Word: goldin
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When NASA head Daniel Goldin declared earlier this year that the U.S. rocketry program is inferior to those of European competitors, he was only stating the obvious. True, the U.S. launches real astronauts and not just satellite payloads. But dismayed by delays, cost overruns and the Challenger disaster, paying clients began to go elsewhere. The shuttle's $80 million-per-launch cost prompted California Congressman Dana Rohrbacher to quip that it is "the most effective device known to man for destroying dollar bills...
...came in at $118 million and was built in two years. Says Wesley Huntress, NASA's associate administrator for space science: "This really is a revolution in the way we do business." NEAR is just the first of the agency's Discovery series--space missions that nasa chief Daniel Goldin has decreed must be "faster, better, cheaper...
Most promising of all, they're buoyed by a newly unveiled NASA initiative, known as the Origins project, that will build a generation of space telescopes to search for new worlds. Says NASA administrator Daniel Goldin: "We are restructuring the agency to focus on our customer, the American people." And the public excitement about this field, he says, "is beyond belief...
...Despite Goldin's caution about assuming the existence of Earthlike planets, few astronomers doubt they are out there. If other solar systems do contain Earthlike worlds, says NASA exobiologist Michael Meyer, at least some should fall into the "habitable zone"--the region, governed by a planet's distance from its star, where water is liquid rather than solid or gaseous. "The good news," he says, "is that if our solar system is typical, there's a 50% chance that a planet will be in the right zone...
...have that normal solar systems exist beyond our own." It is sure to trigger a rush to find new planets. Indeed, half a dozen teams around the world are already looking. And in an address to the astronomers a few hours after Marcy's talk, NASA administrator Daniel Goldin announced a new program whose goal, he says, will be "not only detecting but taking direct images of Earthlike worlds, right down to oceans, continents and mountains, within 25 years...