Word: nasa
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...NASA and the aerospace industry, the announcement packed all the wallop of a Saturn booster at liftoff. After much backstage deliberation, President Nixon last week ordered the space agency to proceed with its long-planned space shuttle. To be built at a cost of at least $5.5 billion over the next six years, the system will be designed to transport at least a dozen passengers and cargo between orbiting space stations and the earth. The vehicle is to be a hybrid that looks something like a jet fighter, takes off like a rocket and lands like an ordinary plane...
Coming only months before the penultimate Apollo shot,* Nixon's decision sets up an important new technological goal for NASA and the depressed aerospace industry. NASA Administrator James Fletcher estimates that work on the shuttle will restore about one-fourth of the 200,000 space-related jobs that have disappeared in the past five years. There will also be a resurgence of activity at Houston's Manned Spacecraft Center and the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, which will share responsibility for the program...
...scientists. They indicated that Mars had at one point in its history undergone melting and that lighter elements had floated to the surface, later hardening into an earthlike crust. Included among the lighter elements are carbon compounds that were necessary for the development of life on earth. Said NASA Exobiologist Jerry Soffen, who is project scientist for the Viking program that will make a purposeful attempt to find life on Mars in 1976: "There can't be biological evolution if there is not geological differentiation...
...anticipated a Russian landing attempt simply on the basis of the great lift-off weight of Mars 2 and 3 (about 10,000 lbs. each). If their landers work properly, the Russians will leapfrog ahead of the U.S. by at least four years in the exploration of Mars; NASA does not expect to launch its Viking landers before...
...exasperating moments, the title of an imaginary radio serial called One Man's Family Goes to War flashes to mind. Pug Henry is a useful enough American character, a blend, say, of Sinclair Lewis' Arrowsmith and NASA's Neil Armstrong: Godfearing, highly disciplined, pragmatic, undemonstrative, scrupulous, brilliant but unimaginative-the best we had in a time when that best seemed more adequate to deal with the world than it does today. As the book goes along, one is inclined to forgive Henry, and the author, the narrative necessities that shoot him hither and yon and miraculously equip...