Word: spaces
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Like its immediate predecessors, the Carter Administration has been lukewarm to space. Only last year, on the occasion of the space agency's 20th anniversary, it issued a declaration that dampened enthusiasts who think of space in terms of what Princeton's visionary physicist Gerard O'Neill calls the High Frontier, a place where mankind can establish permanent settlements, using sun power for fuel and mining the moon and the asteroids. Said the White House coldly: "It is neither feasible nor necessary at this time to commit the United States to a high-challenge space engineering initiative...
That support comes none too soon. As Aerospace Engineer Jerry Grey explains in his intriguing new insider's history of the space program, Enterprise, the shuttle has presented as many political problems as technical ones ever since its conception in the 1960s. Denounced as a "senseless extravaganza in space" by Vice President Walter Mondale while he was still in the Senate, the shuttle created such a furor that NASA was repeatedly forced to compromise its design. In the present version, the orbiter looks much like a bloated DC-9. It will rise vertically off the pad on the back...
Circling the earth with as many as seven people aboard, the ship should be able to do everything from parking and repairing satellites to conducting zero-g experiments and space manufacturing. One early project: the orbiting of a giant remote-controlled telescope. High above the obscuring atmosphere, it will give astronomers sharper views of the heavens than any mirror on earth. Europeans, for their part, are contributing a space lab that will be carried up by the shuttle and act as a scientific workshop...
Indeed, NASA is busily renting out payload space. For $10,000 its salespeople are offering a "Getaway Special," a package for research experiments involving less than 200 Ibs. and measuring under 5 cu. ft. Two early takers: Film Makers Steven Spielberg and Michael Phillips (Close Encounters of the Third Kind) for a project that they are still keeping secret. Eventually the shuttle may be used for far bolder enterprises: assembling solar power satellites that can collect the sun's rays and beam that concentrated energy down to earth; erecting giant antennas that could revolutionize global communications; and putting together...
...affixing 40,000 or so silica foam tiles to the orbiter's outer skin. These shield it from the blazing temperatures (nearly 3,000° F) that the ship will encounter when it re-enters the atmosphere and glides to a landing at either the Kennedy Space Center or Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. A more serious difficulty: ironing the bugs out of the shuttle's main rocket engine, which has failed to perform up to specifications and blew up at least once during ground testing. NASA Administrator Robert Frosch has told Congress that this obstacle should...