June 1968
From The Space Library
Last of 11 JC-130 Hercules turboprop aircraft left Patrick AFB, Fla., to be replaced by larger, high-speed jet EC-135N Apollo Range Instrumentation aircraft. With complex electronic instrumentation, Air Force Eastern Test Range Hercules had supported hundreds of Cape Kennedy space and missile launches, including Atlas, Titan, Polaris, Minuteman, Saturn, Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo. When fully operational in 1961, they had replaced earlier C-54s. (AFSC Newsreview, 6/68, 4)
Scientists were pressing NASA to prepare "Grand Tour" mission of successive unpowered flybys of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune to take advantage of configuration which occurred once in 179 yr. Alignment of planets would permit trip time as low as 8 yr rather than 30. Next opportunity would occur during 1975-1981 period, with 1978 and 1979 regarded as best launch years. Tour was described by Lockheed Missiles & Space Co. engineer Brent W. Silver in Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets as "feasible and worthwhile." It would be "waste of natural resources to pass up this opportunity," he said. Studies indicated mission could be mounted with existing technology, but NASA, because of budgetary cuts, had yet to authorize it. JPL study had postulated nine-year tour including use of electric propulsion for sustained power between planets. MIT project, beginning with exploratory Jupiter probes in 1972, would cost $80 million annually over 17 yr and would use 1,000-lb spacecraft launched by Titan III-C with Centaur upper stage. (J/Spacecraft and Rockets, 6/68, 633-7; Wilford, NYT, 6/20/68, 16)
Evert Clark in Astronautics & Aeronautics praised Report to the Congress from the President of the United States: United States Aeronautics and Space Activities, 1967 [see Jan. 30]. It was "small encyclopedia, revealing information that appears nowhere else in the public record .. . a valuable addition to the shelf of the careful collector." Presidential reports, he said, served "as signposts for the road ahead as well as irreplaceable records of the recent past" and provided "only complete, official accounting of American appropriations and expenditures for military and civilian space since 1955." (A&A, 6/68, 6)
Cosmonaut Valentina Nikolayeva-Tereshkova, who became first woman to fly in space when she orbited earth June 16-19, 1963, on board U.S.S.R.'s Vostok VI, was elected President of the Presidium of the Soviet Women's Committee. (Moscow News, 6/22-29/68, 1)
- June
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