On Dec. 13, seven Endeavour astronauts returned to earth in triumph after accomplishing the biggest repair job in space history. The astronauts performed a number of critical repairs to the myopic Hubble Space Telescope, replacing many of its optics, swapping its solar collectors, and repairing gyroscopes that allow it to maneuver.
The $629 million repair project was intended to show NASA is capable of mounting and carrying out a critical mission.
On Aug. 21, NASA scientists said the $980 million Mars Observer was lost. A transistor in the craft's central clock was blamed at the time.
In addition, a Titan rocket carrying a spy satellite exploded after taking off Aug. 2 from Vandenberg AFB in California.
Plus, on four occasions NASA failed to launch the shuttle Discovery.
But there were also some successes in addition to the Hubble mission. From Oct. 18-Nov. 1, the shuttle Columbia's crew, carrying out experiments on weightlessness, conducted the longest mission in shuttle history.
While budget battles continued to plague NASA, President Clinton announced in December that Russia would cooperate with the United States in bulding a space station, sharing some of the cost and providing some of the hardware.
