NASA has been going through a bad patch recently. Spacecraft disappear, spacecraft hit Mars when they are supposed to go around it, spacecraft arrive there as planned but refuse to send signals home.

Well, you might say, hard times can come to anyone. Maybe the worst is over. Unfortunately, I think that NASA's toughest spell still lies ahead.

For the past decade, most of the agency's energy and budget has gone into building the International Space Station, a large orbiting structure designed for long-term occupancy by humans. The station has seen numerous delays and setbacks, the "international" element has been affected by Russia's economic woes, and the structure is still nowhere near finished; but in another five years or so it will be ready for regular use.

And then the "real" trouble will start. This was made clear to me a couple of weeks ago when a long-time and high-level NASA employee asked me, in a delicate and round-about way, if I could think of any possible uses for the Space Station that might pay for themselves. The problem, he pointed out, is that NASA will be given enough money to finish building the station, but will not have enough to pay for experiments aboard it. Is there anything at all that could be put onto the station, using present technology, and pay its own way as a commercial venture?

I assured him that there is. There is one project for which the Space Station, with its long-term occupancy, will be ideally suited. It calls for no changes to the station. And it is a project, which would throw off many billions of dollars of revenue, produce the highest level ever of public interest in NASA activities, and guarantee continuous global coverage in all forms of the media.

It is also not "fancy science," but a project which every person on Earth can understand at once. We send to the Space Station a woman who is one month pregnant. She remains there for the rest of her pregnancy, and gives birth to the first baby ever born in space. After delivery, and an appropriate recovery period, the first space-family returns to Earth.

Would anyone volunteer for something like this? I believe that many thousands would do so, and I don't mean just kooks. The volunteers would include highly trained women who are already astronauts, scientists, and qualified physicians. Media coverage of the condition of mother and developing child would be continuous, rising to a peak during the last months of pregnancy. Remember the torrent of publicity for 77-year old John Glenn's ride on the Shuttle? Compared to a space baby, that would be nothing. All forms of media would die to get interviews, exclusive footage, or unique access. The commercial spin-offs would be huge, with space-mother clothing lines, space-baby diapers and space-baby dolls.

My friend is a man who has been with NASA for over 30 years. He has observed the agency from the glory days of Gemini and Apollo, through the dark years after the loss of the Challenger, into today's "quicker, faster, cheaper" philosophy. He listened to my enthusiastic pitch, shook his head, and said, "It could never happen at NASA. Suppose something went wrong?"

And there we have, in a phrase, the root of the problem. "Suppose something went wrong?" A government program can live with inefficiency, it can live with wasting money, it can live with delay; it cannot afford a disaster involving the loss of human lives. And the birth of a human child in space, no matter what precautions we take, still carries an element of risk. How could it be otherwise, when the birth of a baby here on Earth has risk to both mother and child?

So, I have to agree with my friend. I see no space baby in NASA's future. There will, someday, be a first baby born in space. I regard that as an inevitable part of the future. But the baby's date of birth, and its nationality, are hard to predict.

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