Reagan, Space Panel Head Ask Continued Exploration

The Democratic chairman of the House Committee on Science and Technology joined President Reagan on Saturday in urging that the nation press ahead with space exploration despite the disastrous explosion that destroyed the Challenger shuttle and its crew of seven.

“This in no way means that we have lost, or will relinquish, the shuttle program,” said Rep. Don Fuqua (D-Fla.), whose committee has jurisdiction over the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, its programs and its budget authorizations. “We will continue to build on its strength and strengthen its weaknesses. . . . We will be relentless in our search for answers to what went wrong.”

Fuqua spoke in a broadcast response for the Democrats to Reagan’s regular weekly radio talk, in which the President restated last week’s commitments not to let last Tuesday’s accident deter the space effort.

“The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we’ll continue to follow them,” Reagan said Saturday. “Nothing ends here. Our hopes and our journeys continue.”

Noting that 19 years have passed since the fire on Jan. 27, 1967, on the pad at Cape Canaveral, Fla., that killed three astronauts rehearsing for the first Apollo mission, Reagan said Americans tend to forget “that progress does not come without great costs or daunting risks.”

Calling “man’s permanent presence in space” the next goal, Fuqua said the nation must continue to support both manned and unmanned space programs. He cited the example of Voyager 2, the unmanned vehicle that he said has “sent back more information about Uranus than we’ve been able to learn and collect about that far planet since its discovery.”

Such programs are “steppingstones which some day will enable us to break out in whole new directions,” Fuqua said.