Jun 17 1976
From The Space Library
NASA studies in the year past had shown that 5 of 6 types of products considered for space processing could be expected to become profitable, Dr. William R. Lucas, director of Marshall Space Flight Center, told the subcommittee on aerospace technology and national needs of the Senate's Committee on Aeronautical and Space Sciences. NASA's space processing program had deliberately pursued a policy of performing experiments on available missions and sponsoring formal experiments by members of the scientific community, Lucas said; the experiment program had been "reasonably representative" of the scientific potential that scientists foresaw for materials processing in space. Although available mission capabilities had severely restricted what could be done, the program had included demonstrations of crystal growth, solidification of homogeneous mixtures of immersible materials, processing biological materials for medical application, and other phenomena relating to physical metallurgy and fluid physics. Potentials identified with glasses and ceramics had not yet undergone experimentation.
Citing the success of experiments in electrophoretic separation and crystal growth on the Skylab and Apollo-Soyuz missions, Lucas emphasized the necessity of developing novel techniques for virtually every experiment; experience so far had justified the early interest in materials processing in space, although many lines of investigation had not been completed because of the program's operational constraints. Wide response to the program both in the U.S. and abroad was evidence of the scientific community's interest, he said. Next steps in development would be to finalize payloads for early Shuttle missions, then proceed with design and development; "We expect to proceed with research ... both through the SPAR [rocket] project and through an expanded program of ground-based research," he added. "We shall need to reemphasize the ground-based program ... to replenish the fund of new ideas in space processing and build a base of technical support with the breadth that Shuttle experiment operations will need," (MSFC Release 76-112)
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