Aug 21 1998
From The Space Library
Phillip Z. Tapper, emergency coordinator for NASA's GSFC, announced that exposure to smoke and water during the previous day's fire had damaged parts of two spacecraft. Tapper said that engineers had not yet determined the exact damage to the heat protection panels, which they were planning to install in the Hubble Space Telescope and another spacecraft.
NASA and U.S. Air Force officials announced the hiring of Space Gateway Support of Herndon, Virginia, to run base operations at Kennedy Space Center (KSC), Patrick Air Force Base, and Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. Johnson Controls and EG&G Florida at KSC had previously held base-operations contracts at the military bases. The new joint base-operations-support contract was worth US$1 billion for five years, with the option to renew for another five years. In consolidating the contracts, the agencies intended to cut costs. According to officials, continuing separate base-operations contracts would have cost 30 percent more. Other primary customers under the contract included government contractors for NASA and U.S. Air Force spaceflight operations, payload ground operations, life sciences, expendable vehicles, and launch operations and support.
Fritz Haber, a German engineer recruited after World War II to work on the American space program, died at the age of 86 in Connecticut. An aeronautical engineer, Haber developed a way to simulate a gravity-free environment by flying a plane in a roller-coaster pattern. NASA first used this simulation to train the astronauts in the Apollo program. Before coming to the United States, Haber had developed a way to transport missiles by piggybacking them on another aircraft. Engineers had never used his piggyback design during World War II, but NASA had implemented his idea, carrying the Space Shuttle on a modified Boeing 747 from its landing site in California back to its launch site in Florida.
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