Word: nasa
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
From the day the space shuttle Challenger exploded two months ago, NASA has hunkered down protectively, trying to justify its decision to launch the shuttle in spite of warnings from engineers about the cold weather. Last week NASA's new shuttle chief, Rear Admiral Richard Truly, took a refreshingly different stance. The agency had been wrong, Truly candidly conceded, on that fateful day. Before another mission blasts off, he vowed, NASA would reshape not just the shuttle's faulty booster rockets but also the process for deciding when to launch. Declared the admiral: "To defend the indefensible and pretend...
...trip to the U.S.S.R. by Maine Schoolgirl Samantha Smith, who died last summer in a plane crash and has become a hero in the Soviet Union. Katya, who has acted in a young people's theater group back home in Moscow, plans to see the Statue of Liberty, Disneyland, NASA's Houston space center, and Ronald McDonald. Though she brought a gift for him, the more important Ronald is not scheduled...
Several entrepreneurs in the U.S., along with government-run rocket . programs in Japan and China, now aim to give Ariane a run for its money. NASA, which previously tried to protect its turf by discouraging U.S. satellite- launching entrepreneurs, earlier this month came out in favor of private rocket services to take up the slack left by the shuttle's interrupted schedule. Reason: Congress is worried that U.S. companies will become dependent on foreign satellite-launching services...
Until January's accident, the space shuttle had been scheduled to carry aloft seven satellites this year and 19 in 1987. That total included two commercial satellites in 1986 and six next year, at a launching fee of up to $40 million each. Since NASA has scrapped that plan, several customers have started shopping around. Western Union was forced to postpone the June trip of its Westar VI, a 24-channel communications satellite designed to replace an older, twelve-channel model. GTE Spacenet had planned to send up its G-Star III, which would relay telephone and television signals...
...rebuild the battered agency, the Administration brought back a former NASA administrator: James Fletcher, 66, leader of NASA from 1971 to 1977 and a physicist who headed a commission that urged Ronald Reagan to develop a Star Wars defense against missiles. The mild-mannered Fletcher comes to the post with one handicap: he has accused the Rogers commission of being engaged in a "witch-hunt...