Word: launching
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...projected launch cost of the 7J7 is so enormous--$10 billion--that not even Boeing can go it alone. To keep its exposure to between $1 billion and $3 billion, the company has taken the unprecedented step of seeking foreign investment. A consortium of Japanese firms has already agreed to kick in as much as $1 billion for 25% of the project...
...m.p.h. gales, producing, even before the explosion, what one NASA engineer called "an extremely rough ride, maybe the roughest yet." At sea, ships assigned to recover the $25 million boosters were heading for safe harbors as waves broke over their gunwales. All those facts should have been known by launch officials. Yet Challenger was given...
...offers a credible theory. Contends Jerome Lederer, founder of the private Flight Safety Foundation and a onetime NASA safety director: "There was social pressure: they had thousands of school kids watching for the first school lesson from space. There was media pressure: they feared that if they didn't launch, the press would unfavorably report more delays. And there was commercial pressure: the Ariane (European launcher) was putting objects in space at much lower cost. NASA was also trying to show the Air Force that they could operate on a schedule. The pressures were subtle, but they acted upon them...
...certainly ready, willing and able," declares Richard Brackeen, vice president for Martin Marietta's space launch systems division. His firm and its chief competitor, General Dynamics, have long experience in producing rockets for the Air Force and NASA and, with the unexpected new demand for such launchers, would like to reverse their role. They would rent Government launching facilities and use their own rockets to orbit commercial satellites. The potential benefit: providing competition that would force lower launch prices and, in turn, lure more private business...
While there is no shortage of commercial satellites in space--off which signals for TV, telephone and even printing plants can be bounced for instant arrival at distant points--the cost of launching replacements is rising because of the U.S.'s launch failures. A few U.S. companies have shifted from the shuttle to Europe's Ariane system, operated by the French from launch pads in French Guiana. Arianespace has raised its prices by nearly one-third, to $35 million a launch, and has at least 29 orders on its books, worth some $1.2 billion. But the consortium has only eight...