henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) (12/05/88)
Japan and US are talking about experimenting with a joint satellite-based air-traffic control scheme on the Tokyo-Hawaii route. NASA FY90 budget request of $14G submitted to OMB. To everyone's surprise, OMB didn't throw a fit immediately. It's early yet, though. The major new start is a pair of Mariner Mk 2 probes, one for CRAF and one for Cassini. Color pictures (not terribly good) of Buran in preparation for launch. As speculated, the Energia/Buran combination is assembled horizontally and then trundled out to the pad by rail for erection there. [Now that's heavy rail...] The Soviet pad does not use the US-type "rotating service structure" that encloses most of the orbiter, and there is no evidence of ability to load a major payload on the pad. [Maybe the Soviets simply plan to run a fast-turnaround system, in which there's no need to load payloads on the pad, because the bird doesn't need to sit on the pad for a month before launch?] There are three new circular things on the Energia core just forward of the orbiter's nose, possibly separation rockets to get the core clear of the orbiter in an abort. NASA people express skepticism of Soviet ability to do a complete flight unmanned. [Ho ho, so much for that.] [Incidentally, from the photos I agree with the earlier comments that Energia's boosters appear to be closer together than they were on the original Energia test launch.] Hubble telescope launch moved up from Jan 1990 to Dec 1989; the DoD mission that originally had the December slot has been postponed. [Interesting -- Atlantis flies with a low-orbit spysat rather than the Clarke-orbit eavesdropping satellite originally said to be the first post-51L military mission, and the third such mission slips. I wonder if there's been some sort of shakeup.] Mir astronauts do EVA Oct 20 to finish the repair of the Anglo-Dutch X-ray telescope. Progress 38 goes up to Mir Sept 9, carrying components for use by French cosmonaut Chretien. Congress again passes legislation re-establishing the National Space Council; Reagan might veto it again. Also passed, and expected to be signed, is a new launch-insurance bill that has the government assume liability for third-party damage and government-facility damage above certain ceilings. The bill also limits government ability to preempt commercial launches from government facilities, and waives government service charges for commercial launches of satellites bumped from the shuttle manifest after Challenger. [This is kind of academic, since so far I think *none* of those birds are booked for US launchers.] Congress authorizes start of development on the advanced SRB, measures to assure ammonium perchlorate supply, start of AXAF, continuation of the Advanced Communications Technology Satellite, and reasonable funding for the space station. The fate of the Commercially Developed Space Facility is still unclear, with Congress calling for more studies before it is funded. Congress orders NASA to get cracking on organizing a group to establish an international standard docking mechanism. Rocketdyne concludes that there is no warping problem on one of Atlantis's engines -- the only problem that might delay Atlantis. An injector faceplate in an engine meant for Columbia was warped in a test recently, and there was some concern that an anomaly in an earlier test on one of Atlantis's engines might indicate a similar occurrence. In testing, the engines occasionally "pop", a phenomenon vaguely similar to backfiring; the cause is not well understood and nobody knows whether it can happen in flight. The forces involved can be quite high, hence the warping. Space Services Inc gets NASA contract for suborbital materials-processing launch in March. Launch of French cosmonaut to Mir slips five days to permit Mitterrand and Gorbachev to watch the launch. [Chretien is said to be annoyed, as this cuts into his time in space -- the return schedule is fixed.] SDI pursues plans for its own booster, probably between Delta and Atlas- Centaur in capacity, probably derived from an ICBM or possibly the Trident 2 SLBM. Launch sites are also being looked at, including Vandenberg and the possibility of ship launch. Aircraft launch is probably not feasible, it will be too heavy. SDI wants a "reconstitutable" launch system, mobile and with a quick turnaround time. This could also be useful for "other defense missions". Navstar users continue to be a bit skeptical about the system's usefulness for aviation. It would be very handy to have a global system good enough for instrument landings, but Navstar is not quite accurate enough, and worse, DoD can degrade its accuracy without warning. It is considered very important that a pilot be able to start a landing approach with confidence that his navigation accuracy is not going to suddenly drop. The current Navstar satellites actually have quite good accuracy and are not capable of remote-control accuracy loss, but that will change in the operational satellites that will start to go up soon. [A couple of items from Flight International 15 Oct:] Pad 39A, used for all the pre-Challenger shuttle launches, probably will not be activated again until 1990 at the earliest. 39B should suffice to handle the launch schedule in the near future. 39A has fallen behind in modifications (e.g. only 39B has the new weather-protection shields for the orbiter) and NASA hasn't the money to bring it up to date now. The reason why Soyuz TM6 had reentry software for an earlier launch in its computer was that it was the backup spacecraft for that launch. (This was a contributing factor in TM6's retrofire problems.) [And from 12 Nov:] Soviet plans call for five shuttle orbiters. It is possible that the size of the orbiters may vary depending on their mission; Birdy is said to be smaller than Buran. The crew for the first manned mission is likely to be two men, probably Igor Volk (commander) and Ural Sultanov. The aborted Buran countdown on Oct 29 was the first Soviet countdown to be terminated automatically, when a crew-escape arm appeared not to be moving away properly. [This has since been reported to be a sensor failure.] The Buran launch is from a new pad, not the one used for the first Energia. West Germans book a commercial cosmonaut flight to Mir in the early 1990s, in the wake of Austria doing likewise. Italy, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Britain are also reported to be negotiating. Glavkosmos says that the normal $10M price may be reduced if the experiments proposed for the flight are "interesting", which is rumored to be the case for the British mission. -- SunOSish, adj: requiring | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology 32-bit bug numbers. | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu