Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!mhuxj!ihnp4!zehntel!dual!amd!fortune!hpda!hplabs!sri-unix!rabahy%castor.DEC@decwrl.ARPA From: rabahy%castor.DEC@decwrl.ARPA Newsgroups: net.space Subject: Space telescope Message-ID: <11854@sri-arpa.UUCP> Date: Tue, 30-Oct-84 14:29:00 EST Article-I.D.: sri-arpa.11854 Posted: Tue Oct 30 14:29:00 1984 Date-Received: Mon, 5-Nov-84 08:17:29 EST Lines: 31 From: rabahy%castor.DEC@decwrl.ARPA (David Rabahy) Associated Press Tue 30-OCT-1984 00:05 Space Telescope Late, Over Budget, Oversized, Space Telescope Leaves Connecticut DANBURY, Conn. (AP) - Oversized and over its budget, a giant telscope began its journey to California on Monday, where it is schduled to be installed in a spacecraft and launched by a space shuttle in the summer of 1986. State police escorted the telescope, which rode on a flatbed truck, to Stewart Air Force Base in Newburgh, N.Y., on the first leg of its trip. Aside from some minor traffic problems caused partially by the load's 16-foot width, it arrived without incident. From the Air Force base, it is scheduled to be flown to the Lockheed Corp. in Sunnyvale, Calif., and installed on a Lockheed-built spacecraft. The space telescope, built by Perkin Elmer Corp., had been delayed for more than a year and cost about $600 million more than anticipated. Originally budgeted at $475 million, costs are projected to reach about $1.2 billion by the time the telescope is launched. As costs escalated and the project fell behind schedule, Congress and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration investigated. But NASA finally sided with Perkin-Elmer, saying it had underestimated the difficulty of building such an instrument. Built at a Perkin-Elmer Corp.'s optical division plant in Danbury, the telescope was designed to observe objects seven times farther away than telescopes on Earth. It is about 33 feet long and 10 feet in diameter. Once set in orbit about 310 miles above Earth, the telescope should be active for about 15 years, according to company officials.