henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) (03/20/91)
USAF contracts for two more DSP missile-warning satellites, plus an option on a third. Inmarsat expects to pick a launcher for the Inmarsat 3 series around the end of this year. Of note is that Proton is considered a serious bidder. The Salyut-7-Cosmos-1686 complex reentered over Argentina mid-morning Feb 7. Numerous reports from witnesses, no injuries or serious damage known. Lt.Gen. Horner, air commander in the Gulf, says lessons learned so far include the need for much better tactical intelligence and a wide-area tactical-ballistic-missile defense system. He says there is a "big BDA [bomb damage assessment] flap" on in the Pentagon, which "would indicate we may have been overly entranced with some forms of intelligence collection". [Translation: a handful of strategic spy satellites is not a very good intelligence system for tactical forces that need lots of selective coverage quickly.] He says that while Scud is pretty useless militarily, everyone underestimated its political impact, and only the success of Patriot controlled the political damage. What's more, even so the allied forces were lucky: Patriot was adequate as an anti-Scud weapon only because the significant Scud targets were so concentrated. An anti-TBM system capable of covering large areas is conspicuously lacking. OSC/Hercules prepares for a major Pegasus sales pitch in Japan and other Pacific-rim nations, including forming a marketing alliance with Okura & Co. Ltd in Tokyo. The two major manufacturers of hand-held civilian Navstar receivers are running flat out, working two and three shifts and selling everything they can build. The military is ordering huge numbers, and the companies have also had many orders from individual units, soldiers, and soldiers' relatives ("...soldiers' mothers have bought units and shipped them to their sons in the gulf"). The combination of nearly-featureless desert, often-inaccurate maps, and frequent night operations has produced a horrendous navigation problem; Navstar receivers are the only available solution. The Navstar controllers have turned off "selective availability" [translation: deliberately degrading the civilian Navstar signals] to make the civilian receivers as accurate as possible. DoD FY92-93 budget kills SDI's Boost Surveillance and Tracking Satellite system in favor of upgrading the existing DSP warning satellites, and "restructures" the Milstar strategic comsat to "emphasize tactical requirements". A major increase in SDI funding is sought, but nobody believes it will happen. What probably will happen, though, is approval for requests for considerably more money for tactical missile defence. Antisatellite funding is cut heavily, indicating it has low priority. NASA FY92 budget calls for 13.6% increase, a start on a new heavylift booster, a start on a Delta-sized "Lifesat" recoverable life-sciences research satellite for first launch in 1996, only slight growth in space station funding, a substantial effort in Moon/Mars technology development, stable funding for NASP, and doubling of the Mission To Planet Earth budget [if you thought the shuttle ate everyone's lunch, wait until *this* puppy sinks its fangs into the planetary-exploration budget]. -- "[Some people] positively *wish* to | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology believe ill of the modern world."-R.Peto| henry@zoo.toronto.edu utzoo!henry