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Wednesday, January 28, 1987 / University Daily Kansan
NASA observes silence as Challenger memorial
United Press International
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — The Challenger astronauts, killed one year ago today in NASA's greatest failure, were pioneers who died carrying the United States to the ultimate frontier, family members said yesterday in an open letter to the nation's people.
In a somber irony, yesterday was the 20th anniversary of a 1967 launch pad fire that killed three Apollo 1 astronauts. The anniversary formed a bridge to a painful past at a time when NASA is struggling to focus on the focus.
For Challenger, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration deliberately planned a low-key remembrance of a day forever etched in the agency's collective consciousness.
Killed aboard the shuttle Jan. 28, 1986, were commander Francis "Dick" Scoebe, co-pilot Michael Smith, Judith Resnik, Ellison Williams, and Gregory Jarvis and New Hampshire school teacher Christa McAuliffe.
The filers' families said that the Challenger Seven risked their lives, "not for the sake of aimless adventure, but for the nation that gave them opportunity and for the space
frontier which was an extension of its spirit."
At 11:38 a.m., the time Challenger blasted off its final flight, flags at NASA field centers are scheduled to be lowered to half-staff and agency employees and contractors plan to observe 73 seconds of silence, the length of Challenger's mission.
No public ceremonies are planned, but this afternoon, NASA administrator James Fletcher and other top agency officials plan to attend a brief service at Fort Myer Chapel near Arlington National Cemetery outside Washington, D.C.
Relatives of the astronauts plan to speak, and President Reagan is to deliver an address to NASA employees over closed circuit television.
"This will be the conclusion of our year of mourning," said student Micaela Mejia, a former neighbor of the McAuliffe family.
In McAuliffe's hometown of Concord, N.H., students and teachers at McAuliffe's red brick schoolhouse plan a private ceremony.
Gov. John Sumunu said a simple service scheduled for the statehouse was consistent with what the family felt comfortable with.
In Florida, several area schools planned special tributes to
McaUliffe, including one at Christa McAulife Elementary School in which seven candles will be lighted to symbolize the astronauts.
In their letter to the public, the families of the shuttle crew outlined their plans for a $50 million Challenger Center, an educational facility to be built in tribute to the shuttle crew.
On Monday, some 50.000 school children took part in a special flag raising ceremony to honor Challenger's crew.
In another haunting irony, a cold wave swept over the Kennedy Space Center on Monday night, a reminder of the subfreezing temperature the night before Challenger's fatal flight that was blamed for contributing to the booster failure that doomed the ship and its seven-member crew.
"What a sense of deja vu," NASA employee said, shaking his head as he stood looking toward launch pad 39B, where engineers had implemented a freeze protection plan.
Today's tribute to the Challenger stands in contrast to the lack of agency ceremony to commemorate the 20th anniversary of a Jan. 27, 1967, launch pad fire that killed Apollo astronauts Virgil "Gus" Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee.
NASA falls behind schedule as Soviet program prospers
The Associated Press
MOSCOW — Since space shuttle Challenger's explosion halted manned U.S. space exploration, the Soviet Union has forged ahead with an ambitious program of endurance missions, space construction and inauguration of a second orbiting station.
Although failures in the Kremlin's space program often have gone unreported, 1986 appeared to be a successful year. The state-run media have predicted that 1987 will be another busy one, beginning with a mission to the new Mir space station.
No date for the launch has been announced, but the Tass news agency reported on Jan. 16 that the Progress-27 cargo vessel had been sent to the Mir station to take fuel and supplies for a manned mission to begin soon.
In the new manned mission, Soviet cosmonauts will be sent to Mir, and a Soviet Syrian team is to join them for a few days. For 1988, the Soviets announced a Soviet-French space shot and the launching of two probes to explore Mars.
The Mir station was opened in March by two Soviet cosmonauts, who returned to Earth in July after visiting another space station.
Officials of the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration said this week that they feared that their goal of resuming shuttle
launches in early 1988 might be overly optimistic, because testing of redesigned booster rockets and other modifications are behind schedule.
Neither Soviet space officials nor the state-run media have made direct comparisons of their activity with the state of the NASA program, which has been virtually frozen since seven American astronauts died in 1986. But the Soviet Union's active schedule in space last year was in stark contrast to that of the United States.
In February, the Soviets sent up the Mir space station, their second orbiting lab along with the older Salyut-7, and quickly followed up with a manned mission to inaugurate the new facilities three weeks later.
The Kremlin began last year with a well-received international project to track Halley's comet from two probes that began sending information to a Moscow monitoring station in mid-January. The probes had their closest encounters with the comet in March.
The Soviet Union also has been trying to take over some of the commercial satellite launches that have been delayed by U.S. rocket failures and problems in Europe's Ariane program.
Without directly referring to the Challenger disaster, Premier Nikolai I. Ryzhkov made a pitch for the slow-moving Soviet program earlier this
month, assuring prospective clients that the Kremlin would not pifer Western technological secrets and offer discounts for developing countries.
The Mir, which means "peace" in Russian, has six docking ports to accommodate visiting spacecraft or add on labs and other components that could be flown up to expand the size and capability of the station.
The Mir station is a new generation orbital laboratory intended to serve as the basis for eventual permanent-lv manned operations.
Two Soviet cosmonauts, Leonid Kizim and Vladimir Solovev, opened the new station on March 15, two days after taking off from the Central Asian cosmodrome in a launch carried live on television.
Kizim and Solove, who along with cosmonaut Oleg Altgov hold the world's record for endurance in space with their 237-day mission in 1984, gave a news conference from aboard the Mir in April.
On May 5, they re-entered the Soyuz T15-t craft, in which they were launched, and traveled to the Salyut-7 space station in what was billed as the world's first "space taxi" trip.
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While at the Salyut-7 station, the cosmonauts experimented with space construction techniques, building a 50-foot trellis of girders in a bridge formation that could link future space stations.
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