Word: nasa
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...NASA at last appears to have pulled itself together after last January's damning revelation that a special commission had charged NASA and its contractors with routinely criticizing or ignoring employees who spoke up about lax shuttle safety. Agency officials now insist that safety, and not a prescribed timetable, is its No. 1 priority. NASA knows it is fighting for its life. "If it's anything short of picture perfect, the shuttle program is going to be at an end," says John Pike, space-policy director for the Federation of American Scientists. "NASA will be chopped up into little pieces...
Thus the watchword at NASA these days is caution. More than 200 modifications have been made to the orbiter alone, and dozens of others to the rocket boosters and the fuel tank. Would-be whistle blowers are encouraged to / report problems anonymously right to the top. "The real challenge," says Richard Truly, NASA associate administrator for space flight, "is to make sure we don't strangle ourselves with being worried excessively about safety...
Morton Thiokol, the company that built the booster rockets for the space shuttle Challenger, has decided to retreat from its long and painful association with the shuttle program. Last week the Chicago-based aerospace and chemical firm said it would decline to bid for the $1.5 billion NASA contract to build motors for the shuttle's next generation of solid-fuel boosters...
...trip home. The 1976 U.S. Viking Lander probes, by contrast, could only radio data from soil samples back from Mars. This time, the samples would be returned to earth aboard the Soviet craft after a period of quarantine, possibly aboard an earth-orbiting space station. Says a NASA official: "It's a scheme that has a lot of attractive aspects." Estimated cost to the U.S.: a cool $2.5 billion and six years of prelaunch labor. The round-trip mission itself would take two years...
...little scientific value: the flight was the last for the Apollo program. Prospects for more joint missions disappeared in December 1979, when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. "These missions start for policy reasons and stop for political reasons," says Nancy Lubin, a Government expert in U.S.-Soviet space cooperation. States NASA Administrator James Fletcher flatly: "Any major expenditure of money is not likely. We couldn't do much more than study the thing...