Fundraisers Expect Green Light from NASA To Recover 70’s-Vintage Spacecraft”, Space News
“A pair of space geeks quarterbacking an effort to bring a derelict NASA spacecraft back into orbit around Earth expect NASA on May 13 to legally bless their privately funded project to recover and restart the 36 year-old International Sun/Earth Explorer-3. “We expect the Space Act Agreement to be signed tomorrow,” Dennis Wingo, president of Moffett Field, California-based Skycorp Inc. wrote in a May 12 email. Prior to getting the Space Act Agreement, Wingo and his partner on the ISEE-3 reboot project, NASA gadfly and Internet publisher Keith Cowing, had already secured the use of four enormous non-NASA ground radar dishes, the help of about 20 volunteers, and the loan of a $200,000 transmitter that should allow controllers at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico — one of the four radar dishes — to contact the vintage Earth-observatory May 19 and command it to enter telemetry mode.”