Aug 24 1976
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(New page: Aerospace contracts valued at about $1 billion were hanging fire as DOD and NASA struggled over which agency would ask Congress for funds (beyond those already appropriated for development...)
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Aerospace contracts valued at about $1 billion were hanging fire as DOD and NASA struggled over which agency would ask Congress for funds (beyond those already appropriated for development and testing) to pay for 2 additional Space Shuttles, said the New York Times. NASA's commitment of 1971 was to develop the Shuttle system at a cost of about $6.9 billion, to include 2 Shuttles, the start on a third, and a series of preoperational flights into orbit beginning in 1979. The NASA plan envisioned a total of nearly 600 Shuttle flights in the 12 yr beginning with 1980, with a fleet of 5 Shuttles averaging an annual 60 flights starting in the mid-80s.
DOD had earmarked $1.5 billion for Shuttle expenses by 1981, including $700 million for refurbishment of Vandenberg AFB in Calif. for polar-orbit Shuttle launches and $190 million for facilities at Cape Canaveral, Fla., plus $178 million for development of an interim upper stage ( a solid-fuel rocket to be ordered by the Space and Missile Systems Organization of the USAF from Boeing Aerospace, for boosting Shuttle payload spacecraft into extremely high orbit). DOD had been maintaining for 2 yr that it 'would not have money for the 2 final Shuttles; Dr. Malcolm Currie, DOD Director of Research and Engineering, told Congress during budget testimony 3 March that paying for the orbiters would exceed what DOD considered "cost effective" amounts for participation in the shuttle program.
DOD's refusal to pay had caused "consternation among planetary scientists," the NYT said, because NASA might be forced to cut much of its scientific space program in the 1980s to pay for 2 more Shuttles within a fixed budget. However, the matter should be resolved within a few wk, the article added. (NYT, 24 Aug 76, 37)
The Soyuz 21 manned mission to space station Salyut 5 ended abruptly after cosmonauts Vitaly Zholobov and Boris Volynov had been in orbit 48 da. Although the first manned space flight since Apollo-Soyuz failed to break the U.S. 84-day record, no problem was mentioned by the Tass news agency; the first hint of termination came about 10 hr before the landing. The Soyuz 21 descent module landed by parachute on the Karl Marx collective farm near Tselinograd in Kazakhstan at 9:33 pm Moscow time (1:33 pm EST); general condition of the cosmonauts was "satisfactory," said Tass. Experiments returned to earth for analysis were of 3 kinds: geophysical and astrophysical observations, technological, and biological. Technology experiments used processes potentially useful in constructing a larger space station, such as studies of the behavior of gases and liquids in space and a soldering technique using a chemical reaction to produce the necessary heat. Cytological and genetic experiments should provide additional data on the nature and hazards of solar radiation in prolonged space flight. (Nature, 26 Aug 76, 735; Av Wk, 30 Aug 76, 23; FBIS, Tass in English, 24 Aug 76; NYT, 25 Aug 76, 20; W Post, 25 Aug 76, B-9)
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