henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) (11/22/90)
An orbiter lifting facility is being set up at the shuttle-orbiter production and maintenance facility in Palmdale so that orbiters can be flown directly there by 747, rather than being unloaded at Edwards and moved to Palmdale by road. The lifting hardware is the set that used to be at Vandenberg. Radarsat International Inc signs with Spot Image to do Canadian distribution of Spot images. The company is also distributing Landsat data and plans to market radar images once Radarsat is finally aloft in 1994. Columbia to roll out to pad 39B for a tanking test after Ulysses goes up. The source of the latest hydrogen leak has not yet been pinned down, but it should be possible to find, fix, and test it in time for a December launch. NASA will consider redesigning the Incredible Shrinking Space Station yet again if Congress cuts the $2.45G request, which is almost certain. [Yup.] Large set of articles on what little is known and speculated about secret US experimental aircraft, some of them possibly hypersonic. SEP gears up for the first full-thrust tests of the Vulcain oxyhydrogen engine for Ariane 5, scheduled to start late this year. So far, things are on track. The only design change so far is reinforcing rings on the lower half of the nozzle, after a nozzle collapsed (due to flow separation of the exhaust jet from the nozzle wall during startup) during early tests. Vulcain is described as a simple engine using a classic design, aimed at low cost rather than maximum performance. Pioneer 10 reaches a distance of 50AU from the Sun, still reporting useful data on the Sun's atmosphere. It was Pioneer 10 that first established that said atmosphere extends far out beyond the edges of the solar system, rather than ending around the orbit of Jupiter as once suspected. P10 will be in communication with Earth until about the year 2000 (and about 75AU) if all goes well. Feature article on Ulysses. The IUS/PAM combination of upper stages is the heftiest yet used, and will push Ulysses to an Earth-relative velocity of 15.4 km/s, the highest ever attained. In early 1992, Ulysses will do a Jupiter flyby throwing it southward out of the ecliptic. It will then fly over the south pole of the Sun June 1994, continuing around to pass over the north pole a year later. Work started in 1978, and was repeatedly delayed by eight launch-vehicle changes and by the US withdrawal in 1984 from what was originally a two-spacecraft mission. ESA named it Ulysses in 1988, for more than one reason. Despite the heavy launcher, Ulysses is actually one of the smaller spacecraft launched by the shuttle. One of the losses when the US dumped the original mission was imaging capability, so this is strictly a fields- and-particles mission. Discovery will run several other experiments after sending Ulysses on its way, including exposure tests of materials like those on the stranded Intelsat (to determine whether it will be worth rescuing) and a set of burns of opposing nose thrusters during reentry (to determine whether it is practical to burn off unused fuel from the nose thruster system at that time, for improved safety and better center-of-gravity control). NASA's "Comet" program, which calls for a new medium booster with a recoverable unmanned spacecraft, has produced some interesting bidders. Orbital Sciences will propose a version of Taurus (which is a wingless Pegasus on top of an MX first stage). Space Services Inc, risen from the dead :-), will propose one of its innumerable Conestoga variants. E-Prime will bid "a version of an existing US ballistic missile". The most interesting bids are from Amroc and... Israel. Amroc will bid the Aurora, built by a team of US companies with Amroc supplying only the engines, since Amroc withdrew from trying to supply complete launchers after its pad fire last year. (The other companies involved have not been identified.) Finally, Israel Aircraft Industries, teamed with Delta Research of Huntsville, is offering its Shavit booster. IAI faces some problems, like a requirement for 51% US ownership of the bid, and like US bureaucratic stupidity about the Missile Technology Control Act, which bans transfer of US technology that might improve foreign missile systems. (IAI says it is "ridiculous" to apply the MTCA to Shavit, when the US is openly and officially assisting Israeli missile development, namely the Arrow anti-tactical-ballistic-missile project.) The Comet program calls for carrying a 300lb payload up and bringing it back down, plus providing it with another 150lb of support hardware that remains in orbit. First launch could be as early as 1992, with the initial contract calling for one launch a year for three years and an option for two more. Third Titan IV launch slips, it's not clear how much, due to a leak in the SRB thrust-vectoring system. Discovery/Ulysses now gets range priority at the Cape. The USAF claims that the Titan IV schedule will not be significantly affected. -- "I don't *want* to be normal!" | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology "Not to worry." | henry@zoo.toronto.edu utzoo!henry