May 11 1977
From The Space Library
Johnson Space Center announced it had awarded a $399 600 cost-plus-fixed-fee contract to ESL, Inc., of Sunnyvale, Calif., for using Landsat data in a vegetation inventory for eastern Alaska under a NASA project conducted jointly with the Bureau of Land Management. The BLM had begun an automatic inventory system for 474 million acres under its jurisdiction; the Alaska area would represent a tundra ecology. If the joint task were successful, NASA had options for work on grassland and sagebrush ecologies. (JSC Release 77-31)
NASA announced it had awarded a $2.3 million contract to Douglas Aircraft Co., as part of its aircraft energy efficiency (ACEE) program, for improving wing lift-to-drag ratio to reduce fuel use. Douglas would design and test a supercritical wing like that invented by LaRC's Dr. Richard Whitcomb, shaped to decrease shock waves on wing surfaces, with a high aspect ratio (long span relative to its width). LaRC would manage work to be done under the contract at the Douglas plant in Calif. (NASA Release 77-93; LaRC Release 77-17)
MSFC announced it had awarded a 45mo contract to the Universities Space Research Association of Houston to provide support for development of the Atmospheric Cloud Physics Laboratory, scheduled to fly as a partial payload twice a year on Spacelab beginning in 1980 or 1981. The Texas-based consortium would review proposals for scientific experiments and provide a liaison between NASA and the cloud-physics community as an aid to the project scientist. (MSFC Release 77-86)
Strategic arms limitation might suffer another blow, the Washington Post said in a column by Victor Zorza, from the USSR's test of a killer satellite viewed by the U.S. as a new weapon intended to deactivate U.S. observation satellites if and when the Soviets decided to launch a first strike. Zorza noted that current agreements did not cover hunter-killer satellites; by the time a new agreement was reached, both powers might have passed another point of no return in the arms race. (W Post, May 11177, A21)
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