Feb 20 1985
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(New page: Michael Burch, assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, said beginning in 1987, two years earlier than planned, two Space Shuttle flights a year would carry experiments for P...)
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Michael Burch, assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, said beginning in 1987, two years earlier than planned, two Space Shuttle flights a year would carry experiments for President Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) research program, with initial experiments testing the ability to detect, track, and aim against targets in space, the Washington Post reported.
The tracking and targeting tests, developed in a Pentagon research program that antedated the Reagan Administration, would include a mounting device for attaching the telescope-like sight to the Space Shuttle and sensors that could pick up at a distance equal to the width of the U.S. the "signature of objects" such as the booster plume of a missile.
The Department of Defense had canceled a Space Shuttle test of the system's main telescope, though sources said it would continue land-based tests to develop a more capable telescope. Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger had said the previous year's congressional SDI program budget cuts would delay by one year an integrated-system demonstration. (W Post, Feb 20/85, A5)
Neil Hutchinson, Johnson Space Center's (JSC) space station program manager, at a U.S. House Science and Technology space science and application subcommittee authorization hearing, said that ferrying and assembling a space station would require seven Space Shuttle flights over a period of nine months to a year, Aerospace Daily reported, and assembly would rely on automation and robotics, not Space Shuttle crew extravehicular activities. Assembly would begin with a beam of solar panels and a 90-ft. truss structure. Space Shuttle orbiters would dock with the space station structure at different points to assemble the facility, using the orbiter's remote manipulator system (RMS) arm and a remote arm operated on the space station.
The 3rd and 4th Space Shuttle flights would take up habitation modules; the 5th flight would ferry two more sets of solar panels and a 3rd module, possibly for logistics. Hutchinson said current planning called for permanent manning of the station after the 5th flight; the 6th flight would carry the 1st of two planned laboratories with the baseline configuration producing 75 kw of power, which would be completed after the 7th flight.
Phil Culbertson, NASA associate administrator, said a new program plan envisioned a 21-month definition and preliminary design effort beginning in April and extending through January 1987, which reflected the lower than anticipated funding level of $230 million for space station activities in the NASA's FY 86 budget. Of the $230 million, $15 million was for utilization, $82 million for advanced development, $52 million for program management/integration, $7 million for operational readiness, and $74 million for system-definition contracts. Defense Daily noted that Culbertson said NASA would have to "stretch" to meet the $8-billion price of the space station and that it would ask its contractors to "stretch with us." (A/D, Feb 20/85, 1; DID, Feb 20/85, 227)
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