Word: titanic
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...problems worsened. On April 18, a startled Air Force watched its once trusty 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...
...Bird spy satellites. The Air Force has sent seven KH craft into polar orbits over the past nine years, but only one is still operational. The satellites are normally used in pairs, and a replacement for the last one to go dead was lost in last August's Titan rocket explosion. The single eye is expected to function for at least another year. Until its new Titans start to become available in 1988, the Air Force has some crisis protection: a known stock of 13 older Titan IIs that are already being refurbished as launch vehicles, and some 40 Titan...
...Science's space board points out that relying on the shuttle for scientific launches has seriously delayed projects such as the Galileo and Ulysses probes of Jupiter and the Hubble space telescope. The last major scientific space mission by the U.S. was the 1977 Voyager 2, launched on a Titan-Centaur rocket; Voyager's bypass of the planet Uranus in January provided the U.S. with its only space success this year...
...least minimal launch capacity this summer: NASA hopes to use an Atlas-Centaur rocket combination later this month to lift a Navy fleet communications satellite, although the similarity of the electronics in the Atlas engine to those in the failed Delta remains a concern. At the earliest, Delta and Titan could be back in the air in six months. On NASA's part, the agency's newly appointed administrator, James Fletcher, has said he expects to correct the flaws in the shuttle and resume flights by July...
...already started to reverse a disastrous decision made in 1972 by the Nixon Administration to develop the shuttle as the sole vehicle for putting both humans and payloads into orbit. Instead, the U.S. will move to a mixed launch fleet including both shuttles and expendable rockets. Ten new advanced Titan 34D7 rockets are already on order, and the Air Force wants at least ten more to provide an increased launching capability beginning in 1988. Within a week or so, a National Security Council-led Interagency Group on Space is expected to recommend that NASA severely restrict or even abandon...