Oct 19 1992
From The Space Library
NASA announced that Dr. Chiaki Mukai of the Japanese National Space Development Agency had been designated as the prime payload specialist for the second International Microgravity Laboratory mission scheduled for launch aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia in July 1994. She was to be the first Japanese woman to take part in a U.S. Space Shuttle mission. Dr. Jean-Jacques Favier, a scientist with the French Atomic Energy Commission, was selected as an alternate payload specialist. (NASA Release 92-173; UPI, Oct 20/92)
NASA's inspector general, Bill Colvin, said that an investigation had been going on for nearly two years as to whether the Perkin-Elmer Corporation of Danbury, Connecticut, maker of the flawed mirrors of the Hubble Space Telescope, withheld data that would have revealed focusing problems before Hubble was sent aloft. (The Sun, Oct 20/92; WSJ, Oct 20/92)
Democratic vice presidential candidate Albert Gore criticized the Bush Administration for misdirecting the national space program before an audience at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Gore said that the administration had failed to establish strategic priorities and that, under President Bush, NASA had found itself working on too many programs with too little money. He pledged that a Bill Clinton administration would seek to spend $35 billion by the end of the decade to build an orbiting space station, in part to replace jobs lost in military industries. (The Sun, Oct 20/92; NY Times, Oct 20/92; Prince Georges Journal, Oct 21/92; W. Post, Oct 20/92)
The countdown began for the launching of the Space Shuttle Columbia on a research and satellite delivery mission. (NY Times, Oct 20/92; UPI, Oct 20/92; NY Times, Oct 22/92; UPI, Oct 22/92)
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