Word: launching
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...California's Vandenberg Air Force Base. Lost in the fiery metallic shower was a Big Bird spy satellite, intended to keep a keen polar-orbit eye on the Soviets. The explosion was the second successive Titan 34D failure within a year, after nine perfect flights. NASA bravely tried another launch, and on May 3 was dismayed when its long-reliable Delta rocket, carrying a hurricane-spotting satellite, had to be detonated over Cape Canaveral after its main engine shut down prematurely and the vehicle tumbled out of control...
...space mishaps are not confined by national boundaries. An Ariane II rocket had to be destroyed by controllers when its third stage failed to ignite 4 1/2 min. into its flight. Lost with the rocket was a $90 million telecommunications satellite. It was the fourth failure in 18 Ariane launches and the third malfunction of its third-stage engine, suggesting a possible system problem. So Ariane, too, was grounded while the accident's cause is sought. Most American companies seem willing to wait out the shuttle's return. Hughes Communications, a subsidiary of the largest private American satellite maker...
...last August's Titan rocket explosion. The single eye is expected to function for at least another year. Until its new Titans start to become available in 1988, the Air Force has some crisis protection: a known stock of 13 older Titan IIs that are already being refurbished as launch vehicles, and some 40 Titan D2 missiles that are being removed from their silos and could be modified...
...Pentagon's appetite for devouring all available launch capacity deeply concerns many civilian space scientists. The report by the National Academy of Science's space board points out that relying on the shuttle for scientific launches has seriously delayed projects such as the Galileo and Ulysses probes of Jupiter and the Hubble space telescope. The last major scientific space mission by the U.S. was the 1977 Voyager 2, launched on a Titan-Centaur rocket; Voyager's bypass of the planet Uranus in January provided the U.S. with its only space success this year...
Amid the deepest gloom since three Apollo astronauts died in a gruesome launch-pad fire at the cape in 1967, the U.S. space program has been forced into a long-needed reassessment of its goals and the means to reach them. Not since President John F. Kennedy insisted, just 25 years ago last month, that America should place astronauts on the moon within ten years have national leaders concurred on what the U.S. should be doing in space. "That was the last presidential policy for space," contends former NASA Administrator Thomas Paine, who now chairs a Reagan-appointed National Commission...