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Friday, February 15,1991
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Page 7
NASA, private firm join to develop
commercial space research project
WEBSTER (AP) — A Houston
firm signed contracts Thursday that
will make it responsible for half of
an estimated $85 million NASA-re
lated project to get the United States
in the commercial spaceflight busi
ness by as early as next year.
Space Industries, Inc., signed
three contracts with the University
of Tennessee Center for Aerospace
Research as part of the NASA-spon
sored COMmercial Experiment
Transporter program, known as
COMET.
“The COMET program rep
resents a very significant step by the
United States to establish not only a
foothold but a leadership position in
what is becoming an international
market in microgravity research,”
David Langstaff, executive vice pres
ident of Space Industries, said.
“The idea here isn’t to service our
governmental needs, but to service
commercial needs,” Joe Pawlick,
COMET program manager, said.
“And that’s the real key to the
COMET program.”
Project officials hope to launch a
spacecraft, powered by a rocket sup
plied by another Houston firm, in
September 1992, and keep a space
capsule in orbit about 300 miles nigh
for 30 days before returning it to
Earth.
Inside the capsule, modeled after
the Mercury and Gemini spacecraft
used in the early days of the nation’s
manned space program, would be
scientific experiments designed to
take advantage of the lack of gravity
in space.
“If we were to look at its most ma
ture point, much like you fly your air
mail package on UPS today, you will
be able to fly your commercial pack
age, perform your experiments and
have the data or finished product re
turned to earth on a totally commer
cial basis,” Pawlick said.
COMET will be directed by a
group of seven Centers for the Com
mercial Development of Space, led
by the Center for Advanced Space
Propulsion at the University of Ten
nessee in Tullahoma.
According to its contracts, Space
Industries will design and manufac
ture the capsule and integrate the
experiments with the vehicle. It also
will operate the system while in or
bit, including the establishment of a
tracking station.
The contracts are for three flights
with ^n option for two more. The
initial three flights should be com
plete by 1995, officials said.
“From there, it depends on the
extent of how the market has devel
oped,” Langstaff said. “We now have
in place the capability to do this on as
frequent a basis as the market re
quires.
“The state of space research is still
very young. This could have a dra
matic impact.”
He estimated once the system be
came established, it could cost cus
tomers between $20 million and $25
million to fly. While neither he nor
Pawlick could say how that com
pared with the cost of putting an ex
periment aboard the space shuttle,
Langstaff said the price “is quite
competitive with the numbers we
hear in Europe and elsewhere.”
“We just provide the wheels,”
Space Services division chief Donald
“Deke” Slayton, one of the original
Mercury astronauts, said. “The
other guys provide the important
stuff.”
Old West ghost town goes up for sale
Texas hero
loses place
on name
of bridge
HOUSTON (AP) — Col. Sidney
Sherman shouted “Remember the
Alamo!” at the Battle of San Jacinto.
Texans always have, but the Hous
ton City Council forgot Sherman
when they unwittingly changed the
name of the Ship Channel bridge
that honors him.
State Sen. Gene Green, D-Hous-
ton, Mayor Kathy Whitmire and the
City Council were trying to decide
what to do about the span they
unanimously agreed Wednesday to
name after Councilman Judson W.
Robinson Jr., who died in Novem
ber.
The officials say they were un
aware the bridge, which takes Inter
state Loop 610 over the waterway,
was called anything but the common
Ship Channel bridge.
Maps clearly mark it as the Sidney
Sherman Bridge, there’s a sign on
the bridge and the city secretary’s of
fice recorded that the City Council
named it after the war hero and in
dustrialist in October 1974.
The change outraged Sherman’s
great-grandson, William T. Kendall.
VAN HORN (AP) — A ghost town with Old West
roots dating back to 1882 is up for sale along a lonely
stretch of Highway 90 between Van Horn and Marfa.
Ten abandoned buildings stubbornly stand in Lobo
— named for the wolves that still roam the area —
framed on each side by distant mountains.
Though the buildings date back only to the 1950s,
they are the offspring of a tiny railroad stop that was
built about 15 miles south of Van Horn in the late
1800s.
And for $60,000 they can be yours — a four-room
motel, gas station/diner, bunkhouse, several small fam
ily homes and a shower house, which stands next to a
water tower. Behind the hotel, there’s a big kidney
shaped pool where a couple of man-sized tumbleweeds
frofic in the breezy deep end.
Like many dried-up rural towns, Lobo owes its begin
nings to the railroad industry — early lines of the
Southern Pacific, in this case.
The first railroad chugged across Lobo’s tracks in
1882, when steam, not diesel, kept the machines rolling.
Railroad workers and their families lived in the few
buildings by the tracks.
But Lobo remained just a watering stop for trains
when Virgie Smith took a job there in 1945.
“I worked there for the railroad there during World
War II — in 1945 and ’46. I think I was one of the first
ladies to work for the railroad,” says Smith, 65, who
now lives in Tornillo. “All the men had gone to war, so
we got their jobs.
“I wouldn’t say we really called it a town. Back then,
there were only two railroad houses, plus the ranch
house across from the tracks. The foreman and his wife
and the water pumper and his wife lived there.”
Smith lived in the depot and worked with two sisters
who made a home of the boxcar beside the tracks.
“We had no electricity or running water or anything.
There was an old cowboy taking care of the ranch
house across the way and we’d go over there to take a
bath.”
Van Horn provided what little excitement there was
nearby.
“Usually you’d just sit around and talk to each other.
You could go to Van Horn and go to the picture show,”
she says.
“My dad — he didn’t especially like the conditions
there — he got me a job at the bank in Fabens,” she
says. “My dad thought the railroad people were rough,
but I thought they were just people.”
Dogs
Continued from page 1
because January’s above-average
rainfall has swollen the river, ham
pering search efforts, Miller says.
“The river has been rampaging,”
he says. “It’s three quarters of the
way up its banks and that’s danger
ous conditions to work around.”
Miller says since the river has been
so high, the possibility of a drowning
victim washing downstream has in
creased. Law enforcement agencies
down river have been alerted.
Miller says because the Brazos
River is cold, the body of a drowning
victim could lie on the bottom for
weeks before it surfaced.
The sheriffs department plans to
drag the river today near the Hwy.
21 bridge, close to the site where
Sharpe’s van was found.
Western influences plague young Africans
Many convert to Islamic fundamentalism
KADUNA, Nigeria (AP) — Young Africans
disillusioned by corruption, poverty and deca
dence they blame on the West are flocking to Is
lamic fundamentalism.
Islam is the fastest-growing religion on the
continent and fundamentalists say they hope to
make it “the voice of Africa.”
“Until we destroy the Western institutions and
all their negative influences that plague our cul
ture, we will continue to suffer their side-effects
— corruption, social decadence, famine,” said
Muhammed Tawfiq Ladan, national secretary of
the Muslim Students’ Society.
The recession that followed Nigeria’s oil boom
of the 1970s was hardest on people like Ladan,
the w^ll-educated young of the middle class who
often are a nation’s future leaders.
A general economic decline also is encourag
ing Islamic fundamentalism elsewhere in Africa.
Justice Bashir Sambo, chief judge of the Is
lamic law courts in Kaduna state, northern Nige
ria, said the rigid demands of fundamentalism
put its followers on a “collision course with au
thorities.”
Fundamentalists oppose not only their secular
governments, but orthodox Muslim leaders,
whom they see as corrupted by colonial influ
ences, and traditional African customs, which
they say pollute Islam.
Sambo said modern communications and edu
cation have spurred the growth of fundamental
ist sects, bringing them into conflict with govern
ments from Nigeria in the west to Zanzibar in the
southeast and Egypt in the north, and beyond
the Red Sea in the Middle East.
Nigerian fundamentalists look to Sheik Abu-
bakar Gumi, who preaches daily in mosques and
at his home in Kaduna.
His words are broadcast on a weekly radio
show and disciples from Ghana, Cameroon and
Benin have said they will return home to seek
converts. On weekends, his followers spread the
message in in the countryside.
Sometimes the message is delivered violently.
Militant students have attacked campus bars
where alcohol is sold.
Violence saddens Gumi because “Islam is a re
ligion of peace,” he said in an interview. “The
Koran says no one must be forced to convert.”
Gumi and his adherents speak idealistically of
a world where tribalism, regionalism, corruption
and crime would disappear before the march of
“the Islamic brotherhood.”
Many thousands have adopted that vision, and
millions more are joining orthodox Islamic sects.
At least half the 100 million people of Nigeria,
black Africa’s most populous and powerful na
tion, are believed to be Muslims.
Islam stagnated in West Africa after coloniza
tion by the Christian nations of Europe, but ref
erence works say it has grown by about 50 per
cent in the past decade to 149 million adherents
south of the Sahara. There are more Muslims in
West Africa than Arabs in the world or Muslims
in the Middle East.
Foreign powers vie to influence them. Saudi
Arabia and its rivals, Iran and Libya, donate
money to build mosques and finance pilgrimages
to Mecca. Gumi said he had visited the holy sites
in Saudi Arabia every year since 1956, and that
the Saudis send preachers to help him.
He said he wants “not only an Islamic Nigeria,
but an Islamic world.”
“If we are all Muslims,” Gumi said, “then a
woman could walk from here to Lagos and no
body would molest her. All the robbers are Chris
tians or pagans.”
Statistics show more crimes are committed in
the Christian-dominated south, home of Lagos,
the capital, than in the north, where most people
are Muslims.
Dr. Bashir Ikara, a moderate-minded Islamic
scholar, said: “Many say if we cannot have an Is
lamic state, then let us separate, form another
state.
“Nigeria is an example of the degree to which
people are committed to these revolutionary
ideas ... in which they find inspiration in the Ira
nian revolution.”
Ladan, the student leader, said Iran “gives us
confidence in what we, too, can achieve.”
He is a doctoral candidate and lecturer in law
at Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria, a centuries-
old northern town where adobe Arab homes sit
in the shadows of multistory brick buildings.
Christianity and Islam collided 150 years ago
in Zaria and a broad swath of central and eastern
Africa, and peace has yet to be achieved.
Fragile truces in northern Nigeria collapse pe
riodically. Mosques and churches are burned and
thousands of people have been killed.
Neither side is satisfied with the compromises.
Islamic and Western-style civil courts both oper
ate, but governments have denied criminal
courts based on Sharia, or Islamic law, which
characteristically order the hands of habitual
thieves amputated and adulterers stoned to
death.
“We cannot have Sharia criminal law, but
Western-style laws based on Christianity are im
posed on us,” Sambo said.
ATTENTION TAMU FACULTY
LOSING YOUR
TAX-DEFERRED PROGRAM?
Within a few weeks you arc required to submit supporting
paperwork if you wish to continue your tax deferred accounts.
New TAMU requirements may result in reduced
or cancelled 403B contributions.
For an explanation of this issue, how to calculate
your allowable contributions, and tax-deferred
rulCS plan to attend our free*
SEMINAR
Speaker: ROSE VAN ARSDEL, CFP
VICE PRESIDENT
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 18
1119 Villa Maria Rd - Bryan
5:30 - 6:30 P.M.
* Seating is limited. Call Teresa at 846-7703 by Friday,
2/15/91, to reserve your place. You will not be able to call
on the day of the seminar 2/18/91 as our A.G. Edwards
office will be closed in observance of Presidents Day, so
plan ahead and call by Friday, 2/15/91. _____
m ^ -r t,/-< Culpepper Plaza
McGUFFEY S (Next t /, I I !, 1 d , i s 0 2 Shack)
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NEW ENGLAND CATALOGUE OUTLET
PETER
MARSHAI1
HOMS
A Farce
r
A 8peciai MSG OPAS Presentation
,118.16
Rudder Auditorium
TICKETS:
MSC BOX Olflce, 845-1234
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SMe service Irom Post Oak Mall and
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of performance. Cost is $2 per person.
Time
to get
your
books
If you ordered a 1990-91
Campus Directory and haven't
picked it up, you may get it
in the Student Publications
business office, room 230
Reed McDonald Building,
8 a.m. - 5 p.m. Monday - Friday.
If you did not order a
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in 230 Reed McDonald.
If you ordered a 1990 Aggieland
and haven't picked it up,
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If you did not order an
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burner (bor-ing) n. 1. Junk food, syn: pizza, ant:
freer/rd'S
WORLD BURRIT0
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Individuals with high blood pressure, either on or off blood pressure medication
to participate in a high blood pressure research study. $300 incentive. BONUS:
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Individuals 18-55 with asthma to participate in a short clinical research
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