Dec 13 1974
From The Space Library
A golden age of planetary exploration was a realistic possibility, Science quoted Dr. James C. Fletcher, NASA Administrator, as saying in an interview. Dr. Fletcher believed space science was likely to be a major thrust of the space program in the 1980s, although NASA'S budget was vulnerable to cuts in the present political climate. He ruled out manned programs other than the space shuttle, but NASA would not become an all-purpose technology development agency for energy, ground transportation, and similar nonspace systems. Applications and materials processing would be important. Dr. Fletcher believed NASA'S program was acceptable to Congress and to the White House and that its future problem would not be wholesale cancellation of the space program but surviving annual budget cuts.
Increased competition for money and staff attention in congressional space-related committees could aggravate NASA'S budgetary problems, according to Science. Observers had predicted that Congress would be faced with a choice between the shuttle and continuation of the space science and applications program. The decision could rest on the support of the shuttle program by organized labor, as it had in a 1972 Senate attempt to kill the shuttle. Some scientists had suggested that a $1-billion NASA budget cut would be better for science than a $100-million cut because the former would entail canceling the shuttle, in theory freeing money for space science. Dr. Fletcher had maintained, however, that a balance between programs would be kept. (Hammond, Science, 13 Dec 74, 1011-3)
Three Kitt Peak National Observatory astronomers announced they had photographed large-scale structures, hot and cold regions, that were probably convection currents in the atmosphere of Alpha Orionis (the star Betelguese in the Constellation Orion), 500 light years from the earth. The announcement, made in Florida at the American Astronomical Society's annual meeting, was based on photos made 28 March using the four-meter Mayall Telescope. A new technique of interferometry analysis had permitted reconstruction of the star's image. In resolving the disc of Betelguese, the Kitt Peak astronomers became the first observers to distinguish actual forms on a star other than the sun. (NSF Release 74-229)
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