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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
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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.