Nov 6 1975
From The Space Library
NASA had awarded a $2 548 265 contract amendment to Aeronutronic Ford Corp. of Houston for operation of the Mission Control Center at Johnson Space Center. The amendment to a contract originally awarded in 1963 called for additional labor and materials that would bring the value of the contract to $267 710 123. The work would employ 513 persons at the three AFC facilities in Houston, and in Penn. and Calif. (JSC Release 75-94)
Workmen on the largest building in the world using solar energy for heating and cooling had doubted that the system would work, until they turned on a water hose, said Dr. Robert San Martin of the Energy Institute at N. Mex. State Univ. When the time came to put the collectors on the roof, the foreman told the crew to run water through them with a garden hose; the workmen forgot that the collectors had been in the sun and were quite hot. "When they ran the water through, violent steam came shooting out the other end," said Dr. Martin. "At that moment they were convinced." The one-story building, a facility for the N. Mex. Dept. of Agriculture, would use 330 units mounted on its roof as a solar collector. Fluid circulated through the collectors heated by the sun would provide 80% of the heating and cooling of the 2349-sq-m structure. Biggest test would be use of solar energy for cooling, relatively untried as yet. (NYT, 6 Nov 75, 34)
Harnessing nuclear fusion reactions to generate electricity on earth moved a step nearer reality when scientists at the Mass. Inst. of Technology reported achieving a fivefold improvement in the confinement of hydrogen in a magnetic container where it could be heated and com- pressed to the point of fusion. A test reactor at MIT called Alcator had successfully raised the magnetic field containing the hot plasma to 75 000 gauss, about 150 000 times the strength of earth's magnetic field at the equator; this, said Dr. Robert C. Seamans, Jr., Administrator of the Energy Research and Development Administration, "exceeds by a factor of five anything previously achieved anywhere in the world." The Soviet Union in the 1960s had developed toroidal (doughnut shaped) machines called Tokamaks that produced better temperature, containment time, and particle density in combination than anything before; a similar machine built in France had achieved a figure of 2 trillion for the density-multiplied-by-containment-time, at a temperature of 20 million C. MIT's Alcator had achieved 10 trillion, at a temperature of 10 million C. ERDA officials and university scientists noted that the plasma confinement would have to be another 10 times as effective, at temperatures 10 times higher, than those of the Alcator experiments before fusion could be achieved artificially in the laboratory. Although the U.S. had begun a program to build the first fusion-power plant by the end of this century, the economy of this new power source would remain doubtful in spite of the availability of cheap fuel from the ocean: The costs of such plants had been estimated at billions of dollars each. (NYT, 6 Nov 75, 27; CSM, 6 Nov 75,1; B Sun, 6 Nov 75, Al)
The Aerospace Industries Association called on NASA to abide by government policy that relied on the private sector for goods and services, charging that increasing in-house activity by the government had been detrimental to the economics of the private sector. Karl G. Harr, president of AIA, told the House Subcommittee on Aviation & Transportation R&D during hearings on H.R. 11573 that a proper partnership between NASA and the aerospace industry should be maintained, and warned of the prospect that the government might move to "increase its share of that partnership." Involvement of government in postresearch activities such as prototype development "threatens to weaken our private technological base," Harr said. "We do not feel that NASA and other government agencies should both identify the needs and pursue the solutions on their own." Commending NASA for its 10-yr aircraft fuel-reduction program, Harr said the program was "an ideal opportunity to develop the government-industry team into its most efficient and cost-effective form." (Transcript, Vol II Part I, 149 ff)
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