NASA Sees U.S. Edge in Technology at Risk

BOSTON —  The United States has been embarrassed in space research since the Challenger disaster and risks forfeiting its edge in high technology and other fields unless it expands space-based scientific missions, a NASA official told a congressional hearing Monday.

Further delays in projects already backed up three years, plus a lack of funding for new space experiments, will allow the Soviet Union, Japan and European nations to cement the lead they have taken over the United States since the Challenger explosion, said Lennard A. Fisk, associate administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

“A lead that we had was allowed to erode and now we have to ask ourselves where we are going,” said Fisk, who outlined the science-related portion of NASA’s proposed fiscal 1989 budget to the Senate subcommittee on science, technology and space.

Fisk said 20 major science-related payloads are scheduled to be carried into space in the next four years, half of them aboard space shuttles and half on expendable rockets.

The projects include probes to Venus and Jupiter and the launching of an X-ray telescope, space telescope and gamma ray observatory designed to work in tandem to study a number of phenomena, including a supernova that occurred last year.