henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) (08/21/90)
House kills NASA SETI funding ($12.1M).
Station EVA studies are about to be released, and the situation is getting
worse, not better. NASA management is likely to argue that the underlying
assumptions are overly pessimistic, but the people who came up with the
reliability numbers say "These failure rates are not imaginary. NASA
cannot, with the wave of a bureaucratic hand, reduce these numbers by
a factor of ten".
Martin Marietta asks US District Court to absolve it of financial
responsibility for the stranded Intelsat VI, on the grounds that the
provisions of the contract terminated its responsibility at liftoff.
[It was MM engineers who screwed up the separation circuitry and thus
caused the failure.] MM alleges that Intelsat has demanded payment of
damages on threat of lawsuit, and furthermore says that if damages are
required, MM will have to leave the commercial launch business.
Assorted technical details of NASA's work on the shuttle hydrogen leaks.
Acceptance tests will be toughened up; they currently use liquid nitrogen,
which is safer and easier to handle than liquid hydrogen but may not get
the seals cold enough to show these temperature-sensitive leaks. A number
of umbilical connections leaked when attached to a "slave unit" simulating
the orbiter, but replacing the slave unit with a blanking plate stopped
the leaks; the assumption at the time was that the complex slave unit,
not an accurate copy of flight hardware, was to blame. It is also hard
to simulate pad conditions, with large flows of hydrogen under pressure,
in a laboratory setting.
NASA in hot water over Hubble mirror problems.
NASA grounds Gibson and Walker, cancelling their assignments as commanders
of upcoming shuttle missions, for disciplinary reasons. Gibson was grounded
after a midair collision in an air race which killed the other pilot. The
grounding was because of his participation in the race, not the accident;
two years ago, NASA formalized a long-standing informal rule forbidding
astronauts with flight assignments from participating in risky recreational
activities like air or motor racing. The detailed reasons for Walker's
grounding are considered part of personnel records, and hence confidential,
but multiple incidents of violating NASA flying regulations are apparently
the cause. Groundings for such reasons have occurred before, but this is
the first time that an astronaut with a flight assignment has been affected.
ESA's director of scientific programs says he may have to kill one of his
three big-ticket new projects -- Huygens, Soho, and Cluster -- unless he
gets more money to cover unforeseen costs on Ulysses (long launch delays
due to the shuttle problems), the HST Faint Object Camera (more launch
delays, some HST's fault and some the shuttle's fault), and Hipparcos
(Ariane launch delays plus the extra costs of more ground stations to
cover Hipparcos after it was stranded in the wrong orbit). To date these
costs have been absorbed by delaying new missions, but all three of the
new big ones are coming up on hard deadlines. The Huygens Titan probe
must be ready for Cassini's April 1996 launch window. The Cluster
solar-terrestrial science mission must be ready for one of the test
flights of Ariane 5 in 1995, or its launch bill will escalate from the
test-flight price of circa $11M to a full-price Ariane launch at $130M.
The Soho solar-terrestrial mission is a joint project with NASA and will
go up on a US launcher, but its budget is based on sharing development
resources and component systems with Cluster, so it too is tied to
Cluster's launch deadline. The space-science budget has received only
very restricted budget increases in recent years, and the pinch is now
being felt.
New Ariane manifest sets fast pace in the next 17 months to recover from
the five-month grounding following the February failure. If everything
goes as planned, there will be four launches this year and nine in 1991.
New National Space Council commercial-space policy says it would be okay
to launch US satellites from Cape York (on Soviet boosters) if "market
pricing" is adhered to. [Translation, if no attempt is made to beat
the Western launcher cartel's prices.]
Japan has another engine fire during H-2 development. [I said they were
going to regret using the SSME staged-combustion cycle... It does not
seem to produce reliable engines, at least not easily.]
Large story on the Combined Release and Radiation Effects Satellite, a
combination of a USAF mission exploring the Van Allen belts and their
effects on components and a NASA mission releasing chemicals to make
electrical and magnetic fields visible for ground photography. NASA is
still trying to claim that, as a "government payload", this mission is
exempt from DoT licensing for its commercial launch.
Letter commenting on the juxtaposition, in the June 18 issue, of an
advertising supplement titled "US Space Leadership: America Renews Its
Commtiment", and news stories reporting on cancellation of funding for
Moon/Mars, ALS, and Lunar Observer and cuts for the space station and NASP.
--
Committees do harm merely by existing. | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
-Freeman Dyson | henry@zoo.toronto.edu utzoo!henry