henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) (05/17/91)
[Light news week. Just as well, since I'm behind and need to catch up some.] Hiten becomes first spacecraft to do an aerobraking maneuver from deep space, making a pass over the north Pacific March 12th at 126km to reduce its velocity 1.77m/s. This may sound insignificant, but it lowered the apogee of Hiten's highly elliptical orbit by circa 1000km. Truly, although privately praising the Augustine report, is reported to be privately furious about one recommendation: tailoring the schedule for a Mars mission to the availability of funds. The report's phrase, "go as you pay", has been banned from NASA official documents. Truly reportedly thinks it is hard enough to get major programs funded with firm schedules, and volunteering to be flexible is an invitation to death by slow starvation. Administration working on rallying congressional support for the scaled- down space station. The emphasis now is on life sciences in support of future manned activity, rather than a general microgravity science facility. There are still some uncertainties about this role, notably the problem of where to put the much-moved centrifuge. Interestingly, there is now a possibility that Italy might add a small manned lab module, perhaps a life-sciences lab that could hold the centrifuge among other things. This is quite apart from Italy's ESA involvement; Italy wants to put some money into manned spaceflight as a bilateral US-Italy deal, and this is one possibility. Soviets marketing formerly-secret military store-and-forward data relay satellites as commercial comsat system. The 250kg low-orbit satellites go up six at a time aboard a Tsyklon booster; the intent of the Western consortium that is working with the Soviets is an operational constellation of 24 by 1995. -- And the bean-counter replied, | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology "beans are more important". | henry@zoo.toronto.edu utzoo!henry