January 1977
From The Space Library
“As Viking Sees It” and “The Search For Life” articles appear in National Geographic Magazine
During January: The Natl. Aeronautic Assn. reported that 1975 was one of the safest years experienced by scheduled U.S. airlines, with a passenger-fatality rate of 0.07 per 100 million passenger miles, beating the railroads' record of 0.08 fatalities per 100 million passenger miles. In 1975, over 205 million passengers on scheduled U.S. airlines (almost as many as live in the entire country, the newsletter noted) had flown more than 162 million passenger miles; only 124 persons had died in 3 U.S. air carrier accidents, whereas highway accidents had killed 44 690. On the basis of the 1975 accident rate, the newsletter calculated a passenger's chances of safe arrival at destination to be 99.99998%. (NAA newsletter, Jan 77, 3)
MSFC employees Alfred G. Orillion, Advanced Projects Office, and James E. Downey, III, deputy director for program development, received special awards for the Alabama section of the American Inst. of Aeronautics and Astronautics at the AIAA honors banquet in Washington, D.C., Jan 13. The awards were for a 1975 space industrialization symposium at MSFC of which Downey was general chairman; Orillion was chairman of AIAA's Alabama section. (MSFC Release 77-9)
Av Wk reported that James S. Martin, Jr., manager of the Viking project, would receive the Goddard award for "brilliant leadership of the Viking project to land an instrumented, automated spacecraft on the planet Mars." (Av Wk, Jan 10/77, 9)
Cosmonaut trainees from Czechoslovakia, Poland, and East Germany had arrived at Zvezdnoy Gorodok, USSR, late in Dec. to begin training for flight positions on Soyuz/Salyut missions. Flight candidates from Bulgaria, Hungary, Cuba, Mongolia, and Romania were to arrive for training at the center during 1977. (Av Wk, Jan 10/77, 9)
- 1977
- January
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