2008 Annual Report - NASA Airborne Science Program

management and support, aircraft operation
and maintenance, data acquisition, software
development, and data reduction, processing,
quality screening and dissemination.
The funding for the above mentioned
functions was allocated from the OSSA
science budget and provided for a level of
contractor support at MSC for aircraft, sensor,
and data reduction activities. MSC was an
Office of Manned Space Flight (OMSF)
center and provided the funding of the
program civil service personnel utilized, but
not funded by, OSSA. The program was quite
successful, with funding in 1965 of $200,000
supporting 11 missions, to $10,900,000 in
1970 supporting 53 missions at 190 test
sites. Staffing (CS and contractor) increased
from 22 to 236 in 1970. By the phase out of
the Aircraft Program at MSC/JSC, over 600
medium and high altitude data acquisition
missions were successfully flown.
The dramatic increases in budget levels,
missions, and data acquisition flights from
the 1965 to 1970 period were due to
added capabilities resulting from acquisition
and modification of additional medium and
high altitude aircraft, and increased principal
investigator participation. This was due
to both airborne and space investigations
(i.e., Skylab/ERTS), major electronic sensor
development and test programs to support
crucial scientific requirements, such as
band selection for the Earth Resources
Technology Satellite (ERTS, later renamed
LandSat) for which a major contribution
was the MSC-developed 24 channel
scanner, and development of multifrequency
passive microwave sensor systems for use
in agriculture, oceanography, and arctic
investigations.
The MSC organizations that were involved in
the program included:
• Earth Observations Aircraft Program
Office (overall program management).
• Earth Observations Division (science
disciplines).
• Engineering and Development
Directorate (sensor technology and
operation and engineering support).
• Flight Operations Directorate
(development and implementation of
electronic data processing programs).
• Photo Technology Lab (photo processing).
• Flight Crew Operations Directorate
(aircraft operations).
• Engineering Division (aircraft and support
hardware design and fabrication).
• Space Flight Meteorology Group (test site
weather forecasting).
The OSSA Program Manager at the
inception of the program through 1970 was a
gentleman by the name of John Koutsandreas
(Kouts), the “Mad Greek”, with a drive and
genius for budget augmentation, as well
as program expansion, both domestic and
international. He was a Marine in every
sense of the word. John worked for Ted
George, who in turn worked for Len Jaffe,
who headed the OSSA Applications Division.
Kouts was the father of the first budgets (and
their dramatic increases in funding), which
in the early days were buried, in another
unrelated OSSA budget line item in a place
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