Word: launchful
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...ship roared higher and higher into the cloudless Florida sky, the words of Lisa Malone, the new voice of Launch Control, were cool and precise: "Discovery -- performance nominal." But if Malone, the first woman to deliver the countdown for a space shot, betrayed little emotion, her colleagues at NASA could barely contain their excitement. "It gets better every time," exulted NASA administrator James Fletcher. He had reason to cheer: last week's launch of Discovery, the third shuttle mission since the 1986 Challenger disaster, was another significant milestone in the comeback of the U.S. space program...
...highlight was the deployment of the $100 million Tracking and Data-Relay Satellite, which completes an orbiting communications network that will let the space agency reduce its reliance on an expensive series of ground stations. Much more was riding on Discovery, though, than a single satellite. Without a successful launch, NASA could not hope to stick to its ambitious schedule of seven shuttle flights this year. And those flights are vital to a whole series of important scientific missions, including sending a probe to Jupiter and placing a powerful telescope in orbit. Those launches, plus several other missions that...
...early October a 40-day window will open for the shuttle launch of Galileo, a craft that will head toward the sun, swing around Venus, and then use the earth's gravity to sling itself out to Jupiter. When it arrives in late 1995, Galileo will drop a probe into the seething maelstrom of the giant planet's atmosphere. Then Galileo will rove through the Jovian system to explore its moons...
Even if technical problems ground the shuttle program again, there will still be some big news from space. In July, for example, NASA will use a Delta rocket to launch the Cosmic Background Explorer, a satellite that will study the background microwave radiation that emanates from every part of the cosmos. These microwaves are thought by astrophysicists to be the faint afterglow of the Big Bang explosion, which started the universe, and they pose a riddle. The glow is uniform in all directions to within 1 part in 10,000, implying that the Big Bang was a perfectly uniform explosion...
...this year proceeds as planned, NASA intends to keep up the momentum. In 1990 shuttles are scheduled to launch the ROSAT X-ray telescope, the Gamma Ray Observatory and Ulysses, the first probe to study the sun's polar regions. But some experts worry about relying too heavily on the shuttle. "I certainly hope that these missions will go off as planned," says James Van Allen, the University of Iowa physicist who discovered the Van Allen radiation belts that ring the earth. "But the shuttle is not out of the woods yet. After Challenger, NASA should have made a decision...