Word: nasa
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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President Reagan may soon decide to replace Challenger with a fourth shuttle orbiter. A new bird will cost nearly $3 billion and take three years to build. The controversial decision would be a resounding victory for NASA and a presidential gamble that the shaken agency can recover from its ills...
...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...
Beyond the mechanical fixes, however, is the need to retool NASA. The consensus in Washington and the aerospace community alike is that NASA needs to be stripped of its near monopoly over U.S. space operations and returned to its former pre-eminent role as a research-and-development agency...
...expendable rockets. Ten new advanced Titan 34D7 rockets are already on order, and the Air Force wants at least ten more to provide an increased launching capability beginning in 1988. Within a week or so, a National Security Council-led Interagency Group on Space is expected to recommend that NASA severely restrict or even abandon the launching of foreign and commercial satellites. The Reagan Administration believes private enterprise should compete for at least some of this business. More important, the Administration wants NASA to dedicate the bulk of its future shuttle payloads and research programs to the military, particularly missions...
Under any circumstances, Fletcher will be hard-pressed to meet his deadline for relaunching the shuttle. The problems demanding urgent solutions involve far more than redesigning the rocket joint that failed. NASA has identified about 50 potentially dangerous faults that will require remedies before a flight can be scheduled. They range from long-standing braking problems that have made many landings risky ventures to a basic question about the reliability of the orbiter's three main engines. Rogers Commission Member Eugene Covert, a professor of aeronautics at M.I.T., headed a joint government-industry team in the late 1970s that solved...