Jun 11 1977
From The Space Library
A new estimate of the cost of building three more Shuttle orbiters might run as high as $600 million apiece, Thomas O'Toole reported in the W Post. NASA had told Congress 3mo ago that the remaining Shuttles would cost $550 million apiece; the increase had resulted from the rising price of aluminum and titanium, the two key metals in Shuttle construction. NASA had bought the materials for two vehicles 3yr ago when prices were lower but had held off buying for the last three.
Only one of the five Shuttles presently proposed had been completed, at a cost of about $500 million. A second being assembled at the Rockwell International plant in Palmdale, Calif., would cost just over $500 million. Christopher C. Kraft, Jr., director of JSC (the Shuttle-, management center), said that NASA expected "by the end of this month a new proposal from Rockwell for the last three spacecraft.... I don't know how much Rockwell's going to suggest but they're for sure going to cost more than the last estimate we got." NASA had hoped Congress would approve starting construction of the third Shuttle before the end of 1977. This vehicle was to be sent to Vandenberg AFB in March 1982 for Pentagon use. The fate of the last two Shuttles was not certain, since GAO had told Congress to delay further action on them. NASA and the USAF had expressed concern that delay would mean not only the shutdown around the country of contractor and subcontractor work forces that would be both difficult and costly to reestablish, but also further and more rapid escalation of prices: O'Toole quoted a NASA estimate that a 2yr delay would boost to about $1 billion the price of each Shuttle affected. (W Post, June 11/77, A-2)
The NY Times reported that ERDA's Sandia Laboratories in N.M. had produced the first fusion neutrons in the U.S. by firing a high-energy electron beam at pellets of heavy hydrogen. Use of electron beams was a late development in the search for economical methods of fusion-energy release. Existing atomic-energy plants had operated by fission, or the splitting of large atoms; fusion would squeeze small atoms to create heavier ones. Each reaction would convert a small amount of matter into large amounts of energy. Whereas fission generally used uranium, a relatively scarce material, fusion could use the heavy form of hydrogen called deuterium abundant in sea water. The process used at Sandia had differed from that used by researchers at Moscow's Kurchatov Inst. who last year reported success in releasing fusion energy. (NYT, June 11/77, 22; ERDA Release 77-99)
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