Apr 12 1974
From The Space Library
Space News for this day. (1MB PDF)
Two A-9 twin turbofan aircraft, Northrop Corp.'s unsuccessful contenders for the Air Force close air support aircraft, had been trans-ferred to Flight Research Center, the FRC X-Press reported. One of the aircraft would be used in three research programs: as a support aircraft in the trailing vortices research program; as a mother ship to air-launch supersonic Firebee drones in the remotely piloted research vehicle pro-gram; and as a test-bed aircraft in the Center's nonpropulsive aircraft noise program. The second A-9 would be used for spare parts. (FRC X-Press, 12 April 74, 2; FRC proj off, interview, 21 Feb 75)
The economic return from the U.S. space program amounted to 33% per year, exceeding the typical yield from investments in stocks, bonds, and real estate, Dr. Christopher C. Kraft, Jr. Johnson Space Center Director, said in a speech at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State Univ. at Blacksburg, Va. Among returns not immediately visible to the public were some 30 000 inventions available by the end of the Apollo pro-gram. The price of ERTS 1 Earth Resources Technology Satellite--surveying the earth since its launch 23 July 1972-was less than 50 cents per American. "Given its potential for aiding us in the coming years, who would not support a program that costs less than a . . . half-pound [one fourth kilogram] of ground beef?" Dr. Kraft estimated that the space shuttle, at an annual cost of $5 for each American, was an in-vestment that would "pay, perhaps, the greatest return to future generations." With such a vehicle we could not only perform a variety of scientific studies with immediate application to life on earth but build permanent space stations and launch planetary vehicles and eventually starships. The space shuttle program, with its international cooperation, would unite "many nations for the benefit of all." (Text)
The U.S.S.R.'s Cosmonautics Day and 13th anniversary of the first manned space flight, made by Cosmonaut Yuri A. Gagarin in 1961, was marked by articles in the Soviet press.
"Cosmonautics is one of the most important testing ranges of science in which many directions of science and technology are being synthesized into a single constantly perfecting system," Soviet Academician Valentin Glushko wrote in Pravda. The successes of cosmonautics in the preceding 15 to 20 yrs had given a powerful impetus to various branches of knowledge. The initial accumulation of facts by spacecraft had been completed. On the agenda now was the detailed study of dynamic processes, the interconnection of phenomena, and the verification of hypotheses and models.
Maj. Gen. Vladimir A. Shatalov, chief of cosmonaut training, acknowl-edged in an interview with Sovietskaya Rossiya the importance of orbital stations for future space experiments. He also acknowledged that Soviet designers had not yet been able to develop a satisfactory space shuttle. He said the U.S.S.R. had no plans for a manned landing on the moon. His impassioned defense of the Soviet space program suggested that it, like the U.S. program; was under fire by domestic critics; "many millions of rubles" had been saved because of the use of meteorological satellites.
In Trud, Academician Boris N. Petrov, head of the Council of Inter-national Cooperation in Space Exploration and Use under the Soviet Academy of Sciences, said that manned flights "must become more frequent and more extended" to produce "really creative work for specialists of many branches of science." (Tass, FBIS-Sov, 16 April 74, U1-2; Wren, NYT, 13 April 74)
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