henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) (08/29/90)
The 21st anniversary of Apollo 11 passed completely without comment in AW&ST. Sigh. GAO report says that the advent of Brilliant Pebbles has disorganized SDIO's deployment plans sufficiently that there should be no FY91 funding for full-scale development of Phase 1 hardware. This will hurt the Boost Surveillance and Tracking Satellite project, which wanted to start f-s-d this year. Truly to lead review of what organizational structure would be best for managing large space projects in the 21st century. [Why do I get the feeling that it will be very much like the current one?] Space station in technical trouble: at last count, the station is 22% overweight and housekeeping power demand is 25% over allotment. The less said about EVA, the better. Space Frontier Foundation calls for cancellation of the space station, arguing that doing it commercially would cost far less and get results sooner. Gramm-Rudman storm warnings go up. If nothing changes, the deficit will be $100G over the G-R limit even if you don't count the S&L bailout. This would mean enormous automatic cuts in defence, space, and aviation unless something is done by Oct 15. In particular, it would almost certainly kill the space station and put the shuttle fleet practically into mothballs for years. General feeling in Washington is that the purpose of these (White House) predictions is to try to get some action in the two-month-old "budget summit", which hasn't been doing much. The White House insists that it *will* let the automatic cuts happen if Congress can't get its act together, but admits that this is meant to force Congress to do so. Senate Armed Services Committee approves a Defence spending plan that kills a bunch of things, including the Milstar strategic comsat and the DoD share of NASP, and cuts a bunch of others hard, including SDI. Solovyev and Balandin run into trouble during Soyuz-repair EVA, pushing the limits of their suits' life-support duration and damaging an airlock hatch on the way in. NPO Energomash, the Soviet big-rocket-engine "company", offers the RD-170 engine for sale to Western civilian users. This is the engine used by the Zenit first stage and the Energia strap-ons. It comes with engineering services to customize it to the customer's launcher. The engine is noteworthy for being designed for re-use, and for having relatively gradual thrust buildup and die-down to reduce stresses on the launcher. The technology-transfer issue got raised, but they think standard commercial trade-secret agreements will suffice to protect the innards. [Once again, the Soviets are acting a whole lot more reasonable than the Americans...] James Beggs, ex-NASA admin, claims to Senate subcommittee that military secrecy hampered NASA oversight of the Hubble mirror production, and implies that the USAF assured NASA that everything was fine and thorough testing would be done. Rockwell gets design contract for the next-generation US antisatellite system. DoD had originally planned to fund two contractors at this stage, but money is tight. Some skepticism has been expressed about the program, given that at any time there are circa 150 active Soviet satellites, most of them military, and the antisatellite RFP specified a probable production run of only 60-75 interceptors. NASA concludes that the Columbia and Atlantis hydrogen leaks are unrelated, despite the coincidental timing, and tries tightening the bolts on Atlantis in hopes that two missions can still be flown before Ulysses. [Didn't work, so Atlantis got rolled back and will not fly until after Ulysses.] Chinese launch the first Long March 2E, a stretched 2C with liquid-fuel strap-ons. This will be the configuration used for the Aussat launches; lift capacity is comparable to Ariane 4. The test launch orbited the first Pakistani satellite (Badr-1, a 50kg "experimental scientific" satellite) and a "second, simulated satellite". Caltech selection committee unanimously picks Ed Stone -- chief scientist for Voyager since 1972 -- to succeed Lew Allen as JPL director at the end of this year when Allen retires. Substantial article on Lawrence Livermore's proposal to use a 1500m gas gun to launch small hardened payloads into orbit quite cheaply ($600/kg if traffic volume is about a kiloton a year for ten years). It could not launch people or delicate equipment, but would be fine for things like fuel, building materials, and bulk supplies, which would be a large fraction of the total mass of (say) a Mars expedition. LLNL is working on small prototypes independently, but would need funding from somebody like NASA or SDIO to build a full-scale system ($2G+). The big unknowns at present are not gun performance, but atmospheric effects on a 6km/s projectile (higher velocities are possible, but atmospheric effects scale with the square of velocity, so lower velocities are preferred). [My reaction to this proposal is the same as my reaction to the Sandia coilgun: it's a fine idea that will not get built, because the traffic volumes needed to justify it are not there. A kiloton per year is twice what the *Soviets* launch! The gun schemes also suffer from working at only one launch azimuth, meaning that all your payloads had better want similar orbits. Congress is not going to fund full-scale SDI deployment; quite apart from the easing international situation and the technical doubts, they see it as an impossibly contentious decision that is best postponed indefinitely, and one way of doing that is to refuse to fund the launchers that could make it a realistic possibility. And a multi- kiloton Moon/Mars plan is not even contentious. No big launcher project is going to be carried out -- as opposed to studied -- in the US until better customers appear.] Arianespace issues new manifest, starting with a two-comsat launch July 24 [successful] and continuing a brisk schedule to recover from downtime. The downtime after the February launch failure *has* permitted some major maintenance to be done without schedule impact, which is useful. -- TCP/IP: handling tomorrow's loads today| Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology OSI: handling yesterday's loads someday| henry@zoo.toronto.edu utzoo!henry