posted 03-08-2005 12:48 PM               

WILLIAM HINES, 88; NASA reporter, Sun-Times veteran

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Mr. Hines, who had a keen interest in science, persuaded his boss to allow him to report on the country's nascent space program shortly after the Russian spaceship Sputnik went up in 1957. "He told him he would be missing the boat if he [didn't] get on it right away," said his wife, Judith Randall Hines.

When an Apollo spacecraft caught fire in 1967, killing three astronauts, Mr. Hines wrote an article in The Nation magazine criticizing NASA's attempts to maintain its image as an agency that gave, as one official said, "meticulous attention to the smallest detail." He prodded the agency and a congressional committee investigating the tragedy on Jan. 27, 1967 to look deeper for the root cause of the fire.

"In these flack-driven times it is perhaps not surprising that the taxpaying public should be hoodwinked, falsely propagandized, deliberately misled, and on occasion even lied to by its servants," he wrote in 1967.

"It is deplorable, however, and dangerous in the bargain that NASA has deluded itself into believing the reality of its own image."

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