henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) (09/11/89)
Editorial urging that before any decisions are made about schedule slips for NASP, it should be reviewed by people with aerospace-industry experience but no direct stake in the program. First flight of Pegasus delayed to October from Aug 22; things are slightly behind schedule, notably the testing of the carrier-aircraft pylon. The first flight is still "as planned" in other respects, including the DARPA/NASA payload. Dept of Truly Ridiculous Pork Barrel: House urges NASA to give more space station contracts to firms owned by women and minorities. Asiasat gets preliminary deal for Thailand's first comsat, and an agreement under which Thailand will lease half of Asiasat 1 until Thaisat is ready. Asiasat 1 itself is in trouble from the new ban on high-technology transfer to China, however: not only does this cause problems for launching on Long March next year, the fact that the satellite is partly for China may interfere with getting it launched at all. (Asiasat does have a backup reservation on Ariane.) OTA report says it is time to fund a fifth shuttle orbiter, because at current planned launch rates there is a 72% chance of writing off an orbiter before space station assembly begins. This assumes that shuttle reliability is 98%, but this is by no means certain; the 29 launches so far provide only 50% confidence that reliability is at least 94.3%. If 94.3% is the actual reliability, the odds are better than even that an orbiter will be lost within a couple of years. OTA concludes that NASA will have to find funding for one or more additional orbiters in the next five years, and must restrict shuttle use to payloads that cannot fly on anything else. OTA says the matter is urgent, with a decision required this year or next if the situation is to be under control in time for station assembly. Funding in FY90 (which starts Oct 1!) would be needed if the next orbiter is to be available in 1996. OTA also notes that existing orbiters will be 15 years old when station assembly starts, with a 25-year old design. Rep. Bill Nelson (Democrat, head of House Sci/Space/Tech subcommittee on space) says the administration needs to make up its mind about its plans in light of the OTA report. He says another orbiter is needed, and NASA also needs to put more payloads on expendables to provide some slack in the shuttle schedule in case of trouble. Nelson also says that the public needs to be informed about all this to avert political disaster when (not if) another orbiter is lost. NASP officials and contractors say the 2.5-year program slip proposed by various people is longer than necessary, with a 1-year slip sufficient to let the program's technology catch up with flight requirements. Congress is also casting a suspicious eye on the 2.5-year slip, with the thought that the USAF and NASA don't seem to be quite as committed to the program as they claim. The USAF in particular seems reluctant to spend much on it. Soviets visit Japan to talk about launcher technology. They are interested in cooperative work on single-stage-to-orbit launchers, and have offered to transfer Energia technology to Japan (!). The possibility of exporting or transferring other launchers, e.g. Proton, was also raised. Japan is a bit cool to the idea right now, as it would violate the COCOM agreements on technology transfer to the USSR. Space Commerce Corp. (the Houston firm that currently represents much Soviet space activity in the US) and Technopribor (the Soviet organization that builds the SS-20 IRBM, now being scrapped under INF) agree to investigate jointly developing and marketing a new commercial space launcher! The new launcher, named Start, will carry 300 lbs into a 500-km orbit. It will be a three-stage solid-fuel launcher, based on SS-20 technology but an entirely new design to avoid trouble with the INF treaty. INF safeguards need to be sorted out so that military use is not possible; the Soviets say that Start facilities would be open to inspection. Start will be launched from a transporter/launcher vehicle, like the SS-20, eliminating the need for fixed pads [and, more significantly, avoiding the need to ship payloads to the USSR!]. Technopribor, which badly wants to find a civilian use for its facilities and workforce, says it could build 300 launchers within five years of goahead, and could deliver loads to orbit at $10k-16k/lb. This would make it broadly competitive with Pegasus and other small launcher proposals. The final decision will be made next year after a detailed market analysis. Flight testing would begin around the end of 1990, with perhaps ten test launches over 2-3 years. Some of the tests may be in Australia and Brazil, and SCC will ask OCST approval to run one test launch in the US. NASA picks 14 initial scientific experiments for the space station, fairly modest ones that can fly during assembly. Voyager finds new moons around Neptune. Voyager's camera resolution of Neptune has been better than ground-based telescopes since late last year, so lots of new data is coming in. Voyager project people observe that a hefty fraction of the world's total radio-telescope area will be pointed at Voyager during Neptune encounter -- a total of 38 major antennas on four continents. [As said before, I'm keeping the Voyager event reporting to a minimum since it's old news by now.] Orbital Sciences signs with Virginia's Center for Innovative Technology to develop, produce, and launch a small low-orbit satellite for experimental use by Virginia universities and industry. A very nice diagram of the trajectories of the Voyagers, much the nicest 3-D visualization I've seen. [Voyager 1 is actually sort of vaguely near Pluto (emphasis on the "vaguely"!).] -- V7 /bin/mail source: 554 lines.| Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology 1989 X.400 specs: 2200+ pages. | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu