Feb 13 1976
From The Space Library
Space News for this day. (1MB PDF)
Ceremonies at GSFC honored 45 members of the team responsible for NASA's Delta rocket, the "workhorse" of the agency's most dependable launching systems. NASA Administrator James C. Fletcher and Deputy Administrator George M. Low participated in the event. Delta placed NASA's first communications satellite (Echo 1) into orbit 12 Aug. 1960; through January 1976, 119 Deltas had been launched. The Delta's reliability and economy had made it the primary vehicle for commercial spacecraft, international users, and operational meteorological systems. The number of reimbursable launches for non-NASA users had increased over the years; of the 11 Delta missions scheduled for 1976, all but 2 would be launched for foreign or commercial users on a reimbursable basis, better than 80% of the total. Delta's payload capability had risen from 68 kg to 910 kg. As Dr. Fletcher remarked, "Delta is becoming a standard against which to measure the conduct of NASA's business in the future." (NASA Release 76-27)
Dr. Alexander M. Lippisch, designer of the first operational rocket-powered fighter aircraft, died in Cedar Rapids, Ia., at the age of 81. As chief of design after 1939 at Germany's Messerschmitt Company, his speed research led to development of the ME 163B, world's fastest airplane at that time, which had a speed of nearly 1015 km per hr and could climb to 9 km in 3 min. As director of research at the Airplane Research Institute in Vienna after 1943, he was rounded up in Operation Paperclip by the Allies, who put him to work for the U.S. Air Force technical intelligence section and sent him to the U.S. in 1946 to work at Wright-Patterson Field in Ohio. He had left government service in 1957 and gone to work for Collins Radio, where he headed the company's aeronautical laboratory. In 1965 he left Collins to form his own group, the Lippisch Research Corp., and at his death was developing an airfoil boat and an aerodyne (wingless aircraft) for the West German government. (NYT, 13 Feb 76, 34)
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