Word: lifting
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Suddenly the U.S. had no way to lift even a medium-size payload into orbit. Temporarily, at least, the nation's vaunted space program has been grounded, its wondrous space future receding. "How bad is it?" asked Bruce Murray, former director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "It's really terrible --worse than some Government officials realize...
...U.S.S.R. has seized the lead in the next stages of space exploration. The Soviets' Mir (Peace) space station, manned on March 13, is operational, while the U.S. is not yet fully committed to developing such a permanent space platform. The Soviets, long ahead of the U.S. in the lift capability of its superrockets, will soon have a new SL-W booster that can push 220,000 lbs. into orbit, about 3 1/2 times as much as the U.S. shuttle. The Soviets have, of course, one huge advantage: their authoritarian government provides long-term planning and consistently high funding...
...expects to have the space program restored to at least minimal launch capacity this summer: NASA hopes to use an Atlas-Centaur rocket combination later this month to lift a Navy fleet communications satellite, although the similarity of the electronics in the Atlas engine to those in the failed Delta remains a concern. At the earliest, Delta and Titan could be back in the air in six months. On NASA's part, the agency's newly appointed administrator, James Fletcher, has said he expects to correct the flaws in the shuttle and resume flights by July...
...seals had long been flagged as a problem that could be aggravated by low temperatures. Yet George Hardy, Marshall's deputy director of science and engineering, declared that he was "appalled" by Thiokol's reasoning that the cape's cold weather, predicted to be in the 30s at lift-off, should lead to a delay. In the now notorious teleconference, four Thiokol vice presidents at first concurred with the fears of their engineers. But when they heard the NASA objections, they decided to take a "management" vote in which the engineers seated beside them had no voice. Even though Thiokol...
...weights involved seem well beyond the lifting potential of any launchers the U.S. now has. Says Colonel George Hess of the Pentagon's SDI organization: "We cannot handle this volume with shuttles and Titans and Delta rockets. Something new will have to come along." More precisely, the U.S. will have to design and build far more powerful launching vehicles: perhaps new unmanned rockets, or an upgraded "space truck" version of the shuttle, or President Reagan's "Orient Express" space plane. An SDI report to Congress says the cost could approach $60 billion just for lift, without counting a penny spent...