henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) (07/18/88)
Aviation Week & Space Technology subscription address is PO Box 1505, Neptune NJ 07754 USA. Rates depend on whether you are an "unqualified" or "qualified" subscriber, which basically means whether you look at the ads for cruise missiles out of curiosity, or out of genuine commercial or military interest. Best write for a "qualification card" and try to get the cheap rate. US rates are $55 qualified, $70 unqualified at present. It's weekly, it's thicker than Time or Newsweek, and most of it has nothing to do with space, so consider whether the price is worth it to you. -- HS Intelsat seeks bids from Japan, China, Europe, and US to launch Intelsat 7 series, asking for both "standard" and "premium" bids; the latter would include schedule guarantees and requirements for refund or reflight in the event of launch failure. Fletcher says NASA budget crisis may lead to unilateral cancellation of international agreements on space station. Loss of the Pacific Engineering oxidizer plant near Las Vegas will not cause any near-term problems because existing stocks are substantial. Possible impact (direct damage and safety changes) to the Kerr-McGee plant nearby is still being sorted out; it's now the only one left... Long-term impact is less clear: total production capacity exceeded requirements, because both firms expanded considerably back when NASA was talking about weekly shuttle launches, but there may still be a net shortfall. To the stupefied surprise of absolutely nobody, the USAF MLV-2 contract went to General Dynamics for its Atlas-Centaur: 11 launchers to carry DSCS-3 military comsats and a Navstar technology experiment, with an option on 20 more. Long-time readers will recall that I've been claiming all along that MLV-2 was a transparent excuse for government subsidy of Atlas-Centaur. However, it's not nearly as bad as I thought; read on. GD will have to stretch A-C a bit to meet the specs; the alternative was a paper proposal from McDonnell Douglas and Martin Marietta. The really noteworthy and encouraging thing is that the USAF is buying launch services, not raw hardware, with a fixed-price guaranteed-reflight contract instead of government inspection of everything. The result is a fairly low price, $40M per flight. Full postmortem on the April SRB test shows mixed results. The seals mostly worked. One of the deliberate defects did not seal as expected, but the later seals stopped the gas and there was no leak. Office of Technology Assessment which works for Congress harshly criticizes SDI for various things, notably software issues and problems with survivability. A particularly serious survivability problem is direct-ascent non-orbital nuclear antisatellite weapons. OTA also says that space-based threats to SDI systems have not been given enough attention, and that there are implicit assumptions that the US will control certain sectors of space. Milstar advanced military comsat hits large cost overruns and slips two years, due to technical problems. One particular problem is that the full cost of a Titan-Centaur with a Milstar on top is now $1G. Launch of first converted-ICBM Titan 2 launcher slips to July due to minor electronics problems. -- 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