Word: transports
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Such, at least, may be the reason the U.S. Congress has voted to kill the billion-dollar supersonic transport. Rarely before have the lawmakers denied funds for a program billed as essential to American primacy in the world. President Nixon observed last week, after the Senate had joined the House in ending further federal subsidy for the SST, that the congressional action "could be taken as a reversal of America's tradition of staying in the vanguard of scientific and technological advance." Says Paul Seabury, a Berkeley political scientist: "It is the first time in American history that...
...world. The largest and for at least 25 years the most exciting of these has been the aerospace industry?the high-performance, high-speed realm of planes and missiles. Each year it has received barely conceivable billions from the national treasury, and each year its products seemed to transport Americans higher, faster and farther than ever before. After the U.S. Senate voted last week to shoot down the supersonic transport, which would have been the costliest commercial product in the nation's history, there were widespread new fears about the future of this proud industry. Barring the increasingly slim chance...
ONCE again the Congress faced a question of national priorities. Much of U.S. labor and all of the aerospace industry had rallied behind the supersonic transport aircraft as a symbol of technological supremacy. In one of those massive lobbying campaigns that had proved so effective in the past, the professional persuaders argued that U.S. prestige, thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in profits were at stake in the continued development of the plane. The pressure, economic and nationalistic, seemed irresistible. But last week the House of Representatives, which had staunchly supported the SST through ten years of controversy, stunningly...
...fate of the SST is still in doubt. If the Senate votes to continue funds, some kind of compromise-now wholly unpredictable-would have to be worked out with the House. If the Senate continues its opposition, the Government would seem to be out of the supersonic-transport business, at least for a time. Then it would be up to the aerospace industry to show whether it really believes enough in the aircraft's future to gamble more of its own money on it-and to persuade private financial institutions to gamble as well...
PROPOSALS for Government funding of an American supersonic transport date back ten years-the same amount of time Senator William Proxmire has spent opposing it. From 1961 to 1969, Proxmire engaged in five losing campaigns against SST appropriations. He has filibustered and conducted hearings, hammering away in a personal crusade against the "perfectly trivial purpose of developing an SST, seeing how rapidly we can already fly people overseas." It was the kind of tenacity that has made Proxmire the bane of defense contractors, pork-barreling colleagues and consumer frauds...