henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) (07/19/88)
Heads up -- another Soviet nuclear radarsat is in trouble overhead. Cosmos 1900, launched Dec 12, apparently has had some sort of major failure. It has performed neither its boost maneuver (to put its reactor section into long-lived high orbit) nor its backup separation maneuver (to separate the reactor core so that, unprotected, it will burn up on reentry). An uncontrolled reentry with radioactive debris reaching the ground is possible. DoT Secretary Burnley says DoC was wrong to allow Payload Systems Inc. to fly a scientific experiment on Mir, on the grounds that such international ventures hurt the US launch industry. And you thought the US was a free country. Ho ho. Oxidizer shortage looms... Planned production of ammonium perchlorate this year was 50Mlb. The capacity of the surviving Kerr-McGee plant is nominally 36Mlbs/yr, and it can probably be boosted to 40 fairly quickly, but a year down the road -- when existing stockpiles empty out -- the gap will be felt. Most solid fuels are circa 70% AP by weight; the shuttle uses 1.7Mlbs per mission. In addition to the gap between requirements and supply, not all solid motors are cleared to use Kerr-McGee AP, since there are minor differences between it and the product of the defunct Pacific Engineering plant. It will probably take two years or more to rebuild the PE plant, probably at a more remote site. (Kerr-McGee is already running into local opposition to resuming production at its plant.) Expanding the Kerr-McGee plant wouldn't be quick either. Cause of the explosion is not clear; one possibility is that a natural-gas leak started a fire. AP by itself is not particularly explosive, and this is the first major AP accident on record. Federal grand jury subpoenas records from Ford Aerospace and Hughes in an investigation of kickbacks within Intelsat. NASA shortens pre-STS-26 flight readiness firing from 22 to 9 seconds to avoid repeated high loads on the aft skirts of the SRBs. Dates already obsolete now hoped for are July 17 for the FRF and Aug 29 for launch. Small schedule slips continue; repair of minor insulation debonds, misthreaded leak-test ports, and installation of large numbers of test sensors are slowing SRB stacking, although the left SRB is done. Congressional Budget Office predicts severe budget problems for NASA in 1990s due to increasing interdependence of NASA programs. If the deficit requires holding NASA's budget at the current $9G level, this will demand either postponement of the space station well into the 21st century or a "complete restructuring" amounting to gutting the manned space program. CBO warns that the US space program is becoming an "all-or-nothing proposition" because large-scale projects like the shuttle and the space station are crucial to so many other plans. Postponing the space station could have the same sort of ripple effect on space science and applications as the Challenger accident. The interdependence carries potential for lower overall costs, but it also increases cost and schedule risks for individual missions. Now here comes a REAL weirdie... SDIO tried unsuccessfully for two months to get Administration blessing for a manned US/Soviet space demonstration in August involving astronauts, cosmonauts, Mir, an SDI satellite, and astronaut maneuvering backpacks. A Soviet booster would have carried US hardware to Mir, possibly including US astronauts, to retrieve a package from an SDI satellite and return it to Mir. NASA vetoed the idea as an unnecessary distraction from the shuttle's problems, and many people saw it as a political stunt rather than a useful mission. Some practical problems too: the US MMU won't fit through Mir's hatches. The only reason the idea got as far as it did was that it came direct from Abrahamson. "The concept's got a wooden stake driven through its heart now, but you never know what's going to come out of SDI during the next full moon", says one unnamed official. I swear I did not make this up. Europe urges US to soften its objections to launching NATO comsats on Ariane, an idea the US has vowed to block. The *official* US reason, as readers may recall, is that such NATO-infrastructure contracts are supposed to be restricted to full NATO members. France, the largest partner in Ariane, isn't a full member any more. House Appropriations subcommittee approves $10.7G appropriation bill for NASA, a cut of $0.8G, mostly *not* from the space station. -- Anyone who buys Wisconsin cheese is| Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology a traitor to mankind. --Pournelle |uunet!mnetor!utzoo! henry @zoo.toronto.edu