henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) (08/29/89)
DARPA awards small contract to Space Data Corp of Arizona to develop and demonstrate a small launcher with a payload of 1000-1500 lbs to polar orbit. Bush endorses NSC recommendation to slip Aerospace Plane program 2.5 years. Hubble telescope moved out of storage for tests, in preparation for shipment to KSC. Pan American Satellite (the first privately-owned operator of international comsat links) has filed an antitrust suit against Comsat Corp, alleging abuse of Comsat's dominant position in Intelsat. Panamsat says Comsat has conspired with foreign governments to prevent Panamsat from expanding its transatlantic service at a time when Intelsat had no spare capacity, is pricing its services below cost to try to keep Panamsat out of the market, and is telling potential Panamsat customers that Panamsat will be unable to gain authorization to serve them. Comsat, naturally, says this is all nonsense. Mitsubishi Heavy Industries expects to start testing an experimental liquefied-air-cycle engine, based on Japan's LE-5 oxyhydrogen rocket engine, this year. This will be a proof-of-concept design for the basic notion -- using liquid hydrogen fuel to liquefy atmospheric air as oxidizer -- and will not be optimized for performance. A new combustion chamber design, larger than the LE-5, would be needed for an operational engine. There is some possibility that the schedule for the tests may slip, however, as the LE-7 engine meant for the H-2 launcher has hit problems (cracks in the hydrogen turbopump) and it has priority on facilities. Consolidation of shuttle spares and parts maintenance into a single centralized depot at the Cape is now nearly complete. Doing all parts testing and overhauling with a single set of facilities is cheaper than having each manufacturer maintain separate equipment and crews, and the central facility is credited with helping to solve the pump problem on the Magellan launch quickly. Parts availability has also risen greatly in the last couple of years, as NASA has finally been funding spares properly. [Readers may have noticed occasional items from Flight International in the past. I get both because there's a surprising amount of news that AW&ST doesn't cover, even in the US. Items from Flight have been scarce of late because they fouled up my subscription; that has now been cleared up, although I'm still wading through the backlog. Here are a few things from the 17 June issue:] Hercules/OSC sets Aug 22 as Pegasus launch date. [This has slipped since, due to problems with the carrier-aircraft pylon.] Hercules has now bought part of OSC. DARPA, which has bought the first launch, has also taken up two of its six options on further launches. The second launch, set for October, will carry a DARPA experimental comsat. The third is set for February, although DARPA has no specific payload plans yet and may pass the launch slot on to NASA or the USAF. Hercules is considering a "hot-drop test" with only the first stage live, to check out deployment and ignition. The first real launch will carry a 400lb payload into a 400mi polar orbit (nominal capacity is 600lbs to 215mi orbit); the payload is a DARPA UHF communications experiment with a NASA barium-release experiment piggybacked on it. Hercules/OSC is planning later versions of Pegasus: Pegasus 1A with a larger payload fairing, Pegasus 2 which will have a larger first stage (the current first stage becoming the second), and a less-well-defined Pegasus 3 with a larger fuselage diameter (77in vs 50in). Martin Marietta signs NASA's first commercial launch contract, to launch Mars Observer on a commercial Titan in 1992. Amroc's first commercial launch will carry a microgravity payload for an as-yet-unidentified customer; the payload will be recovered using an early version of Amroc's flyback reentry vehicle, which is meant to make a pinpoint landing from orbit using a remote-controlled ram-air parachute system. Space Services Inc. will launch its second Starfire commercial microgravity mission in November, and U of Alabama (which heads the Consortium for Materials Development in Space, the customer for this one and the previous one) has taken options on two more. Space Services hopes for DARPA business for small satellite launches, but says the market is very uncertain as yet. [You know, I'm a bit surprised that none of this showed up in AW&ST. Perhaps it's because it's outside the traditional Pentagon/contractor circle that AW&ST reports on in such detail...] -- 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