Word: nasa
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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With the shuttle back in space, the U.S. may begin to reduce the Soviet advantage. In addition to one more flight this year, NASA has scheduled seven for 1989, ten for 1990, nine for 1991 and 13 for 1992. For the time being, the Pentagon remains partly dependent on the shuttle. Its high-resolution "keyhole" photo-reconnaissance satellite, which will be used in part to monitor Soviet compliance with nuclear-arms-reduction treaties, will be aboard the next shuttle. Scientists too have been granted accommodations -- aboard the Atlantis in April 1989, the next opportunity to launch the Magellan mission...
...caution flags were raised last week. "It was an impressive and important first step," says John Logsdon, director of George Washington University's Space Policy Institute. "But many of the problems that have been there are still there." Those problems are legion. For starters, the shuttle's complexity and NASA's heightened concern for safety lead many experts to doubt the agency's ability to hold to even its relatively modest schedule of 18 more flights between now and the end of 1990. Richard Truly, the agency's space-flight director, concedes that improvements can be made...
...shuttle operation is the simple fact that the U.S. space program, and thus the purpose of the shuttle itself, is still ill defined and adrift. Unless a strong consensus emerges for clear national priorities in space, the situation is unlikely to change. With the completion of the Discovery mission, NASA will doubtless argue that the shuttle is of crucial importance in building the proposed space station scheduled for the mid-1990s. Just last week the U.S. signed an agreement with eleven Western nations to undertake jointly the construction of the manned | outpost, which would require 20 shuttle flights. Both presidential...
What is needed, says Logsdon, is "a purposeful, well-funded, coherent program. That, I think the country wants, and that is waiting for the next President to shape -- early in his Administration." NASA adviser Alan Ladwig agrees and urges "a national commitment to space. It's up to the White House and Congress to lead. It's not NASA's job anymore...
...week's end NASA's immediate job was clearly delineated: to complete Discovery's mission and bring it safely back to earth. Aboard the spacecraft, the astronauts attended to a few glitches, including a nagging problem in the craft's cooling system and a balky antenna on a communications instrument, which they managed to retract. They worked on science experiments, played tapes of classical and pop music and shot pictures of Pacific thunderstorms, of a lava flow in Ethiopia and of coastal erosion wreaked by Hurricane Gilbert in Yucatan...