Oct 13 2000
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(New page: Responding to a 25 January 2000 article in the New York Times, alleging that grants in the mid-1990s had benefited the Russian civilian agency Biopreparat, NASA's Office of Inspector Gener...)
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Responding to a 25 January 2000 article in the New York Times, alleging that grants in the mid-1990s had benefited the Russian civilian agency Biopreparat, NASA's Office of Inspector General published a report stating that NASA had not followed the U.S. Department of State's guidelines for administering biotechnology grants to Russia, thereby inadvertently funding germ-warfare laboratories. The Russian government owned 51 percent of Biopreparat, the organization that had conducted most of the Soviet Union's biological warfare research since the 1970s. At the time of the article's publication, Biopreparat was continuing to research pathogens that had been included in the Soviet biological warfare program. The Inspector General found that "almost three-fourths of US$1.68 million in NASA grants intended for space biotechnology work found its way to `institutions that had been affiliated with Russia's biological warfare program'." Therefore, the Inspector General asserted that NASA had not followed the Department of State's guidelines requiring NASA to "regularly visit and participate in the research it was funding at Russian institutes that had been part of the Soviet biological warfare program." NASA agreed with the Inspector General's sole recommendation: to practice "invasive collaboration" in the future, when funding biotechnology research in countries with known or suspected biological weapons programs.
Space Shuttle Discovery arrived at the ISS. Shuttle Commander Brian Duffy successfully executed the rendezvous without the Shuttle's radar, relying on a star-tracking system and on handheld lasers operated by his crew. The Ku-band antenna had failed after launch, disrupting the radar and television link. The Shuttle docking was NASA's first conducted without radar.
The ESA signed a four-year contract with two industry groups-Sarcom, led by Spot Image of Toulouse, France, and the Emma consortium, led by Eurimage of Rome granting the two groups "priority access to the Envisat radar remote-sensing satellite" scheduled for launch in 2001, as well as imagery from the ERS-2 spacecraft, already in orbit. About the new business relationship, a major policy shift for the ESA, Acting Envisat Mission Manager Gunther Kohlhammer remarked that the ESA had realized that it needed to change so that it could develop new markets. The contract gave commercial orders for the satellite images priority over scientific requests, setting new limits on the type and number of users ESA would grant access to data without paying commercial prices.
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