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Even if the search and the solution go smoothly, many people will be surprised if any more shuttle flights blast off this year. With 15 shuttle missions scheduled, 1986 was to have been NASA's biggest year since the heady days of the Apollo moon-landing program. Whether that crowded schedule could have been met had there been no tragedy is open to question. In the past, NASA has consistently had to scale back its shuttle plans. Challenger's fatal mission was the 25th in the shuttle program; about twice as many missions were supposed to be flown by now, according to plans that the agency announced in 1980. Nonetheless, NASA was confident that it had finally got the bugs out and that its much criticized policy of phasing out "expendable" unmanned rockets in favor of launching all manner of space vehicles from shuttles was correct.
The next flight will certainly have to be scrubbed, and its major mission cannot be rescheduled. On March 6, Columbia was to lift off and observe Halley's comet from afar, coordinating its findings with those of the probes from the European Space Agency, the Soviet Union and Japan scheduled to rendezvous with the comet in March. By the time U.S. shuttles are flying again, Halley's will be long gone, not to return for 76 years.
Three more flights of great scientific importance seem likely to suffer long delays. During two different missions in May, shuttles were to launch space vehicles toward Jupiter. Challenger was to have carried Ulysses, a spacecraft that would fly past Jupiter and use that planet's powerful gravitational force as a kind of slingshot to flip into polar orbit around the sun. Ulysses would provide a first-time view of the solar north and south poles. (Since earth orbits in the plane of the solar equator, humans have never got a head-on look at the sun's polar regions.) Galileo, the other . spacecraft, was to be carried aloft by the shuttle Atlantis, and then soar into orbit around Jupiter after sending a probe into the atmosphere of the planet. If these missions do not go up by early June, they will have to be postponed for at least 13 months. Not until then will Jupiter and earth again be in the proper alignment.
In October, Atlantis was scheduled to place in orbit the $1.2 billion Hubble space telescope. Above the distorting effects of the earth's atmosphere, the telescope is designed to see figuratively to the edge of the universe and, in a sense, back nearly to creation. (The light the telescope will detect from the most distant galaxies was emitted from those galaxies not long after the big bang that created the universe some 15 billion years ago.) Delay in this case would be more disappointing than crucial; the space telescope can go up at any time. Still, the long-awaited telescope is a prime example of the dependence of "unmanned" scientific exploration on manned flight. Even after it is launched, the telescope can be maintained and, if necessary, repaired only by astronauts lofted to it aboard shuttles.