Word: launchful
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...grievously miscalculated in putting all its space eggs into the shuttle basket. The Pentagon, long suspicious of the shuttle's reliability, wrangled appropriations from Congress to build eleven Titan 34-D rockets for military missions. The nation's scientists, for their part, despaired as the eagerly awaited shuttle launch of the Hubble space telescope, which could revolutionize astronomy by extending our view to the edges of the universe, fell years behind schedule. Crucial deadlines were missed for shuttle launches of the planetary probes Magellan, designed to map the surface of Venus, Galileo, to survey Jupiter and its moons, and Ulysses...
...difficulties, NASA has lost potential commercial clients to the European Space Agency, which will put payloads into orbit aboard unmanned Ariane rockets at bargain prices (cost: about $40 million per payload). Even more galling was last month's decision by the Reagan Administration to allow China to launch two U.S. communications satellites, a move that stunned the fledgling U.S. commercial rocket industry. "That hurt, and hurt hard," says an executive of one U.S. firm. "We wanted those birds...
Belatedly aware of the folly of total dependence on manned launch vehicles to deploy spacecraft, the U.S. has been forced to play a catch-up game. Since January 1986, the Soviets have launched scores of satellites, sent two / scientific probes to Mars, and ferried a stream of cosmonauts between the earth and the space station Mir -- all with the aid of antiquated but tried- and-true expendable rockets. In the process, they have pushed far ahead of the U.S. in knowledge of the effects of extended space flight on humans...
...partly dependent on the shuttle. Its high-resolution "keyhole" photo-reconnaissance satellite, which will be used in part to monitor Soviet compliance with nuclear-arms-reduction treaties, will be aboard the next shuttle. Scientists too have been granted accommodations -- aboard the Atlantis in April 1989, the next opportunity to launch the Magellan mission, and the following October for the Galileo probe. The Hubble telescope may finally get off the ground in February 1990, and Ulysses in October of that year...
COVER: Discovery' s fiery launch lifts U. S. spirits and puts astronauts back into space...