Mar 3 1993
From The Space Library
Congress held an oversight hearing March 2, in which members of Congress attempted to determine what had led to a potential $1 billion over-run in the Space Station program. Space Station managers testified on how the overruns had developed and how they planned to fix them. At the hearing, NASA officials said they had offset all but about $500 million of the potential cost overruns for the next three years; they had done so largely by cutting management jobs and replacing consultants with government employees. (W Post, Mar 3/93; LA Times, Mar 3/93; USA Today, Mar 3/93; AP, Mar 3/93; Space News, Mar 8-14/93; Av Wk, Mar 8/93; H Post, Mar 3/93)
NASA announced that when the first U.S. commercial rocket lifts off in May, its main fuselage and booster rocket were scheduled to carry the logo, "Last Action Hero," the title of a Columbia Pictures summer movie release starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. Columbia paid $500,000 for the ad, which was to be orbiting Earth for more than two years. (WSJ, Mar 3/93; B Sun, Mar 3/93; W Post, Mar 3/93; LA Times, Mar 3/93; USA Today, Mar 3/93; UPI, Mar 3/93; AP, Mar 3/93)
Speaking at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, George Smoot, an astrophysicist at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in Berkeley, California, described his cosmic research work using the space-time ripples that were discovered a year ago, Smoot and his group want to explore backward in time toward the universe's origin and forward to the universe of today. In its investigation, the group uses one of the instruments on the Cosmic Background Explorer Satellite to study the microwave radiation that permeates the cosmos. Cosmologists now have what Smoot compares to "a baby photograph of the universe at about five hours into a human lifetime." That snapshot contains enough information to allow investigators to work backward and forward in time. (CSM, Mar 3/93)
Senator John Warner (R-Virginia), introduced legislation to kill NASA's manned Space Station project. Calling the Space Station "wasteful and unnecessary," the senator urged President Clinton to kill the project. (W Post, Mar 3/93, Mar 4/93)
NASA announced at least a two-day delay in the planned March 14 launch of Space Shuttle Columbia because of a ruptured hydraulic hose that had sprayed fluid in the engine compartment. This was the second delay in three weeks for the German Spacelab mission. (AP, Mar 3/93, Mar 4/93; UPI, Mar 3/93; P Inq, Mar 4/93; USA Today, Mar 4/93; RTw, Mar 3/93)
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