Feb 12 1993
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According to reports, the Clinton administration's new budget would cut funding for NASA's planned Space Station by 40 percent; the cuts were predicted to trigger another major restructuring of the project and more delays. Key Capitol aids said the House had approved $1.35 billion for the program in the next fiscal year, instead of the $2.25 billion NASA had requested, Clinton was reported to be troubled by the massive cost-overruns associated with the project. (W Post, Feb 12/97; AP, Feb 12/93, Feb 13/93; UPI, Feb 12/93, Feb 13/93)
In 1989, NASA embarked on a vast program, the Mission to Planet Earth, which set out to monitor the effects of climate change on Earth's atmosphere, land surface, and oceans. The centerpiece of this program was to be the Earth Observing System, or EOS, a group of 30,000-pound space platforms that could cost as much as $30 billion to build, launch, and operate. The platforms were projected to beam home one trillion bits of data each day, ranging from the flux of solar radiation into the atmosphere to the growth of plankton beneath the ocean surface.
Controversy had surrounded the EOS program since its inception; critics argued that EOS was a grandiose program that would produce huge amounts of undigestible data and would take money away from other-perhaps more useful-efforts at climate monitoring. Critics continued to maintain that long-term, continuous monitoring of crucial climate variables, monitoring that has been postponed until EOS gets launched, would be more useful.
The EOS budget through the end of the century had been trimmed from $17 billion to $8 billion and the mission had been modified. If the budget got much tighter, NASA would have to completely rethink Mission to Planet Earth. (Science, Feb 12/93)
WorldView Imaging of Livermore, California received a government license to launch small, inexpensive spy satellites. WorldView claimed that it could take super-sharp photos from 250 feet up and sell the photos for about half the $4,000 charged by the government's Landsat and France's SPOT Image. Possible uses included traffic monitoring, urban planning, and corporate spying. (USA Today, Feb 12/93; NY Times, Feb 12/93)
A panel of experts tasked with examining the Space Shuttle's main engines said that they were safe to fly provided that technical checks were made "vigorously and rigorously." The panel noted that the engines were so fussy that they needed constant maintenance. Such attention was one of the factors that had driven the cost of each Shuttle flight to about $500 million. The panel suggested that NASA continue to press forward on a number of technical improvements already in the works. (AP, Feb 12/93)
According to officials at NASA, a bad lot of batteries, made by Gates Aerospace Battery Company, might shut down several satellites, including the $363 million Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS) sooner than expected. To make sure that UARS would finish its minimum 18-month mission, NASA scientists had to adjust the satellite's hardware. Instead of gathering extra data from UARS for 10 to 12 years as expected, scientists now estimate that contact with the satellite would last only four or five years. (Science, Feb 12/93)
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