henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) (08/07/89)
This is the Paris Air Show wrap-up issue, light on space news. NASA reveals plans to do exhaustive photography of LDEF before moving it into the payload bay on the LDEF-retrieval mission, to document the exact surface appearance of everything before exposure to air. Air Force Secretary recommends 70% cut in DoD Aerospace Plane funding, saying that costs are too high and risks too great. He does concede that it will be six months before he can be specific about technical objections [!]. Reports are that his opinion was based on a report from the Rand Corp., his former employer. A 70% cut would effectively kill the project. German-led industrial consortium (with members in US, France, and Italy) beign formed to develop a privately-owned retrievable unmanned space platform called "Amica". ESA is considering turning Eureca, a similar rig developed with ESA money, over to the group. This would provide two vehicles for industrial materials work in the early 1990s. The group is already marketing platform space to NASA, ESA, and the French and Italian space agencies; it will concentrate on government-agency payload sponsors initially, with a gradual shift to commercial customers later. Construction will be financed with payload deposits and bank loans. NASA is a crucial customer; Amica does not want NASA money, but wants to trade payload space for free or cheap shuttle deployment and retrievals. NASA is interested but wary. Eureca is scheduled to fly (for ESA) in mid-1991, and it would then be turned over to the Amica group. Amica itself would fly for six months in 1992, after which the platforms would alternate in doing one six-month mission per year. ESA plans to use most of the second and third Eureca flights but has made no commitment to Amica yet. British astronaut to fly to Mir in 1991. The mission, dubbed "Juno", is now official, with the signing of the contract in Moscow. It will be financed by sponsorship and merchandising (!), sale of payload space, and broadcasting rights. About L16M is needed all told. Two astronaut candidates are being sought; they will start 18 months of training at Star City in November. They will learn Russian as part of this. [I'm surprised at this -- I'd have expected that to be a prerequisite -- but maybe they decided there weren't enough people who could meet it. If I recall correctly, nominal training for a Mir flight is one year, so the Soviets are allowing extra time for it. They may also be charging extra, as L16M is about twice the reported "going rate".] The mission will be 8 days long in spring 1991. The backup candidate will spend the time doing the same experiments on the ground. ESA's Olympus broadcast satellite arrives in Ottawa for checkout before shipment to Kourou. First pictures of the new Soviet SL-16 booster. This is the one whose first stage is also the Energia strap-on. At least 11 have been launched since first flight in 1985, mostly carrying military snoopsats. A new version of the Progress freighter is being developed for SL-16 launch. Capacity to LEO is 30 klbs. [Sounds like Progress II is going to be a whole lot bigger than the current one. SL-16 could well be meant as a Proton replacement in the long run; payload capacity should be similar with a third stage added.] SSME fails during development testing: pump shaft seizes and hydrogen fire results, with heavy damage to the engine. This engine was a ground test unit, but NASA is assessing whether the problem might affect the operational engines. First pictures of Soviet launch activities at Plesetsk; quite good photos, actually. This is novel because Plesetsk is primarily military and was very highly classified until recently. It is the world's busiest launch site, ahead of even Baikonur [nowhere else comes close to either], with over 1200 launches to date. Lockheed to develop threat-warning system for US military satellites, to detect and verify attacks by antisatellite weapons. The initial Satellite On-board Attack Warning System unit, for delivery and launch in 1992, will include detection of microwaves, laser light, and impacts. There have been suspected cases of "interference" with US satellites in the past, although details are classified. A major goal of SOARS is unambiguous determination of whether trouble is an attack or an on-board technical problem. Low-profile attacks like peppering a satellite with projectiles could be mistaken for problems with space debris, for example, and it is considered important that the cause of a satellite failure be known quickly and definitely in a crisis; even a tentative analysis can take months now. SOARS normally gets power and communications through its host satellite, but it includes its own hardened backup power supply and transmitter, designed to survive an attack that would disable the satellite. The initial contract is for only one unit, although there are options for two more, and Lockheed obviously hopes to get a production contract eventually. Later versions might add sensors for particle beams, radio jamming, and nuclear radiation. -- 1961-1969: 8 years of Apollo. | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology 1969-1989: 20 years of nothing.| uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu