The Space Shuttle C0lumbia’s brilliant performance in its first spaceflight has opened imaginative vistas for application of the technology in a “new era of space conquest.” Never before had astronauts flown a space ship from orbit to an airport landing. The feat has accelerate talk of exfocus more on practical applications – notably defense purposes – than on long-range goals such as breakthroughs leading to future interplanetary travel. Under Reagan’s budgetcutting program. $168 million is to be sliced from the fiscal 1982 space transportation budget of the National Aeronautics and as a space-going freighter that will make 100 or more round-trips beyond the earth. Another shuttle. the Challenger. is under construction in” Califomia and work should begin on two more shuttles in the next Q year or so. looking to the world’s first fleet of spaceships. Militarily. Columbia’s flights by 1985. Communications businesses are excited about the space shuttle. News accounts say U.S. and foreign concerns already have signed up for space on shuttle flights programmed in the next five years. The triumph of Columbia and astronauts John Young and Robert Crippen as well