in the cockpit on reentry, . . . [the doctors] could very easily not have picked this thing up until my next annual physical which is 6 or 8 months off." Then it would have been a "lot tougher" to fix.

Slayton, one of the seven original U.S. astronauts, had been grounded in 1962 because of an erratic heart rate, first detected in 1959, but had been returned to flight status March 1972 in time for assignment to ASTP. He told the briefing that he hoped to be out of the hospital within 7 days and back to work in 2 wk, and on flight status again within a month. (Transcript, ASTP PC-63, 20 Aug 75) NASA announced that the U.S. tour by the five Apollo-Soyuz Test Project crewmembers had been postponed to 13 Oct. because of astronaut Donald K. Slayton's scheduled lung surgery. The crew's tour of the U.S.S.R., scheduled to begin 22 Sept., would continue on schedule [see 15 Aug.]. (NASA Release 75-236)

Lt. Col. Michael Love successfully completed the 28th flight of the X-24B lifting body, making its second and final runway landing [see 5 Aug.] at Flight Research Center. The purpose of the flight was to land on a concrete runway, survey body pressure, study a lefthand fin tuft, check out the thermal protection system, and perform stability and control maneuvers with the rudder bias at 5° toe-out. Launched from a B-52 aircraft at 13 700 m, Col. Love ignited the vehicle's rocket engine and the X-24B reached a speed of mach 1.53 and an altitude of 21 900 m before engine shutdown and unpowered glide and landing.

Flights of the 11-m delta-shaped vehicle were part of a joint NASAAir Force program to study transonic flight characteristics of an aerodynamic shape that could be the forerunner of future hypersonic cruise vehicles. (X-24B flt rpt, NASA Prog Off; FRC Release 25-75) The Large Area Crop Inventory Experiment (LACIE), a low-budget cooperative NASA-Department of Agriculture-National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration program designed to assess U.S. wheatcrop yields and to forecast production, could develop into a worldwide crop program, J. F. ter Horst reported in the Los Angeles Times. If elevated in status and budget priority by President Ford, LACIE could accurately measure a worldwide grain feast or famine each year, identifying regions of big harvests and potential shortages, vital in allocating world food supplies to meet the needs of growing world population. Ter Horst quoted an advisor of President Ford as saying that, if the LACIE system were in worldwide operation, "we would know what the Russian grain crop was likely to be, what they would be buying, and just how much of our crop we could afford to sell them."

Ter Horst added that intelligence sources indicated the Russians had already measured U.S. crops by satellite. "If true, that could explain the confidence of Russian grain-purchasing moves this year. It also indicates an accelerated U.S. political need to play catch-up in this phase of the space race." (ter Horst, LA Times, 20 Aug 75) A Today editorial had commented on the planned Viking flight to Mars: "Success of the Viking flight could mean additional Congressional support for more sophisticated flights in the future. . . . It will be almost another year before we will have the answers to the Viking experiments....At that time, we will be celebrating the 200th birthday of our country-and what better way to celebrate the birth of one nation than with the discovery of another?" (Today, 20 Aug 75)

21 August: The Titan-Centaur launch vehicle for the Viking- B had been moved to the pad at Launch Complex 41 just 24 hr after the successful launch of Viking 1. Technicians would mate the spacecraft to the launch vehicle on 27 Aug., preparing for the scheduled launch on 1 Sept. (KSC Release 174-75)

The Space Shuttle was, in many ways, the "ultimate recycling program," Robert Anderson, president and chief executive officer of Rockwell International Corp. said on Transportation Day at the Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto. Anderson said that the Shuttle program, with its international scope and emphasis on reusability, was the first major step toward economical and effective use of space.

More advanced Shuttle-launched satellites would benefit the world by aiding crop control; locating new sources of minerals and fossil fuels; monitoring weather, pollution, and localized disasters such as oil slicks and forest fires; mapping oceans and urban areas; and improving communications. "For the job of transportation is not just to move people and goods from point to point-it is to also move history forward by enabling the pioneers to explore the new frontiers and by enabling society to capitalize on their discoveries." (Text; Rockwell Intl Release R-42)

NASA announced appointment of Herbert J. Rowe, chairman of the board of PEMCOR, Inc., as Associate Administrator for External Affairs. Rowe would coordinate activities of the Office of Industry Affairs and Technology Utilization and the Office of Public Affairs, the offices that oversee NASA interactions with external organizations and individuals and disseminate information about NASA programs. (NASA anno, 26 Aug 75)

NASA announced retirement from military service of NASA Skylab 4 (16 Nov. 1973-8 Feb. 1974) astronauts Gerald P. Carr and William R. Pogue effective September 1. Carr, a Marine Corps colonel, would remain with NASA as a civilian astronaut. Pogue, an Air Force colonel and an astronaut since April 1966, would leave NASA to become a vice president of High Flight, an interdenominational evangelistic foundation founded by former astronaut James R. Irwin. As crew members on Skylab 4 Pogue and Carr, along with Dr. Edward G. Gibson, share the world record for individual time in space of 2017 hr 15 min 32 sec. Pogue's departure would reduce the number of NASA astronauts to 31. (NASA Release 75-233)

The Knights of Columbus, a U.S. Catholic fraternal organization, had agreed to pay for worldwide satellite coverage of three live 90-min Vatican events, the Washington Post reported. Four Intelsat satellites would telecast the midnight mass at Christmas, the Stations of the Cross from the Roman Colosseum on Good Friday, and the Pope's Easter Sunday message. Each broadcast would cost an estimated $25 000. (W Post, 21 Aug 75)

22 August: Defense, space, and energy accounted for most of a record increase in Federal research and development funding in FY 1976, the National Science Foundation's report An Analysis of Federal R & D Funding by Function, Fiscal Years 1969-76 stated. The largest dollar increase, $1860 million, was for national defense; the second and third largest increases, $343 million each, were for space and energy.

Relative increases in FY 1976 were largest for education, 102%; energy, 37%; national defense, 20%; and space, 13%.

Total Federal obligation for R&D in the 1976 budget of $21.7 billion was a record high. The $2.7-billion increase over FY 1975 was also a record increase for any one year, enough to indicate a real rise in R&D activity, allowing for a reasonable inflation factor. The upward change contrasted with an average annual decline of 2.7% in constant dollars over the period 1969-75. (NSF Highlights, 25 Aug 75, 1) NASA announced selection of McDonnell Douglas Astronautics Co. for negotiation of a $14.8-million fixed-price incentive contract to develop, build, and deliver Space Shuttle solid rocket booster (SRB) structures, and to design and build the tooling necessary to produce them. The SRB structures would support the Space Shuttle on the launch pad, transfer thrust loading to the Orbiter and external tank, and provide structural support for the SRB recovery system, electrical components, and thrust-vector control system. (NASA Release 75-238)

A group of 28 scientists, engineers, sociologists, and economists concluded a 10-wk (16 June-22 Aug.) NASA-Stanford University study at Ames Research Center by recommending that the U.S. adopt a space colonization program using available technology. The "city in space" envisioned by the study group could be a 1.5-km-wide wheel-shaped habitat for 10 000 persons positioned on the moon's orbit at a point 385 000 km from both earth and moon. Costing an estimated $100 billion, the 454-million-kg wheel, or torus, would rotate around its hub at 1 rpm to simulate earth's gravity. The rim would house inhabitants as well as shops, schools, light industry, and closed-loop agriculture; heavy industry could be located outside to take advantage of weightlessness and high vacuum in space.

A major commercial activity of the first colony would be to construct solar-power satellites. Placed in geosynchronous orbit above the earth, the satellites would collect and convert sunlight into energy and beam it to earth as low-density microwaves.

The space colony would have several advantages that might make it self-supporting: weightlessness for manufacturing and transportation, massive use of lunar minerals, and continuous natural sunlight for increased agricultural productivity. The study group had considered social, cultural, safety, and ecological difficulties of a space colony, but had found "no unsurmountable problems that would prevent humans from living in space." (NASA Releases 75-229, 75-249; ARC Release 75-41; Dunstan, W Post, 23 Aug 75)

• The press commented on the mission of the Viking spacecraft to Mars [see 20 Aug.]. The Washington Post said that the essence of the space program had been "to provide mankind with new knowledge, not in hopes that this knowledge will be useful immediately here on Earth but in hopes that it will expand our understanding of the universe in which we live and . . . enable us to reach better solutions to our philosophical and political, as well as practical, problems." The Viking missions had opened a new era in which the search for knowledge was to be done largely by machines; the rewards promised to be rich, beyond measure in strictly monetary terms.

The Christian Science Monitor agreed, commenting that Viking represented "an opportunity for mankind's self-awareness to take a

greater stride away from earth-centered thinking than was afforded by Neil Armstrong's historic step on to the moon." Discovering organic life on Mars would strengthen the conviction that life existed abundantly throughout the universe and that we were not alone. Some had questioned whether the U.S. should spend a billion dollars on such a program when resources were hard pressed on earth, but a new discovery, that life was not a meaningless chance but part of a grand design, could give new inspiration to humanity's efforts to deal with earthly problems.

Here was a challenge for the architects of détente, the Monitor asserted. The U.S. and Russia had been needlessly duplicating scientific efforts, their cooperation amounting to little more than “arm'slength information exchange." The two countries had much to share. "By abandoning costly competition for a truly joint program, the two countries could gain from each other's capabilities, minimize the cost to each of them, and pursue this cosmic outreach on behalf of all mankind." (W Post, 22 Aug 75, A24; CSM, 22 Aug 75, 28)

23 August: An editorial in the Washington Star commented on the Viking mission to Mars: "Perhaps the most miraculous thing about the Viking spacecraft. . . is that the American people, pinched as they are by hard times, would more or less cheerfully dispatch a billion dollars on a one-way. journey into the trackless void." Still, enough might have been learned in the making of this remarkable vehicle to "constitute fair recompense for all the money it represents," and whatever it discovered at journey's end might be worth twice the cost. (W Star, 23 Aug 75)

...

24 August: A planet's size and bulk might be more important than its location in the solar system in determining whether it can support life, Dr. Robert Jastrow, Director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said in a New York Times article. Conventional scientific thought had always been that the chance of life's evolving on a planet was narrowly restricted by the planet's distance from its parent star. However, planetology-the study of comparative geology of the planets, made possible by space probes such as Pioneer, Mariner, and Viking-provided evidence for the newer theory.

The most important single factor in the geology of earth-like planets was the amount of internal heat left over from their birth. Planets as large as earth conserved heat, losing it very slowly through volcanic action over long periods of time. Molten volcanic material carried gases, including water vapor, that had been trapped below the planet's surface; the vapors condensed into oceans, other gases formed an atmosphere, and life began. Mariner's photos of Mars had confirmed the existence of volcanoes; but, because of the planet's relatively small size, these exhausted their internal heat supply and died out rapidly about 100 million yr ago. During its active period, Mars must have had in its atmosphere large volumes of volcanic gases, including water vapor; Mariner photos had shown what were apparently dry river beds. When the volcanoes became extinct, the water and atmosphere leaked away into space and the small planet was left dry and nearly airless. Any life forms found on Mars by Viking or future space probes would probably be fossils.

The study of lunar material added another example to the comparative geology of earth-like planets: The moon rocks brought back by

Apollo astronauts had revealed volcanic activity on the moon; because the moon was smaller than Mars, this activity had stopped even earlier and the gases and moisture escaped even more quickly, leaving another dry, airless, and lifeless body.

Scientists concluded that Mars was cold and lifeless not because it was farther from the sun than earth but because it was smaller and geologically inert. If the earth were moved out to the orbit of Mars, the average temperature of the earth would drop somewhat but its insulating atmosphere, continually replenished by volcanic gases for some billions of years longer, would maintain a livable temperature over large areas of the surface. (Jastrow, NYT, 24 Aug 75, E7) Soviet ground controllers altered the trajectory of Luna 22, the unmanned lunar probe launched 29 May 1974, bringing it closer to the moon's surface. Resulting parameters were 1286-km apogee, 100-km perigee, 3-hr period, and 21° inclination. Tass reported 3 Sept. that all onboard systems were operating well and that the spacecraft was continuing to transmit to earth information about the moon's surface. (Tass, FBIS-Sov, 3 Sept 75, U1)

25 August: Apollo-Soyuz Test Project astronaut Donald K. Slayton entered Texas Medical Center to undergo exploratory surgery for a small lesion on his left lung. NASA physicians had discovered the lesion in x-rays taken during the astronaut's postflight recovery from gas inhalation [see 25 July]. Slayton's x-rays had shown a complete clearing of lung infiltrates but revealed a 4-mm discrete shadow. Specialized x-rays, called tomograms, taken 6 Aug. had confirmed that the shadow was indeed a lesion and not a part of the normal lung structure. NASA physicians, conferring with chest specialists at the Texas Medical Center, recommended surgery; all the doctors agreed that the lesion had not resulted from the gas inhalation. (JSC Release 75-69) The People's Republic of China had confirmed that its three satellitesChina 1, launched 24 April 1970; China 2, launched 3 March 1971; and China 3, launched 26 July 1975—had earth-observation capability, Defense Space Business Daily reported. Although the PRC's People's Daily had published cloud photos taken by one of the satellites, and the implication was that the satellites were forerunners of meteorological satellites, their performance suggested the development of higher resolution observation-reconnaissance satellites. All three satellites had been placed into orbits with perigees at reconnaissance altitudes sufficient to cover all targets of interest to the PRC. (SBD, 25 Aug 75, 290)

• NASA's use of the firefly's two light-producing chemicals, luciferin and luciferase, to test for the chemical presence of adenosine triphosphate (ATP), an energy-storage compound present in every living cell, had increased interest in luminescence as a tool for medical research, the New York Times reported. Research done in 1948 by Johns Hopkins Univ. scientists had demonstrated that ATP was the third essential ingredient along with luciferin and luciferase-necessary for the firefly's glow, and that the amount of light generated was directly proportionate to the level of ATP present. The Hopkins scientists had also developed a simple test for life itself, since luciferin and luciferase added to any living matter could reproduce the firefly's glimmer. NASA applied this information, with more sophisticated light