In Brief:

June 19, 2000
Web posted at: 3:27 p.m. EDT (1927 GMT)

From staff reports

(CNN) -- NASA has awarded launch contracts that could be worth up to $5 billion for two U.S. aerospace giants, including one with a string of rocket launch failures.

The agreement calls on Boeing Delta Launch Service Inc. and Lockheed Martin Commercial Launch Services Inc. to supply launch vehicles over the next decade. The rockets will deploy planetary, Earth-observing and scientific payloads, the agency said.

Boeing was awarded three firm missions and five optional ones that are worth $417 million, despite the troubling debut of its newest rocket, the Delta 3.

One blew up in August 1998, destroying a PanAmSat Corp. satellite. Another suffered a cracked combustion chamber crack in May 1998, leaving an Orion 3 satellite stranded in a useless orbit.

A NASA spokesperson said the agency planned to use an older Delta series rocket with a proven track record.

"We feel comfortable contracting with the Delta 2," said Kirsten Williams, pointing to 15 consecutive launch success dating back to 1994.

Rival Lockheed Martin, which makes the Atlas rocket, will compete with Boeing for as many as 62 other launches during the 10-year period, according to NASA. The space agency announced the contracts late Friday.

(CNN) -- The discovery of a sugar molecule near the center of the Milky Way has given a boost to scientists searching for clues about the formation of life in the universe.

A team of researchers spotted glycolaldehyde, a simple cousin of table sugar, in a dust cloud some 26,000 light-years away, using a radio telescope on Kitt Peak, Arizona.

"This discovery may be an important key to understanding the formation of life on the early Earth," said Jan M. Hollis of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.

The existence of the sugar molecule in a cloud where new stars are born suggests that chemical precursors to life formed in such clouds long before planets developed around stars, he said in a statement last week.

Conditions in interstellar clouds may resemble those on Earth in its youth. And studying the chemistry of such interstellar clouds could reveal clues about how bio-molecules formed on our planet, according to the Goddard center.

Glycolaldehyde, an 8-atom molecule composed of carbon, oxygen and hydrogen, can combine with other molecules to form more complex sugars like Ribose, a building block of nucleic acids such as RNA and DNA, which carry the genetic code of living organisms.

Want more? Go to previous In Brief