henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) (05/15/89)
KSC engineers study photographs of Energia launch facilities, looking for innovative ideas the US might adopt for ALS or Shuttle-C. Soviet Union is developing a new Earth-resources satellite that will provide images with 2m resolution for commercial sale. It may have radar imaging capability as well. The latest Insat (Indian comsat) arrives at Astrotech's payload-processing facility in Titusville -- the first customer in 18 months. Insat is booked for a Delta in May. Space Industries Inc. (ISF/CDSF) and Payload Systems Inc. (materials processing packages for flight aboard Mir, among others) merge. Bush to name new head of NASA this week. It will be Truly, with J.R. Thompson (current head of Marshall) as deputy. Truly's successor as head of shuttle operations will probably be Crippen. [Major article about ballistic-missile technology etc. in Third World.] Analysis of Israel's satellite launch last September indicates a 156kg satellite on a three-stage 25-ton booster. (The orbit was 250x1150 km and was nearly retrograde.) [Replacing the third stage with a 500 kg warhead would give a missile range of 7500 km, enough to reach Moscow.] First priority of National Space Council will be the sad state of commercial space activity. The budget situation will limit what can be done. Quayle, on his first day as Council chairman, criticizes US dependence on foreign launchers and puts a high priority on assuring commercial access to space. He criticizes decision to allow US use of Long March: "...a shameful event". Soviets are thought to be planning to push for the same deal China got (use approved but with limits on numbers). Council to consider amount and type of government support for commercializing space. White House official says government involvement appears necessary, due to poor health of the industry. He also says that Reagan administration's [harebrained] idea of private financing for some NASA projects will be reexamined. Quayle says Council's initial focus will be on short-term problems rather than long-term issues like Moon or Mars goals. [Boo hiss, part of the idea of the Council was to get away from the inability to think ahead.] Things that can be done in the next 10-15 years will be about as far as the Council will go. [Sigh, there was a time when that would have covered either the Moon or Mars...] Quayle warns that ambitious goals will run head-on into the budget problems. Quayle gives low priority to US-Soviet cooperation, will put emphasis on strengthening US program. The Council will make an annual report to the president on US activity and policy; the first report is due around the end of summer, in time to influence the FY91 budget, and will undoubtedly examine the space station project and its possible follow-ons. Administration-Congress budget summit in progress, aimed at setting overall funding levels for FY90. Storm clouds are gathering for projects that assume big increases, e.g. the space station. Space entrepreneurs say there are promising signs, but the outlook remains cloudy due to uncertainty about policy. Joe Allen [ex-astronaut, now president of Space Industries]: "The problem is that there are too many cooks in the commercial space policy stew -- the recipe never quite gets finished... We have become increasingly sensitive and nervous about policy that has no implementation plan behind it... Even now the Administration is promoting some commercial projects with very little thought on how they are to be implemented..." He takes a very dim view of the Reagan nonsense about private funding for parts of the space station, notably the robotic servicing system: "When proposals like that go to Capitol Hill they give space commercialization a bad name... [They] come from the same bureaucratic network that tried to commercialize the tracking and data relay satellite system and Landsat..." Allen warns that foreign competition is no longer "just on the horizon", it has arrived. Galileo's thrusters have been cleared for flight and are being reattached, putting Galileo back on schedule for the October launch. Unfortunately, there is bad news too: NASA has decided to restrict the thrusters to firing only short bursts, out of fear that sustained operation might damage other nearby thrusters if overheating problems reappear. This does not hurt the efficiency of the thrusters, but it means that major firings take place over longer periods, which *does* hurt the overall fuel efficiency. (There are other complications too, like limits on Galileo's time in preferred thrusting attitudes when in the near-Sun part of the mission, when solar heating can be a problem.) Also, on close inspection, some pulsed-thrust maneuvers that were in the flight plan already were not examined closely enough, and they turn out to be more expensive than expected. Preliminary estimates, assuming that unpredictable factors are at the 50% probability level, say that Galileo is about 10 kg short of fuel for its full mission. Eliminating one of the two asteroid flybys would save about 40 kg, and each of the Jovian- moon encounters (10 planned) costs about 20 kg. No decision will be made until after Venus encounter (next Feb), by which time Galileo's actual flight performance will be known better. Actually, only nine of the twelve thrusters tested 100% okay; one more was rebuilt, the other two have minor problems -- not expected to endanger the mission -- and are being put in positions where they will see only light use. Galileo will go to KSC mid-May and will launch, it is hoped, Oct 12. The window is Oct 12 through Nov 24, but fuel consumption will be minimized with a launch in the first few days. The next window is in July 1991. General Dynamics announces four commercial versions of the Atlas, the biggest having four strap-on solid boosters to meet Intelsat's payload requirements. GD has committed itself to building 62 Atlases from 1990 to 1997. [This isn't bad by Western standards, although it's nothing by Soviet production-line standards.] Soviets give up on Phobos 2. Some limited signals were received after the imaging session March 27, but full contact was not regained. Those signals are thought to have been from the omnidirectional antenna, not the high-gain antenna, according to Dunayev (head of Glavcosmos), and there were indications that Phobos 2 was spinning. Attempts to command it back to normal orientation were unsuccessful and no further signals were heard. The mission is not considered a complete failure, since quite a bit of data was gathered earlier, including images of Mars and Phobos. One image appears to include an "odd-shaped object" between the spacecraft and Mars; this might be debris in Phobos's orbit, or it could be Phobos 2's jettisoned propulsion module. [There has been some speculation that a debris collision might have caused the failure, given that P2 had conducted similar imaging maneuvers earlier with no problem.] LTV and its Italian partner BPD are studying a souped-up version of the Scout 2 launcher, with four strap-on SRBs derived from the ones BPD builds for Ariane 4. The previous Scout 2 concept used only two SRBs. Market studies apparently indicate a desire for heavier payloads, notably for microgravity work. Italy's Aeritalia is studying a recoverable capsule, dubbed Carina, sized to fly on Scout 2. Dunayev says no Soviet shuttle missions are planned this year. "We're examining what the goal of our next mission will be..." [Could this be something to do with Mir's problems?] USAF provides small-scale funding for work on high-efficiency solar cells for spacecraft, notably multi-layer cells incorporating materials working in different wavelength bands. -- Subversion, n: a superset | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology of a subset. --J.J. Horning | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu