In Brief:

• Former JPL flight projects manager dead
• X-33 fuel tank ready for tests

September 8, 1999
Web posted at: 3:58 p.m. EDT (1958 GMT)

(CNN) -- A NASA flight projects manager whose career spanned the history of space exploration at Jet Propulsion Laboratory has died.

W.E. (Gene) Giberson died of cancer August 31. He was 76.

For the 1958 launch of Explorer 1, the first U.S. satellite, Giberson helped organize and staff an improvised tracking site in a Los Angeles County Sheriff's station, which verified that the satellite was in orbit.

As project manager, Giberson started up NASA's Surveyor program at JPL, which in the mid-1960s landed robotic spacecraft on the moon to analyze its surface and scout potential sites for the Apollo landings.

He managed the Mariner Venus/Mercury 1973 project, which was the first spacecraft to visit two planets using the gravity of one planet to arrive at another destination.

He also oversaw the Mariner 10 spacecraft, which took the first close-up pictures of Venus and Mercury.

In the late 1970s, Giberson managed the Seasat oceanographic satellite, a mission that demonstrated imaging radar and other techniques to be used in NASA's Earth Sciences Program.

In 1981, Giberson was named assistant Laboratory director for space flight projects and oversaw all of JPL's space missions. He retired in 1990.

Giberson, a California native, graduated from Marquette University with a degree in electrical engineering. NASA awarded Giberson its Outstanding Leadership Medal and its Distinguished Service Medal. Giberson is survived by his wife, Dorothy, and 10 children.

(CNN) -- A major component for NASA's half-scale model of a space shuttle successor is ready for pressure and stress tests at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama.

Tests will start this week on the first of two 4,600-pound graphite epoxy tanks, each designed to carry about 29,000 gallons of rocket fuel -- liquid hydrogen -- at minus 423 degrees Fahrenheit.

The twin hydrogen tanks flank the wedge-shaped X-33 vehicle, which would launch vertically and then glide down from orbit, landing like an airplane.

The X-33, a sub-orbital technology demonstrator for a future reusable launch vehicle called VentureStar, is being developed in a partnership between NASA and the Lockheed Martin Skunk Works in California. VentureStar would be commercially owned and operated and launch in a single stage, unlike today's shuttle, which requires multiple rockets.

The X-33 program is designed to lower the cost of putting a pound of payload into space from $10,000 to $1,000.

The vehicle is scheduled to conduct 15 flight tests beginning in summer 2000. It will fly faster than 13 times the speed of sound and at an altitude of 60 miles to prove its technologies and systems.

The X-33 program is behind schedule due to technical problems and will cost the government about $317.6 million more than planned, congressional auditors said last month.

Under the original agreement NASA was to pay $912.4 million, with Lockheed Martin also contributing to the program. The GAO estimates the government's share will now be $1.23 billion.

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