Space Administration

First-quarter net income at AlliedSignal Inc. rose 12 percent compared with the same portion of last year, the company said yesterday.Its $335 million in net income, or 59 cents per diluted share, was a first-quarter record for the New Jersey conglomerate and beat last year's mark of $300 million or 52 cents per share.The rise came despite several divestitures that took place in 1998, including the sale to Raytheon Co. of a military electronics plant in Towson. Total sales for the first quarter were $3.6 billion, down 1 percent from the year-ago period.

WASHINGTON -- Lifting a budget threat aimed at the Goddard Space Flight Center, Senate appropriators sidestepped spending limits yesterday to restore almost $300 million cut by the House.Under a plan devised by Senate Republican leaders, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration would receive the full $13.5 billion sought by President Clinton for the agency.Though the issue is still far from final resolution, the Senate action almost certainly protects the Maryland-based space facility from layoffs or canceled contracts, as some had feared.

SAN FRANCISCO - It has sounded, at times, like the ultimate adventure trip gone haywire. Or maybe a deadly, space-age spinoff of "Gilligan's Island": Soar into the ether! See the world from 250 miles above the Earth! Brush up on your Russian as you battle fires, midair collisions, power failures and the deep, dark abyss of space itself!Over the last year and a half of joint U.S.-Russian missions on Mir - which ended last week when the shuttle picked up astronaut Andrew Thomas - the weary space station has become widely regarded as having the performance, safety and engineering of, well, a Ford Pinto.

MIAMI -- Insisting that you're never too old for high-flying adventure, John Glenn -- the first American to orbit Earth and an influential senator -- is this close to blasting back into space this year.At the age of 77.The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is leaning toward approving his 10-day flight aboard shuttle Discovery in October. A decision could come in a few days."We're certainly looking at it," NASA spokesman Brian Welch said yesterday. "We take him seriously. There's a lot of buzz about it around here."

DURING the Apollo missions, it seemed almost unpatriotic to ask how much it was costing to put a man on the moon and bring him home safely. But the need for deficit reduction erased that shyness. NASA has seen its budget cut almost every year since 1992. The space agency has had to scale back projects, reduce its work force and be more precise about spending. Cost overruns still occur, but a leaner NASA appeared to be keeping them within reason.That was an illusion. Confidence in the National Aeronautics and Space Administration was shaken to the core last week by news that space station Alpha is already $3.6 billion over budget.

APRIL HAS been a tough month for Russian space scientists. They celebrated the 36th anniversary of the first man in space (Yuri Gagarin) while acknowledging they work in a shadow of the program that accomplished that feat. Once proud of the envy their dominance in space exploration caused, Russians now cross their fingers the U.S. Congress won't cut their life line.It appears that won't happen. The House Science Committee has voted to continue funding of the space station, a joint venture whose construction has been delayed nearly a year because of the Russians.

CHESAPEAKE ACADEMY teachers are noticing a lot of their students walking around with their heads in the clouds. It could be those aeronautical scientists and engineers showing up at school, filling the youngsters' heads with facts about outer space.All of this is because Chesapeake Academy was selected to be part of a pilot program sponsored by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.Science teacher Holli Quillin has included several NASA activities in her classroom. One helped her show second- and third-graders how to write their galactic addresses.

WALLOPS ISLAND FACILITY, Va. -- The steely-eyed missile men and women of this isolated NASA outpost are staging dozens of countdowns and lift-offs this week. But here in the mosquito-infested marshes of Virginia's Eastern Shore, the glamour of space flight is nowhere in sight.Instead, Wallops workers and a German scientist are sweating in the soupy heat as they launch several dozen small rockets and release weather balloons from one of the world's oldest rocket ranges.Laboring in obscurity, Dr. Gerald Lehmacher of the University of Wuppertal in Germany and a National Aeronautics and Space Administration crew are providing the space shuttle Discovery with a reality check.

John J. Martin, a retired NASA administrator and associate deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency during the Nixon administration, died Thursday of complications from Parkinson's disease at Charlestown Retirement Community in Catonsville. He was 74.Born in Detroit and raised in South Bend, Ind., Mr. Martin graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 1943 with a degree in mechanical engineering.He enlisted in the Navy in 1943, was commissioned a lieutenant and served in Guam.

WASHINGTON -- Some sections of the upcoming international space station, especially those built by Russia, may be more vulnerable to damage by meteoroids and space junk than the rest of the structure, according to a study by the National Research Council released yesterday.The panel called for improved shielding on the station modules in question and urged the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and its partners to work more closely in planning emergency procedures in the event of a damaging collision.

The Russian invasion of Georgia complicated what was already a major headache for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration: how to get to and from the International Space Station, which was funded mostly by U.S. taxpayer dollars, after NASA's aging fleet of space shuttles retires in 2010. NASA expected Russian rockets to ferry its astronauts between 2010 and 2015, when the shuttle's replacement is due to fly. But a chill in U.S.-Russian relations could throw a monkey wrench into that plan.

WASHINGTON - President Bush chose Michael D. Griffin yesterday to be the new head of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, putting a scientist with technical and management expertise in charge of the space program's ambitious plans to go back to the moon and on to Mars. Griffin, 55, who is director of the space department at the John Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory, must be confirmed by the U.S. Senate to become the 11th administrator of NASA. But early congressional reaction was effusive.

Urgent: HQ Direction," began a message e-mailed on April 1 to dozens of scientists and officials at the Goddard Space Flight Center of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in Greenbelt. It was not an alert about an incoming asteroid, a problem with the space station, or a solar storm. It was a warning about a movie. In The Day After Tomorrow, a $125 million disaster film that is to open on May 28, global warming from accumulating smokestack and tailpipe gases sets off an instant ice age. Few climate experts think such a prospect is likely, especially in the near future.

After waking up Saturday morning to the space shuttle Columbia breaking apart on national television, the events staff at Baltimore-Washington International Airport figured they'd have to find a new speaker for their annual Black History Month event. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration's deputy administrator, Frederick D. Gregory, would surely be too busy, too broken up to tell a crowd of strangers about his life spent overcoming the obstacles that history had placed in his way. He would be shuttling between Houston and Washington, consoling the grieving families and supervising an investigation into what went wrong aboard the ill-fated mission.

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. - Felix Alberto Soto Toro still wants to be an astronaut, now more than ever. He has dreamed of floating among the stars since he was 6. As a student at Florida Institute of Technology 17 years ago, he watched the Challenger explode. But he dug in: He joined the National Aeronautics and Space Administration that same year, went on to earn a doctorate in electrical engineering and is now taking flying lessons. The loss of the shuttle Columbia on Saturday was brutal.

WASHINGTON -- Lifting a budget threat aimed at the Goddard Space Flight Center, Senate appropriators sidestepped spending limits yesterday to restore almost $300 million cut by the House.Under a plan devised by Senate Republican leaders, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration would receive the full $13.5 billion sought by President Clinton for the agency.Though the issue is still far from final resolution, the Senate action almost certainly protects the Maryland-based space facility from layoffs or canceled contracts, as some had feared.

First-quarter net income at AlliedSignal Inc. rose 12 percent compared with the same portion of last year, the company said yesterday.Its $335 million in net income, or 59 cents per diluted share, was a first-quarter record for the New Jersey conglomerate and beat last year's mark of $300 million or 52 cents per share.The rise came despite several divestitures that took place in 1998, including the sale to Raytheon Co. of a military electronics plant in Towson. Total sales for the first quarter were $3.6 billion, down 1 percent from the year-ago period.

SAN FRANCISCO - It has sounded, at times, like the ultimate adventure trip gone haywire. Or maybe a deadly, space-age spinoff of "Gilligan's Island": Soar into the ether! See the world from 250 miles above the Earth! Brush up on your Russian as you battle fires, midair collisions, power failures and the deep, dark abyss of space itself!Over the last year and a half of joint U.S.-Russian missions on Mir - which ended last week when the shuttle picked up astronaut Andrew Thomas - the weary space station has become widely regarded as having the performance, safety and engineering of, well, a Ford Pinto.

DURING the Apollo missions, it seemed almost unpatriotic to ask how much it was costing to put a man on the moon and bring him home safely. But the need for deficit reduction erased that shyness. NASA has seen its budget cut almost every year since 1992. The space agency has had to scale back projects, reduce its work force and be more precise about spending. Cost overruns still occur, but a leaner NASA appeared to be keeping them within reason.That was an illusion. Confidence in the National Aeronautics and Space Administration was shaken to the core last week by news that space station Alpha is already $3.6 billion over budget.

MIAMI -- Insisting that you're never too old for high-flying adventure, John Glenn -- the first American to orbit Earth and an influential senator -- is this close to blasting back into space this year.At the age of 77.The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is leaning toward approving his 10-day flight aboard shuttle Discovery in October. A decision could come in a few days."We're certainly looking at it," NASA spokesman Brian Welch said yesterday. "We take him seriously. There's a lot of buzz about it around here."