henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) (12/12/89)
News report saying that the main reasons for the Pegasus schedule slip from summer to December were fuel leaks in the NASA B-52 and the need to build a new adapter to connect Pegasus and the B-52's wing pylon. The original welded-steel adapter had to be scrapped due to excessive cracks, and the replacement composite adapter wasn't ready until August. The West's voluntary restrictions on missile-technology exports do not seem to be working. A recent Brazilian launch-services RFP called for export of liquid-fuel rocket engines as well, and the French -- party to the voluntary restrictions -- offered them the Ariane engines. Galileo's two Earth flybys will slow Earth's orbital velocity by 9.6e-18 mph, altering Earth's position 5.3in per billion years. Christic Institute expected to protest. [:-)] "Sen. Jake Garn has risen successfully to the defense of what may be the only group truly unrepresented in this town -- extraterrestrials." (He prevented funding cuts in NASA's SETI program.) California earthquake does minor damage to space-related facilities. USAF communications facilities in Sunnyvale take minor structural damage and a burst water main, but are hastily tested and judged capable of supporting the Galileo launch the next day. Ford Aerospace satellite plant takes structural damage, but satellites currently in works appear unharmed. NASA Ames reports minor water damage. Lockheed facilities in the Bay area are intact and operating, although its Santa Cruz test facilities are without power and some damage is reported. Lawrence Livermore reports "superficial damage". Boeing wins SDI contract to build large ground-based free-electron laser for tests in mid-1990s. [Space relevance is that those thingies are also prime candidates to power a laser launcher.] Galileo up Oct 18, with only minor problems experienced on the flight. One of Atlantis's three APUs unexpectedly switched into high-speed mode just after SRB separation, which may have minor impact on reentry planning. There has also been a minor problem with the shuttle's flash-evaporator cooling system, possibly due to heavy loads placed on it by Galileo's RTG heat. New software and procedures permitted launch on schedule despite a last-minute need to switch abort sites due to weather. Crippen named director of space shuttle program in Washington; he has been deputy director at KSC. Brewster Shaw [another astronaut] will replace him at the Cape. House and Senate make deep cuts in Aerospace Plane, but trim space station only lightly and actually boost funding for Shuttle-C. First commercial Titan launch slips a few weeks due to electrical problems. Ariane V34 slips from Oct 5 to Oct 27 due to relay problems; the payload is the first Intelsat 6. This will be followed by V35 on Dec 13, carrying Japan's Superbird B and BS-2X. That is a change from earlier manifests, which showed Spot 2 (and its piggyback amateur-radio microsatellites) on V35, due to a contractual commitment to get the Japanese payloads up this year. Spot 2 and friends are now scheduled for the next flight, Jan 19. Another story on the Awesomely Lucrative Spacelauncher, er excuse me the Advanced Launch System. It's still being touted as providing, simultaneously, very low cost to orbit, very fast turnaround between launches, and very high reliability. Various details of how Martin Marietta thinks this could be done, some of which makes sense. Vehicles would move to the pad only when ready for launch, and would go up immediately. The pads themselves would be a return to the Saturn V concept: a fairly simple fixed pad without gantries and the like, and a mobile launcher moved on top for the launch. (One reason cited for this is relatively quick repairs to the fixed pad after a launch failure.) Payload integration and mission analysis would be highly automated, to permit short-notice changes in payloads and missions. New technology for big cryogenic tanks would be useful, notably better alloys and automated production and inspection processes (current welding and X-ray inspection processes are very tedious). Fault-tolerant avionics would be better than the ICBM approach of making guidance systems fault-free at great expense. Possible problems should be simulated in advance, to avoid "having to put a study team together when something fails and have them spend a week figuring out what to do while the crew stands around waiting". [Methinks the US aerospace industry has forgotten that good people with proper authority and experience can do this without massive computerized simulation. There was an incident during Saturn I development when a launch was being scrubbed because some instrument reading went outside launch limits. Kurt Debus -- director of KSC, one of von Braun's old bunch -- looked at the readings for a few seconds and ordered the launch to go ahead anyway! He'd decided that it was instrument error. He was right.] Unified information handling could greatly reduce the mass of paperwork that has to move between different groups. All of this, of course, is going to require considerable adjustment by the customers as well as the contractors. [I would perhaps be a bit less cynical about these pronouncements from MM if I didn't recognize so many of them from an OTA study on reducing launch operations costs. MM talks a good fight, once told what to say :-), but whether they can put it into practice or not is a good question.] Inmarsat shakes up management to get the Inmarsat 2 satellite program back on track. It is currently 18 months behind schedule. The new project head is Roy Gibson (ex-head of ESA, ex-head of the British Space Agency). Hipparcos being prepared for start of its astronomical mission. The big question is how long it will last: less than 18 months would essentially wreck the mission, two years or better would be good (although not as good as the original plans). Controllers are experimenting with things like the attitude-determination system, which were originally intended for the rather different environment of Clarke orbit. So far, Hipparcos is behaving very well. ESA's tracking station in Perth and CNES's station in Kourou are being added to the original single station at Odenwald (West Germany), to reduce the gaps in communications coverage. The big near-term worry is the eclipse period early next year, which will involve eclipses much longer than those experienced in Clarke orbit. CNES [French space agency] begins definition of a radarsat to complement the Spot optical satellites. Construction might start in 1994 for a first launch in 2000-2001. Ground resolution would be from 2-50m, with some ability to steer the beam to cover a wider ground track or linger longer on a single target area. The spacecraft bus would be the same one in the works for Spot 4 and Helios. Soviets plan modest upgrades to Soyuz and Progress spacecraft. Soyuz will add a new window to make manual docking easier. (Nobody is yet sure whether the Soyuz TM-8 episode -- in which the crew aborted the automatic docking with Mir because the pitch angle looked off -- was a real misalignment or just difficulty in seeing the real angle. The current TV/periscope setup is not very convenient.) The new Progress M has a large payload than the old Progress, plus an optional cargo-return capsule (set for first use late next year). NASP developers continue to debate whether orbital flights should make powered or unpowered landings. Everyone agrees on powered landings for early atmospheric tests, but the ability to make a powered landing does impose weight penalties for extra fuel and engine-restart systems. There is also some question about what happens if you're depending on being able to relight the engines and you can't. No final decision has been made, but the NASP office seems to favor unpowered landings. NASP managers are seriously unhappy about the 2.5-year schedule slip that seems to be increasingly a fait accompli. Only about a year of that seems justified by the technology, and there is concern that many of the best people will be lost if the program spends 18 months marking time. Boeing produces a significant boost in efficiency of space-rated solar cells, using a scheme which stacks two cells mechanically to make use of a wider spectrum than a single cell can achieve. People have been trying for years to grow one type of cell in a thin layer on another, with disappointing results. Boeing used some clever mechanical design to get the same effect. NASA and aerospace contractors are very interested. -- 1755 EST, Dec 14, 1972: human | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology exploration of space terminates| uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu