Word: surveyor
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Before it became a space-age swan, however, Surveyor had a long history as an ugly duckling. The seven-space craft program, originally expected to cost about $50 million and scheduled to begin shooting for the moon in August 1963, will eventually cost $350 million, and did not get off the ground until May 1966. Outraged by delays and rising costs, a congressional subcommittee in 1965 called Surveyor "one of the least orderly and most poorly executed of NASA projects...
Stung by congressional criticism and aware that everyone had sadly underestimated the complexity of a soft lander, NASA, Hughes Aircraft (which designed and built Surveyor) and Pasadena's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (which directed the project, provided technical advice, and eventually controlled the flights) moved to rescue the floundering program. Increasingly certain that Surveyor's findings were a necessary preliminary to an Apollo lunar landing, NASA loosened the purse strings, enabling JPL to increase its Surveyor personnel from fewer than 100 to 500, Hughes from...
Success Incentive. Under a newly-appointed triumvirate consisting of JPL's Surveyor Project Manager Robert Parks, Deputy Manager Howard Haglund and Hughes's Program Manager Robert Roderick, JPL-Hughes staffs were imbued with an "I think I can, I think I can" philosophy. To increase efficiency and desire at Hughes, NASA substituted an incentive contract for the old cost-pius-a-fixed-fee contract providing substantial financial gains only for successful missions...
...remedies worked. Knowing that glitches were bound to occur in the 83,000 different Surveyor components (34,000 in the Doppler and descent radar alone), scientists considered the first four craft as "engineering models," and would have been delighted if only one of them had made a successful soft landing. Thus no one was more surprised than the JPL and Hughes crews when the first Surveyor not only made a perfect landing and transmitted back thousands of pictures of the lunar surface but also proved so durable that it came back to life after each of two lunar nights, having...
...subsequent success of Surveyors 3, 5 and 6 enabled scientists to complete their planned surveys of possible astronaut landing sites and left Surveyor 7-scheduled to be launched early in 1968-for use in a completely scientific mission. Scientists are currently considering landing it in a highland basin, where it could photograph and analyze high-altitude features not yet investigated by U.S. or Russian landers...