Jun 18 1997
From The Space Library
The U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) released a report detailing the cost overruns for the development of the International Space Station (ISS). U.S. Senator Dale Bumpers (D-AK), a longtime opponent of the expensive ISS, requested the report. Upon seeing it, Senator Bumpers commented, "we don't need to search outer space for black holes. We have one right here on Earth. It's called the International Space Station." GAO's report found that Boeing Company, hired by NASA to build the ISS, had already incurred nearly US$300 million in cost overruns. The report also found that the cost-effectiveness of the project had deteriorated severely from the time of last accounting. In 1995 Boeing had been US$27 million under budget as opposed to the severe overages of 1997. GAO Associate Director Thomas J. Schulz recommended in the report that Congress should rethink its commitment to the program if the overruns continued to grow. The estimate of the cost, just to get the program back on schedule, was US$129 million. However, an ongoing debate on a disaster relief bill for the Midwest prevented the scheduled congressional hearing on the report.
NASA announced that Lockheed Martin Missiles and Space Company had won the contract to develop and deliver solar-imaging instruments for U.S. weather satellites. The US$54 million contract provided funding for the creation of a model instrument and two flight instruments. Scientists believed that the solar x-ray images captured by the instrument would improve the ability of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Air Force to forecast special weather events. The proposed imager also had applications for civilian companies dependent upon predicting weather patterns.
Jurgen H. Rahe, NASA's Science Program Director for Exploration of the Solar System, died when a tree collapsed on the car he was driving during a severe storm in Maryland. Rahe, 57 years old, had enjoyed a distinguished career in the field of astronomy and at NASA. At the time of his death, he was responsible for overseeing visionary NASA programs, such as the Galileo Mission to Jupiter and the much-anticipated July 1997 landing of Mars Pathfinder. Rahe had guided NASA's efforts to make more frequent and cost-effective exploratory missions of the solar system. According to one colleague, Rahe had presided over the planetary exploration program's "unparalleled period of major discoveries." Before his tenure at NASA, Rahe held tenured positions at California Institute of Technology and Germany's University of Erlangen-Nuremberg.
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