Word: brevard
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...since the tragic fire that killed three astronauts on the launch pad in 1967 has NASA's morale been so low or its future so bleak. The signs are all too apparent: shops are shuttered in Florida's once-booming Brevard County, the home of Cape Kennedy. Thousands of engineers and technicians are out of work in Southern California and other aerospace centers. Last week, even as Apollo 15 streaked to the moon, Congress sent the White House a compromise $3.27 billion NASA appropriations bill-$1.9 billion below the allocations of the space agency's heyday...
...believe," wrote Harry Truman in his memoirs, "that if Dick Russell had been from Indiana or Missouri or Kentucky, he may well have been President." As it was, Richard Brevard Russell Jr. was an unreconstructed Georgian from the red-clay hamlet of Winder, 45 miles northeast of Atlanta; his one effort at the Democratic nomination, in 1952, quickly collapsed because of his unshakable racial attitudes. Russell remained in the U.S. Senate for 38 years. There he alternated between outdated parochialism and respected service in the national interest. When he died at 73 last week of the complications of chronic lung...
Falling morale at NASA's major installations is readily apparent. In Florida's once booming Brevard County, site of Cape Kennedy, houses and stores are boarded up, new offices stand empty, and the most lucrative profession in the area seems to be that of resume writer for the thousands of space workers who have been looking for new jobs. At Houston's Manned Spacecraft Center, the five giant computers are working at a sharply reduced rate (operating cost: about $10,000 per hour), one of the two mission-control centers has been put in mothballs, and astronauts...
...Involved. Deeply committed to their demanding work, few engineers vote or participate in politics or community projects. "They think they don't really live here, and so they tend not to get involved," explains Psychiatrist Podnos. About 14% of Brevard County residents have been there less than a year, and only 4.5% expect to stay for more than five years. The Cape is a society of "ten-percenters"-men who move from one space contractor to another seeking a 10% pay increase. Their insecurities are heightened by shifts in space policy. With the Apollo program drawing...
...sure, many of the symptoms of unhappiness in Brevard County can be found in any U.S. executive suburb. Countless families also manage to cope successfully with the rootless life of the space technician, just as thousands managed to surmount the pressures and temptations of boom towns in World War II. Yet the turmoil in some Brevard County homes is so corrosive that Dr. Ben Storey, a general practitioner in Titusville, reports that he finds one new case of ulcers every week in adolescents that he sees. He has even discovered one case in a 2½-year-old child. Considering...