henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) (09/25/89)
Cover story this issue is the Pegasus roll-out. Nice-looking bird. All white rather than the black seen in artists' conceptions, with no markings at all. The one thing slightly surprising about it, to me, was that the trailer it's on looks like it was built to carry 747s -- it's very massive. [Built to handle Pegasus's larger successors?] This Pegasus is complete except that its solid motors are filled with inert ballast rather than live fuel, for captive-carry tests. The tests will mostly check out the old X-15 pylon and Pegasus's adapter (necessary because the attachment points aren't in the same places as those of the X-15); no drop tests of the inert Pegasus are planned. The carry tests will lead up to launch in October. Total development costs up to first launch are estimated at $50M; Hercules/OSC expect to recover this within the first 20 launches. At the moment there are either 2 or 3 firm launch bookings, depending on how you count. OSC expects 2 launches this year and 4-5 next year; the assembly tooling could support 12/year. There is growing interest in launching small payloads, especially as a way to get flight opportunities out of shrinking government budgets. The first payload is a DARPA data-relay satellite and a pair of NASA chemical-release experiments. Launch will occur about 60 miles west of Big Sur, so that Pegasus will be visible to the Western Test Range equipment at Vandenberg. Congress orders DoD to prepare a comprehensive plan for military comsat requirements and programs for the next decade, saying that the Pentagon's comsat architecture is in a "state of complete disarray". House Appropriations Committee staff launches inquiry into the space station, based on suspicions that a lot of the money is not really going into technical development. [What a surprise.] NASA initial FY91 budget submission was for $17G, lowered to $14G after OMB got a first glance at it. The wishlist includes two orbiters, Shuttle-C, the space-station lifeboat, and a large assortment of science missions including Mission To Earth and Gravity Probe B. SDI defers decision on whether to proceed with current plans or switch the main-line effort to something else (e.g. Brilliant Pebbles), pending a major review. Congress expresses some skepticism about SDI chasing fashionable ideas rather than getting its act together. Soviet spysat, Cosmos 2030, explodes in orbit. Believed to have been detonated deliberately after maneuvering control was lost. This happened in low orbit and most of the debris has reentered already. The Soviet spysat programs have been very busy of late, for no obvious reason. Cosmos 1870 radarsat commanded into destructive reentry, after the two-year-old satellite started to fail. A second large radarsat is scheduled to go up next year, and there are hopes of commercial sales of data once the third -- intended as an operational, rather than experimental, bird -- goes up in 1992. STS-28 deploys advanced imaging spysat Aug 8. Satellite is an upgraded version of the KH-11 [i.e. the KH-12? not clear]. This bird is at a lower altitude than the Lacrosse launched last year, and was deployed using the arm, which Lacrosse wasn't. A small secondary payload, developed by JPL and Goddard, possibly for SDI, is believed to have remained aboard; seven other unidentified experiments were aboard. NASA is very pleased that Columbia is back in service, given the demand for shuttle flights. Remaining shuttle missions this year are 34 (Atlantis carrying Galileo, Oct 12), 33 (Discovery with a DoD payload, Nov 19), and 32 (Columbia carrying a comsat and the gear for LDEF retrieval, Dec 18). NASA-industry team reviews options for handling possible space-station budget cuts. Top on the list is cutting the crew from 8 to 4; there are a bunch of other minor things that might be done, but none with any big impact. Ariane 44LP [first flight of the biggest Ariane 4 configuration] booster launches Hipparcos star mapper and TVSat 2 broadcast satellite. [AW&ST jumped the gun a bit and claimed that they were launched into Clarke orbit, which as regular readers know isn't true: Hipparcos's apogee motor refused to fire, to the consternation of ESA's science team.] France approves development of Spot 4, ensuring continuation of the Spot program. The one change made in the project to gain approval was deletion of a multispectral scanner for crop/vegetation work, which would have required substantial expansion of support facilities. Design lifetime is five years, compared to three for Spots 1-3. The spacecraft bus will be the same one planned for Helios, France's military spysat being developed for launch in 1993. Spot 4 should go up about 1994, in time to take over from the earlier Spots [Spot 1 is in orbit and still mostly working, Spot 2 is being readied for launch, Spot 3 is in storage for later launch]. Classified ad for tour of soviet space facilities in Moscow and Leningrad, Nov 3-12. [This got considerable attention in sci.space a month or so ago, so I'll just repeat the inquiries address rather than the whole ad: Aerospace Marketing Group, 4131 Spicewood Springs Road, Suite G-4, Austin TX 78759, (512)338-4800.] -- "Where is D.D. Harriman now, | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology when we really *need* him?" | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu
nickw@syma.sussex.ac.uk (Nick Watkins) (09/26/89)
In article <1989Sep25.014005.1837@utzoo.uucp> henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) writes: >STS-28 deploys advanced imaging spysat Aug 8. Satellite is an upgraded >version of the KH-11 [i.e. the KH-12? not clear]. The "better means to transmit its images to US military field units at sea or in such places as West Germany" (under the TENCAP programme) and the "greater maneuvering capability" were both advertised properties of the KH-12, so it probably is a KH-12. The name Strategic Response System is new to me though. > This bird is at a lower > altitude than the Lacrosse launched last year, and was deployed using the > arm, which Lacrosse wasn't. Article in fact says it was other way round. Interestingly, AW&ST says 1988 Titan 34D launch from VAFB might have carried a KH 11, echoing the recent posting from John Pike. This was the one originally labelled as an SDS, though AW&ST had no item on it at all as far as I know. >"Where is D.D. Harriman now, | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology >when we really *need* him?" | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu OK. So I'm ignorant. Who is D.D. Harriman? Meanwhile, I was beginning to believe that Henry's summaries might be the on-line version of AW&ST mentioned in "2010" when I noticed a recent ad therein, which says the whole text is available on line to suitably rich subscribers. Same goes for some other McGraw Hill trade journals. Nick -- Nick Watkins, Space & Plasma Physics Group, School of Mathematical & Physical Sciences, Univ. of Sussex, Brighton, E.Sussex, BN1 9QH, ENGLAND JANET: nickw@syma.sussex.ac.uk BITNET: nickw%syma.sussex.ac.uk@uk.ac
amos@taux01.UUCP (Amos Shapir) (09/27/89)
In article <1394@syma.sussex.ac.uk> nickw@syma.susx.ac.uk (Nick Watkins) writes: > >OK. So I'm ignorant. Who is D.D. Harriman? He's the lead character in Heinlein's story "The man who sold the Moon". A quote: "The moon rocket is gone. Even the shuttle is gone. We are back to where we were in 1950. Therefore, we must build a new rocket and fly it to the moon!" The story was written, BTW, in *1949* (that's right, forty-nine, not eighty-six) -- Amos Shapir amos@taux01.nsc.com or amos@nsc.nsc.com National Semiconductor (Israel) P.O.B. 3007, Herzlia 46104, Israel Tel. +972 52 522261 TWX: 33691, fax: +972-52-558322 34 48 E / 32 10 N (My other cpu is a NS32532)
henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) (09/29/89)
In article <1394@syma.sussex.ac.uk> nickw@syma.susx.ac.uk (Nick Watkins) writes: >> This bird is at a lower >> altitude than the Lacrosse launched last year, and was deployed using the >> arm, which Lacrosse wasn't. > >Article in fact says it was other way round. I got the altitude right but the arm wrong -- just misread the paragraph. >OK. So I'm ignorant. Who is D.D. Harriman? D.D. Harriman was the fictitious protagonist of Robert A Heinlein's classic story "The Man Who Sold The Moon" -- a Carnegie-style robber-baron plutocrat who founded commercial spaceflight. > Meanwhile, I was beginning to >believe that Henry's summaries might be the on-line version of AW&ST >mentioned in "2010"... Afraid not. :-) McG-H would undoubtedly want money for that! (Although the typically-one-month delay between the cover date and my postings is mostly just how long it takes for me to receive, read, and summarize the issues, and the terseness is mostly just a matter of minimizing typing time, I also prefer to avoid any appearance of competing with the magazine itself.) -- "Where is D.D. Harriman now, | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology when we really *need* him?" | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu