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A $57.5-million weather satellite was lost on May 3, 1986, when the unmanned Delta rocket that carried it went out of control 71 s after liftoff and was destroyed by command from the ground. It was the third consecutive launching failure for the U.S. space program, following the losses of the space shuttle Challenger in January and an Air Force Titan rocket in April. As Eos went to press, a team of officials from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and its contractors were meeting at the Kennedy Space Center (Cape Canaveral, Fla.) to review telemetry data from the launch. Two surges of current were found to have occurred in the electrical system of the rocket's main engine just prior to the engine's shutdown; it was this shutdown that caused the rocket to go out of control.

The new schedule for Space Shuttle missions and expendable launch vehicles (ELV's) calls for a 7-month delay in sending up the Hubble Space Telescope. NASA was forced to put off launching the telescope until February 1990 to keep the Magellan and Galileo missions within their narrow launch windows. The first post-Challenger shuttle launch is now scheduled for late this month. Discovery's most recent delays were due to a hydrogen leak discovered July 29 that has still not been corrected and an engine valve malfunction during an August 4 test fire.

It is no news that the space programs of the United States, both civil and military, have been acutely disabled since the Challenger accident in January 1986. Billions of dollars' worth of high-priority commercial, scientific, and military spacecraft are backing up in the launching queue, but within the civil sector, no effective effort has yet been made to remedy this disgraceful situation. In fact, the present inflexible policy runs in the opposite direction — that is, to worsen the situation. The likelihood of such a national disability was foreseen in testimony before a subcommittee of the Senate appropriations committee on June 29, 1971, by then—Senator Walter Mondale, Thomas Gold, Brian O'Leary, and myself. At that time, advocates of the development of a fleet of manned space shuttles promised the Congress that each of the proposed shuttles would deliver 50,000 pounds of payload into low Earth orbit at a launching cost of $100 per pound; that each shuttle would have a useful lifetime of 100 missions; that by the early 1980s the United States would be conducting 50 shuttle flights per year (i.e., about one per week) for civil purposes alone; and that all expendable launch vehicles would thereby be rendered obsolete.

There will be 18 space missions using expendable vehicles through the end of September 1981, according to Joseph B. Mahon, director of the Expendable Launch Vehicles Program for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The busy schedule involves launching a variety of scientific, weather, communications, and Department of Defense satellites from launch sites located at the Eastern Space and Missile Center, Vandenberg Air Force Base, California; and the Italian-operated San Marco launch platform in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Kenya. Seven of the 18 missions will be flown on Delta launch vehicles, seven on the Atlas Centaur, three will use the solid fuel Scout, and one, the Atlas-F.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has a record-setting launch schedule for 1984—10 space shuttle flights (see Table 1), 10 satellite deployments from the space shuttle in orbit and 12 unmanned missions using expendable launch vehicles. Also scheduled is the launch on March 1 for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration of Landsat D′, the nation's second earth resources satellite. The launch activity will begin February 3 with the launch of shuttle mission 41-B using the orbiter Challenger. Two communications satellites will be deployed from 41-B: Westar-VI, for Western Union, and Palapa B-2 for the government of Indonesia. The 8-day mission will feature the first shuttle landing at Kennedy Space Center in Florida; and the first flight of the Manned Maneuvering Unit, a self-contained, propulsive backpack that will allow astronauts to move about in space without being tethered to the spacecraft.