The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has sometimes been criticized for neglecting science and spending most of its effort on spectaculars. Yet in its present financial crisis, in which it faces budget cuts of hundreds of millions of dollars, two significant astronomical projects may stay alive while other parts of the agency's plans go overboard wholesale. The projects involve orbiting an optical telescope of two or three meters diameter and a radio telescope of about 1,500 meters diameter. At the moment both projects are moving forward in spite of NASA'S money crisis. Of the radio project, called LOFT for Low-frequency Radio Telescope, Dr. Robert G. Stone of NASA'S Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., says, We are trying to keep some life in it. The life that it has at present is a design study contract awarded to Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory, Inc. of Buffalo, N.Y. Cornell engineers will analyze the design of the reflector grid, antenna feed and antenna radio frequency characteristics of a flight test model one-fifteenth the size of the proposed telescope. This step will follow a five-meter test model that Cornell now has ready for flight to see how well it holds its shape in space. If the project continues to survive, LOFT could be flying by the end of the decade. Dr. Stone sees it as a kind of orbiting national laboratory. LOFT would be designed for observation at frequencies between 0.5 and 10 megahertz, a range that is reflected by the ionosphere and cannot be observed from the ground. The same range is now being studied by the first radio telescope in the sky, the Radio Astronomy Explorer (RAE). Success with RAE has made radio astronomers eager to put up a bigger and better telescope. The main purpose of RAE was to find out whether there were astronomical emissions in this range. There was no particular reason to suspect that there weren't, but until they were observed it was not certain that they existed. The explorer is fitted with dipole and V antennas to sense the background radio signal, and one of its major functions is to compile a contour map of radio brightness in this low-frequency range. According to Dr. Stone the map is nearly complete. After finding out what parts of the sky contribute bright emission in this frequency range, the next step is to identify and study individual RAE'S antennas were not designed to resolve discrete sources; nevertheless, says Dr. Stone, before the map is finished we may get one or two sources. Discrete sources in this frequency are one of the main things LOFT iS being designed for. It will attempt to find out what happens to the spectra of discrete sources, especially quasars, at the low-frequency end. Most astronomers expect less brightness than at higher frequencies, but the opposite has also been suggested. Since wavelengths at these frequencies are measured in hundreds of meters, the signals will give information about large-scale movements of the Waves of this length represent large motions of electrically charged bodies; light and higher frequency radio waves are usually generated by processes that go on inside atoms and molecules. LOFT will also be used to study planetary atmospheres. RAE has already produced two interesting bits of planeNASA Radio sources will be measured by 1,500-meter rig.