Jul 16 1975
From The Space Library
At a Moscow exhibition of space art to commemorate the joint U.S.-U.S.S.R. Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, Soviet art glorified man's role in space, whereas U.S. art emphasized technology, the Baltimore Sun reported.
U.S. artists, commissioned by NASA and the National Gallery of Art to record the space program, showed basically factual treatments of blastoffs, launch towers, and mazes of steel gridwork. Artist Alden Wicks depicted Kennedy Space Center's Vehicle Assembly Building as "The New Olympus." Men played subordinate roles in U.S. art; they swarmed through control centers or, as in Jamie Wyeth's "Firing Room," sat by the dozens in front of individual TV monitors. Engineers ministered to launch vehicles like priests before an idol. Even in the pen-and-ink drawings of individual astronauts, faces were diminished by the detailed minutiae of spacesuit and life-support paraphernalia.
By contrast, man dominated the Soviet art. Artist Anatoly Yakushin depicted pioneer rocket theoretician Konstantin Tsiolkovsky against a geometric maze, but man controlled the idea. A painting by Boris Okorokov showed a young flight controller commanding abstract equipment, in contrast to Wyeth's passive TV-monitor watchers.
The irony of the two artistic visions was that they "reverse the technological visions of the nations' manned space programs," the Sun said. In reality, U.S. flights left much of the flying up to the astronauts; while the Soviets had kept their cosmonauts as passive as possible.
Also included in the exhibition were paintings by Apollo-Soyuz Test Project cosmonaut Aleksei A. Leonov, the only one of the artists who had seen outer spaces He painted cosmic scenes in brilliant colors: His deep space was not a flat black, but a composite of black and indigo, streaked with magenta and stars with violet coronas. The Leonov earth as seen from space was deep marbled blue with atmospheric sheaths surrounding it in hard-edged layers, pale hues close to the planet, darkening in stages to the night of space. (B Sun, 16 July 75, A4)
Department of Defense said the Navy had understated the long-term cost of building the new F-18 carrier aircraft by at least $1.6 billion, the Washington Star reported. The Star said the Navy had chosen the F-18 under pressure from DOD and Congress, after the Air Force selected the F-16 for its low-cost fighter instead of the fighter version of the F-18. At the time the Navy estimated the cost of each F-18 as $7.8 million, or $2.6 billion to develop and produce the first 128 F- 18s; however, the Star reported, a DOD analysis found the 5-yr costs would be closer to $4.3 billion.
The future of the program was under discussion. One alternative would be to raise projected Navy budget to accommodate the increased costs of the F-18. Another would be for the Navy to drop F-18 and go back to industry to design and develop a lower cost fighter that would fit into the original budget and, in the interim, to let the Navy buy fighter-bombers from McDonnell Douglas to meet its fleet-modernization needs in the early 1980s. (Finney, W Star, 17 July 75, A16)
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