Word: astronautical
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Morton Thiokol stopped its scheduled shipment of aft booster segments to Cape Canaveral, Fla., where an astronaut crew had hoped to resume flights on June 2. NASA estimated that the longest probable delay from the nozzle failure would be three months. But some of the agency's veterans speculated that the Administration will not want to risk a launch until after the November elections...
That daunting prospect is one reason why practically no one takes seriously NASA's contention that the space station could become operational as early as 1995. Says former Astronaut Donald ("Deke") Slayton, head of a private launch firm based in Houston: "The law of averages says it won't happen." Moreover, many scientists remain opposed to the concept of a manned station, contending that most of the experiments NASA has in mind can be conducted on unmanned missions...
...space policy also went up in smoke. A series of unsuccessful launchings, including the loss of an Atlas-Centaur rocket fired into a lightning storm last March, has further devastated the space program and left it floundering. In a 63-page report prepared for NASA and released last week, Astronaut Sally Ride attempts to set the agency back on track. She argues for an "evolutionary" policy with diverse objectives, rather than a splashy, one-goal venture. Writes Ride, who was the first American woman in space: "It would not be good strategy, good science or good policy...
...blasted off into history four years ago by becoming the first American woman in space. Now Astronaut Sally Ride, 36, is set to explore the academic frontier. Her new mission: science fellow at the Center for International - Security and Arms Control, a think tank at Stanford University. Ride's switch to the private sector, effective Aug. 15, comes in the wake of her divorce from Astronaut Steven Hawley and reports that the ambitious spacewoman had become restless at NASA. "It was going to be a long time until she flew again," confides a colleague, "and she wasn't particularly turned...
...response from American companies was short of nyet, but it was a decided not yet. Not only does federal law prohibit the transfer to the U.S.S.R. of the high-tech electronics used in spacecraft, but no one seems willing to accept Soviet assurances. Apollo Astronaut Walter Cunningham spoke to the Soviet group and later dismissed the proposal. Said he: "We'd be naive to think they're not going to peek under the covers to look at our hardware...