Word: nasa
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...letter to NASA sent yesterday, Markey asked the agency for its assumptions in estimating lower risks and for factors on which those assumptions were based...
...report said more optimistic estimates "have no quantitative justification at all" and that this was clearly acknowledged in an earlier NASA-commissioned study on which the disputed estimates were based, the Globe said...
Once shuttle flights do resume, it will take years--whether two, five, six or more is anyone's guess--for NASA to catch up to the flight schedule it had mapped out before Challenger exploded. Three shuttles simply cannot carry out all the missions that had been assigned to a fleet of four. Meanwhile, there is sure to be a renewed, sharp debate about the goals of the U.S. space program, the role of the shuttle and even the perennial issue of manned vs. unmanned space flight...
While no one at NASA will even speculate on when shuttle flights might resume, other knowledgeable officials cite the sole precedent: after a fire destroyed an Apollo spacecraft on the launching pad and killed three astronauts in January 1967, it took 21 months before manned space flights resumed. "We've got to reckon in about those terms," says New Jersey Republican Jim Courter, a member of the House Armed Services Committee who follows the space program closely. The moratorium could be shortened if the flaw turns out to be something that can be fixed fairly quickly. But it could stretch...
...provided the only bright notes during the U.S. space program's darkest hours. As the 1,800-lb. spacecraft sped away from its close encounter with Uranus, it continued its flawless performance, transmitting data and pictures that are gradually stripping away some of the mysteries of the planet. At NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., nearly 2 billion miles away, William McLaughlin, the Voyager flight- engineering manager, could speak only in superlatives as he reviewed the data. Said he: "I think it is the most successful space mission of all time...