henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) (12/19/88)
McDonnell-Douglas is selling its shuttle-borne biochemical electrophoresis equipment to NASA, for a pittance. Pratt&Whitney gears up its West Palm Beach plant for long-term volume production of RL-10 engines for the Centaur upper stage (used by both Atlas and the bigger Titan configurations). The protein-crystal growth experiment aboard Discovery came up with bigger and better crystals than yet produced on Earth. Several more drug companies have joined the sponsoring consortium for the next flight, on STS-29 in Feb. Analysts suggest that the Nov 15 flight of Buran may have been the third launch attempt, not the second. Debate said to be underway within USSR on usefulness of the Soviet shuttle and its impact on other programs. Sagdeev, in particular, is skeptical. NASA FY90 budget down about $1G from original request. It's still a large increase over FY89, but the cuts will constrain things enough that NASA plans to appeal them. GAO budget-deficit study incidentally criticizes NASA for lack of long-term planning, underestimates of costs of major projects, lack of life-cycle planning (i.e. cutting startup costs at expense of operating costs), and the costly habit of delaying launches to "save" money. The airlock module to go up to Mir in spring (probably) will contain a Soviet MMU for easier maneuvering during spacewalks. It is now reported that each of the two add-on modules scheduled to go up to Mir in 1989 will be roughly the size of the existing Mir complex! Reagan signs launch-insurance bill giving government a share of third- party liability for US commercial launches [some had expected him to veto it -- he wanted liability limits instead], and the 1989 NASA authorization bill [another slight surprise, since it establishes the National Space Council that he opposed]. Hawaii starts action on master plan and environmental-impact statement for a commercial spaceport at Palima Point or Kahilipali Point. Solar-science community to ask NASA for another Solar Max rescue mission! Solar Max will reenter in under two years, and may be uncontrollable as early as Jan 1990. Even optimistic estimates put reentry before June 1990 if the satellite is maintained in its current attitude, which keeps its instruments pointed at the Sun but also puts the satellite broadside-on to air drag about half the time. A low-drag attitude is possible but would greatly reduce scientific data return. An urgent request has been made for a shuttle mission to reboost Solar Max to a higher orbit, and incidentally do a number of repairs that would improve its usefulness. (In particular, Solar Max's high-gain antenna gimbal is jammed, making it largely impractical to use the TDRS system for relaying Solar Max data, and this will become increasingly important as TDRS takes over other relaying jobs and ground stations are closed as a result.) Action is needed soon if the necessary hardware is to be ready in time; there has been no decision yet. Article on recent scientific results from Solar Max; interesting but nothing remarkable. Article on Jean-Loup Chretien's planned activities aboard Mir; nothing remarkable. NASA accelerating studies to give the new administration the option of initiating work on a lunar base or Mars mission. Bush will get initial results in the next year or two, followed by formal NASA recommendations in 1991. [A mistake -- the sooner the better. Bush's best chance to get something like that past Congress is right at the start. Of course, NASA may be aiming at Bush's hypothetical second term...] Bush himself is now saying "...the logical order is first the Moon, then -- perhaps Mars". Major studies will aim at three ideas: an evolving lunar base, a streamlined [translation: one-shot] Mars mission that could be mounted early in the next century, and a possible Phobos mission. The lunar-base studies will look at the commercial potential of such a base, notably the potential for mining Helium 3 from the lunar regolith for export to Earth as a fusion fuel. Also of major interest is producing liquid oxygen from lunar soil to cut costs of a possible Mars mission. The Moon base is considered to involve the fewest unknowns, since the Apollo landings eliminated most of them, and is favored as an intermediate step even if Mars is considered the long-term objective. The accelerated Mars mission would have a crew of 3 and would make limited use of in-orbit assembly (it would not require an assembly base in orbit). The spacecraft would not provide artificial gravity, and would use aerobraking and fast orbits to do the whole mission in 14 months, including 20 days on the surface. This would be a scaled-down version of an earlier concept, which planned to launch an unmanned cargo transport in 2005 (with lander, surface equipment, and Earth-return fuel), followed by a manned ship carrying eight astronauts in a high-speed trajectory to reach Mars in eight months (with a similar orbit used for return). A new idea that is attracting attention is a manned mission to Phobos. This could be done earlier than a Mars landing, would develop most of the needed capabilities, could establish a useful staging base, and would be of major scientific interest in its own right. It could be launched in 2001, using an unmanned cargo vehicle [presumably using an economy orbit] to carry exploration hardware and return fuel to Mars orbit, followed by a manned ship using a fast trajectory (nine months). The two would rendezvous at Mars. Of the crew of four, two would make a Phobos landing, while the other two control robot activity (including a sample-return mission) on the Martian surface. This again would be a 14-month mission with a Mars-orbit stay of 20 days. USAF assumes control of Launch Complex 17 at the Cape, formerly NASA's launch facility for Delta. Work is underway to upgrade and automate the remote tracking stations that form a major part of the USAF satellite-control network. IKI, the Soviet space-research institute, is now offering its image- processing system commercially (the hardware is essentially a PC clone with fancy video gear). "Aerospace Forum" piece by John Yardley (project engineer for Mercury, technical director for Gemini, now president of McDonnell Douglas) pushing commitment to a "Foundation Program" for the space program. Nothing much new [as one might expect from somebody who expects to profit heavily from the status quo]. [There will now be an interruption in the flow of these summaries while I spend three weeks in Australia. Back mid-January. I may possibly get the Dec 5 summary done before I go, but don't bet on it.] -- "God willing, we will return." | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology -Eugene Cernan, the Moon, 1972 | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu
dietz@cs.rochester.edu (Paul Dietz) (12/21/88)
Henry Spencer writes: > McDonnell-Douglas is selling its shuttle-borne biochemical electrophoresis > equipment to NASA, for a pittance. I'm not surprised this has happened. I've read that McD-D considered CFE because, among other reasons, they thought no competing process could be developed in 5 years (this more than 5 years ago). Recall that continuous flow electrophoresis is a process where a stream of protein mixture is injected into a slab of flowing buffer fluid. An electric field applied across the slab causes proteins to migrate laterally at a rate dependent on their charge and size. At the other end of the cell the stream has been separated and is collected in a series of outlets. Microgravity is supposed to help this process, for a number of reasons: - Most important, the protein mixture can be made to have a higher density than the buffer fluid. In gravity, it slumps and disrupts the flow. This increases throughput by a factor of 100. - Higher electric fields and thicker cells can be used in microgravity, because heating due to ionic currents does not cause convection. This increases the throughput by another factor of 5 to 10. However, I don't understand why you can't cleverly avoid these problems in gravity. Naively, I would have thought that you could avoid thermal convection by running the equipment horizontally, and cooling it on the bottom. The difference in density between the protein mixture and the buffer fluid could be addressed by making the buffer fluid more dense (for example, by mixing in a carrier protein that can be easily separated afterwards), or by setting up a vertical density gradient. > The protein-crystal growth experiment aboard Discovery came up with > bigger and better crystals than yet produced on Earth. Several more > drug companies have joined the sponsoring consortium for the next > flight, on STS-29 in Feb. I previously was skeptical of this application, but I was wrong, I think. I've read that drug companies are willing to spend $100-200K for good crystals of particular proteins, and drug company R&D budgets are in the billions of dollars. If microgravity really does let one make protein crystals that give better diffraction paterns, launch costs would be less important than flexibility in scheduling and short turnaround time. Clearly a niche for a private sector launcher. Paul F. Dietz dietz@cs.rochester.edu