Word: nasa
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Titan rocket explode at California's Vandenberg Air Force Base. Lost in the fiery metallic shower was a Big Bird spy satellite, intended to keep a keen polar-orbit eye on the Soviets. The explosion was the second successive Titan 34D failure within a year, after nine perfect flights. NASA bravely tried another launch, and on May 3 was dismayed when its long-reliable Delta rocket, carrying a hurricane-spotting satellite, had to be detonated over Cape Canaveral after its main engine shut down prematurely and the vehicle tumbled out of control...
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...
...grounded while the accident's cause is sought. Most American companies seem willing to wait out the shuttle's return. Hughes Communications, a subsidiary of the largest private American satellite maker, has sent one launch to Arianespace but has committed some $500 million for the use of NASA facilities, including eleven projects over the next five years. Says the company's president, Steven Dorfman: "I want to launch all our systems on the shuttle. It would be potentially disastrous to the communications-satell ite business if NASA no longer were permitted to launch them...
...report that implicitly dismisses the worries about America's current space failures as the product of small minds and faint hearts. Calling the solar system "our extended home," the document urges the U.S. to take logical, sequential steps toward colonizing space over the next 50 years. It assumes that NASA's proposed orbiting space station will be in place by 1994. Simultaneously, research would proceed on both an aerospace plane (President Reagan's so-called Orient Express), capable of taking off from runways and soaring into orbit, and a new generation of reusable rocket-powered craft that would reach orbit...
...reach them. Not since President John F. Kennedy insisted, just 25 years ago last month, that America should place astronauts on the moon within ten years have national leaders concurred on what the U.S. should be doing in space. "That was the last presidential policy for space," contends former NASA Administrator Thomas Paine, who now chairs a Reagan-appointed National Commission on Space...