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Beyond the Atmosphere:
Early Years of Space Science
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- CHAPTER 12
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- SPACE SCIENCE PANEL
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- [220] After the
first few years in which the Space Science Panel of the
President's Science Advisory Committee saw NASA get under way,
advised on such matters as orbiting astronomical observatories,
sounding rockets, and universities, and supported NASA in the
battle over classification of geodetic satellite data, interest
among panel members appeared to wane. For some years attention to
what NASA was doing was somewhat desultory. In the latter half of
the 1960s, however, when NASA's bumbling over what to do in
post-Apollo years helped to precipitate a crisis of confidence
over the agency's planning, interest reawakened.
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- After studying the matter of manned space
stations at some length, the panel issued a report endorsing the
Apollo Workshop, or Skylab, program as a one-time-only experiment
in determining what man could do in a space station, but
withholding support from any continuing space station
[221] work until Skylab results were available and
more mature consideration could be given to the matter. When the
author testified on the Hill shortly after the report came out, he
found that Congressman Karth had been giving a great deal of
attention to what the panel had to say; and his copy of the
report, amply marked up either by the staff or Karth himself, was
a source for a great many questions on the space science
program.35
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- The panel's negative attitude toward
permanent space stations persisted throughout the work of
preparing a draft report for the Space Task Group. In this the
panel was opposed to Administrator Paine, who wanted to proceed at
once with a permanent space station, as the next natural step in
the space program. It was the panel's view that before proceeding
with a space station, a more economical and versatile means of
transportation to and from the station should be developed. In
this respect-although with some ambivalence and quite
tentatively-it supported a Space Shuttle project as the next major
manned spaceflight effort for the nation. How much influence the
panel had in securing ultimate support for the Shuttle program is
moot. But at any rate in this last great issue to come before the
panel before its demise in January 1973 at the hands of President
Nixon, the members were pointing in the direction NASA came to
regard as the right one for the country.
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