Aug 5 1997
From The Space Library
The Russian Soyuz spacecraft lifted off from Kazakhstan carrying cosmonauts Anatoly Y. Solovyev and Pavel V. Vinogradov on a mission to repair the disabled Mir space station. Russian space officials tasked the two men with restoring power to Mir after the 25 June collision with a cargo craft cut by half the orbiting research center's energy. Regarding the importance of the mission, some observers of Russian space activity went so far as to say that the country's piloted space program depended on Solovyev and Vinogradov's success.
During the terminal countdown of a demonstration test of the Titan IV-B rocket designed for the Cassini mission to Saturn, engineers noticed liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen leaking from the Centaur stage of the rocket. NASA had scheduled Cassini's launch for early October 1997. NASA officials delayed the launch until they could complete further tests, offering no immediate estimate of how long that might take. Interested scientists and engineers, however, predicted that the problem could postpone the mission by months or even years. Under the mission's original timetable, NASA had expected Cassini to launch in October 1997, reaching Saturn in July 2004. Because of the length of the journey from Earth to Saturn, the scientific community expected that NASA would find it difficult to reschedule the flight. Moreover, experts warned that the alignment of planets providing an ideal launch date, such as that in October 1997, would not occur again for 12 to 14 years. At US$3.2 billion, Cassini was one of the last of NASA's high-stake, multibillion-dollar missions, drawing considerable attention during the climate of steady cost reductions that characterized the 1990s.
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