Director of NASA’s Manned Space Program to Retire

Aaron Cohen, who took over as director of NASA’s manned space flight program at Johnson Space Center in Houston shortly after the 1986 Challenger disaster, announced his retirement Friday after 31 years with the U.S. space agency.

Cohen, 62, said he will retire Aug. 20 to become a professor at Texas A & M University.

Cohen’s retirement comes at a time when National Aeronautics and Space Administration Administrator Daniel S. Goldin has made several changes intended to attack cost and management problems with the proposed space station Freedom.

In early 1993, NASA revealed that its estimates to develop the space station for the next three years had ballooned more than $1 billion over budget.

More than half of the rising costs were linked with the station’s development at the Johnson Space Center with contractors.

Cohen denied that the budget problems influenced his decision to take the position at the university from which he was graduated in 1952. “This is an opportunity that I did not want to pass up,” Cohen said in announcing his retirement.

Meanwhile, NASA put the finishing touches on its busiest shuttle Friday for a satellite-delivery mission that officials say should lead to faster communications and a better understanding of hot, distant stars.

Discovery was scheduled to lift off from Kennedy Space Center at 6:22 a.m. PDT today. Good weather was forecast.

The five-man crew is to drop off two satellites in orbit: an experimental communications craft and an ultraviolet telescope. A spacewalk also is planned during the nine-day flight to test tools to be used in December to fix the Hubble Space Telescope.

It will be Discovery’s 17th trip since its first flight in 1984; that’s more flights than any other shuttle. It also will be NASA’s 57th shuttle mission overall and the fifth of eight flights planned this year.

Aboard Discovery is NASA’s $363-million Advanced Communications Technology Satellite, designed to transmit data 20 times faster than current craft from a 22,300-mile-high orbit.

Seventy-two satellite experiments are planned over the next two years by communications companies, broadcasting organizations, universities and hospitals.

Potential technological pay-backs include six-inch-diameter antennas on planes that could allow passengers to watch live TV, long-distance medical diagnoses and immediate relay of data to battlefield commanders in wartime.

Greg Reck, acting associate administrator of NASA’s Office of Advanced Concepts and Technology, said the satellite, if successful, should help increase America’s share of the communications satellite market.

“The United States paved the way in satellite communications in the early ‘60s, but over the last decade foreign competition has really made inroads in that market,” Reck said.

Also aboard Discovery is a reusable German platform holding an ultraviolet telescope and a spectrograph to study interstellar gas. The crew will release the approximately $80-million craft and retrieve it six days later for the trip home.

Until now, these experiments have been limited to five minutes of observing times with small rocket launches.

Six days in orbit constitute “a deliciously long period of time,” said Wesley Huntress, associate administrator for NASA’s space science office.

The telescope will probe stellar nurseries--pockets of gas and dust at minus-400 degrees Fahrenheit--as well as old stars measuring in the millions of degrees. The most distant target will be a quasar about 2-billion light years away.