May 29 1966
From The Space Library
The Nation was facing a crisis in space planning, NASA Administrator James E. Webb said in a press interview at NASA Hq. The question was what to do with the Apollo project after men had landed on the moon. The answer would determine whether the US. remained a major space faring nation,” and must be found within a year, he said long before the first lunar landing was made. Search for the answer had been postponed several times because the problem seemed remote and budgets were tight. “It is extremely important not to think you can postpone the decision again. I think it is imperative to have a thoroughgoing national debate on whether we want to go past the point of no return.” If the Nation did not mind being second to the moon or chose to “dismantle the Apollo machine without recovering its great investment,” he would accept that, he said. But he did not believe that either the Congress or the public had consciously reached these decisions. He feared they just had not thought about them. (Clark, NYT, 5/30/66, 1, 22)
Soviet aircraft designer Andrey N. Tupolev described U.S.S.R.’s Tu-144 supersonic airliner in Soviet trade-union newspaper Trud. Four-engine aluminum aircraft would carry 121 passengers at 1,500 mph (compared with US. supersonic transport’s 250 passengers at 2,000 mph); speed had been deliberately limited to allow construction “of highly durable aluminum alloys,” Tupolev said. Tu-144 would be needle-nosed with small delta wing far back on fuselage and four jet engines in single container under rear section. Aircraft would be operational in “the nearest future”-possibly by 1970. (Anderson, NYT, 5/30/66, 36C)
May 29-June 4: Mapping the moon for man’s first lunar landing was discussed by leading scientists at an 11-nation International Conference on Selenodesy at Manchester, England. (Reuters, NYT, 5/30/66, 22)
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