ahead of schedule and at a combined savings of $16.1 million.

The work on Atlantis includes 323 modifications tasks, including preparing an airlock for use on the International Space Station, and beefing up radiator panels to protect them from micro-meteor hits.

Workers also are installing lighter weight thermal protection system to replace some of the fragile tiles that protect the shuttle from the heat of re-entry from space.

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PHOTO (1-2--Color in AV Edition only) Mechanic Al Burrows, left, and electrician Janice Lackey don protective ``bunny suits,'' above, before going to work on modifications to the space shuttle Atlantis at Air Force Plant 42 in Palmdale. At right, the emptied nose of Atlantis pokes through maintenance scaffolding.

Jeff Goldwater/Daily News