Email us for help
Loading...
Premium support
Log Out
Our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy have changed. We think you'll like them better this way.
This eagerness to go to Mars, as evidence at Congressional hearings made clear, necessitated joint U.S. -Soviet efforts and cooperation between their space programs. Not everone in the United States was for it. However, defense planners think the setback to the manned shuttle program to mean a change to greater reliance on ever more power unmanned rockets; and to gain public and Congressional support, some data about the Air Force's new booster rockets to be used in the "Star Wars" defenses was released.
Overriding objection, the United States and the USSR signed, in April 1987, a new agreement for coorporation in space. Immediately after signing the agreement for, the White House ordered NASA to suspend work on the Mars Observe spacecraft that was to be launched in 1990; thenceforth, there were to be joint efforts with the Sovet Union in support of its Phobos mission. *In the United States opposition to sharing space secrets with the Soviet Union nevertheless continued, and some experts viewed the repeated Soviet invitations to the United States to join in their missions to Mars simply as attempts to gain access to Western technology. Prompted, no doubt, by such objection, President Reagan once again spoke up publicly of the extraterrestrial threat. The accasion was his address to the General Assembly of the United Nations on September 21, 1987. Speaking of the need to turn swords into plowshares, he said:
In our obsession with antagonisms of the moment we often forget how much unites all the memembers of humanity. Perhaps we need some outside, universal threat to recognize this common bond. Con'td p.311