May 23 1985
From The Space Library
The Pentagon's Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) office said today that the Space Shuttle Discovery would participate in June in the first SDI experiment in orbit, carrying a mirror intended to intercept and reflect a laser beam fired from earth, the Washington Post reported. In some missile defense systems, a large orbiting mirror would receive a powerful beam from a ground-based laser and reflect it to destroy an enemy missile, but in the Space Shuttle experiment, the laser beam would be too weak to harm the spacecraft. A small mirror would reflect the beam back to the ground so engineers could verify their ability to keep the laser pointed at the orbiting mirror.
The laser would travel from an Air Force Base on Maui, Hawaii, and bounce back by a special 8-in.-diameter "retroreflector" that astronauts would place in one of the Space Shuttle's middeck side windows while the spacecraft was over the Pacific.
An SDI spokesman said the laser had successfully tracked during earlier tests an airplane carrying the mirror at an altitude of 30,000 feet. The Space Shuttle flew in orbit at 100 miles and more.
The test, called the high precision tracking experiment, was the first in a series that the SDI office had booked aboard the Space Shuttle. Beginning in 1987, the Pentagon would fly two major SDI experiments each year. (W Post, May 24/85, A8)
In a ceremony today in the East Room of the White House, President Reagan presented the Presidential Medal of Freedom to 12 people including former test pilot Chuck Yeager. "More than you'll ever know," Reagan said, "this world would have been much poorer and a dimmer place without each of you." In presenting Yeager's award, Reagan said he was "a hero in war and peace," who on October 14, 1947, in a rocket plane named "Glamorous Glennis" after his wife, "became the first human being to travel faster than the speed of sound, and in doing so, showed to the world the real meaning of 'The Right Stuff'." After the ceremony, Yeager gave Glennis Yeager his medal.
In an interview with a Washington Post reporter upon his arrival in Washington for the ceremony, Yeager said, "I was just a lucky kid who caught the right ride. But then I was as naive as could be, living a cloistered life out at Muroc, where the flying was fun and the living was easy.
" . . We didn't know what the word 'macho' meant. We were jes' a bunch of hell raisers . . . It wasn't a case of the right stuff. Just dumb luck.
"When they refer to a pilot 'having the right stuff; that doesn't mean a rat's ass to me or any other pilot. It's more meaningful to be in the right place at the right time." (W Post, May 23/85, Dl; May 24/85, B1)
NASA Administrator James Beggs told Congress that the new version of the Centaur rocket designed for Space Shuttle-launched planetary missions would cost about $110 million more ($90 million for NASA; $20 million for the Air Force) than expected [see NASA/Budget, Feb. 28], the Washington Post reported.
Wider and shorter than the old-model Centaur to fit in the Space Shuttle's cargo bay, the new rocket would launch in 1986 two spacecraft toward Jupiter. An even shorter version starting in 1987 would launch from the Space Shuttle two classified missions for the Air Force.
Beggs told the House Science and Technology subcommittee on space science and applications that "We underestimated the job of integrating the Centaur into the shuttle and General Dynamics underestimated the cost of changing the configuration of the rocket." The new estimates raised Centaur program costs from $755 million to $865 million. (W Post, May 24/85, A16)
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31
