Jun 4 1977
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The NY Times reported that the General Accounting Office, Congress's investigative arm, had told the lawmakers to consider delaying completion of the Space Shuttle fleet, originally planned to include five ships. Two had been built so far. GAO said Congress should go ahead will building a third Shuttle but should put off construction of the other two until "there insufficient confidence in the shuttle development program and more information is available on the space transportation system operations cost and plans for future space activity." Today noted that this report was "the most sweepingly and harshly critical" of a number of negative assessments of the Shuttle issued by GAO. Among its charges were that the Shuttle would cause sonic booms over Calif. and Fla. upon landing; that its tires would blow out and cause a crash when it tried to land; that it could make too few orbits; that there was no proof it would reduce the costs of carrying cargoes into space; and that hardly anyone would want to use its services except DOD and NASA itself. GAO pointed out that other nations, led by Japan, had been developing their own launch vehicles and were likely to use them instead of paying to use the Shuttle; it also said NASA had erred in setting its fees low to encourage users to change over from expendable launchers. NASA's plan to recover expenses later, when costs had fallen with increased use, might never be possible, the GAO said.
Former NASA administrator James C. Fletcher said he disagreed with most of GAO's comments: NASA would solve the technical problems as it had solved others, he said, and delaying acquisition of the fourth and fifth Shuttles would be wasteful. "If they are procured while tooling and assembly lines are in place, they unquestionably can be procured at far less cost than would be incurred by delay." A 3-yr delay would run up the program cost by from $3 billion to $4.5 billion, he said. (NYT, June 5/77, 43; Today, June 4/77, 8A)
The NY Times. reported that a new USAF A-10 antitank attack jet crashed June 3 at the Paris Air and Space Show, killing Howard W. Nelson, chief test pilot for Fairchild Industries. Nelson, who had flown 105 missions during the Korean War and had over 10 000hr total flight time, had flown 500hr in A-10s; he was over the runway and hit the plane's tail on the ground in view of his wife and thousands of spectators. No one else was injured. This was the 6th crash in 12yr at these shows, held yearly to exhibit the latest aircraft to the world market; at the 1973 show, a Soviet Tupolev SST jetliner had crashed into a group of houses near the field killing 5 crewmembers and 8 residents.
A Fairchild spokesman said the USAF would set up a board to investigate the crash. The USAF had bought 30 A-10s at $4 million each, and a squadron of these was scheduled to go into operation June 10 at Myrtle Beach AFB, S.C. This was the first major accident since the A-10 was first flown in 1972. (NYT, June 4/77, 3; Today, June 4/77, 8A)
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