Astronautics and Aeronautics, 1967 - NASA's History Office

June 12: Venus ZV unmanne
a parking orbit and then injected on a trajectory “close to the prescribed
one.” All onboard equipment was functioning normally. There was no
indication whether spacecraft-launched two days before scheduled
launch of NASA’s Mariner v Venus flyby mission-woulzattempt a flyby
of the planet or a soft-landing. (NYT, 6/13/67, C19; AP, W Post,
6/13/67, All ; Nordlinger, B Sun, 6/13/67)
Cosmos CLXV was launched by U.S.S.R. into orbit with 1,542-km (958-mi)
apogee; 211-km (131-mi) perigee; 102.1-min period; and 81.9O inclina-
tion. Equipment was functioning normally. ( UPI, W Star, 6/13/67, A70)
* Rep. William F. Ryan (D-N.Y.), speaking on the House floor, urged Con-
gress to reopen its investigation of NASA, with particular emphasis on
management policies and procedures. He said the Phillips Report indi-
cated NASA “has had grave difficulty in enforcing standards of work-
manship, implementing safety and inspection procedures and in properly
supervising contractor costs and time schedules. The results of more
recent reviews of North American and reviews of other contractors have
again not been made public.
cc
Under such unsatisfactory conditions, accidents and failures can
well be expected. Congress should be less concerned with the technical
cause of a particular fire and more with the space agency’s lack of control
over its own program. It is with this in mind that I have regretted the
untimely close of the congressional hearings and requested further
substantive investigation into the area of NASA management. . . .’,
(CR, 6/12/67, H7033)
Although ARC was the smallest NASA field center, Newsweek said, it was
producing “some of the agency’s biggest ideas.” Summarizing ARC his-
tory, the article noted that when center opened in 1940 it had been
primarily a site for testing warplane aerodynamics. “Ames still maintains
its original wind tunnel-the world’s largest-as well as 29 others, [but
aeronautics] . . . represents only a quarter of the effort at Ames today.
Most of the scientists are otherwise engaged in pure research in such
fields as planetology, exobiology . . . and chemical evolution.
“. . . the center’s laboratories enable more than a thousand scien-
tists, engineers and technicians to pursue as wide a variety of problems
as their imaginations and the broad guidelines of the space program
permit. The problems now range from designing a new hard space suit
to studying the effect on mice of reproducing in a 2G environment.”
(Newsweek, 6/12/67)
ERC awarded MIT a three-year, $7.9-million contract for R&D of high-per-
formance gyroscopes and accelerometers “to guide and control the
vehicles planned for the complex aeronautical and space missions of the
1970s and 1980s.” It was anticipated that instruments would make pos-
sible systems which would navigate advanced supersonic aircraft to
intercept runway landing beams without present runway aids ; provide
highly precise pointing references for satellites; and guide interplane-
tary vehicles on missions lasting one year or more. (NASA Release 67-155)
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