henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) (08/09/88)
DoD and NASA approve plan to restore ammonium perchlorate production: Pacific Engineering will build a new plant to replace the ruined one, while Kerr-McGee will re-open its plant, expand it, and also build a new plant. Supply will meet demand by 1990, but things may get a bit sticky until then. Bad news time: Mars Observer may slip another two years (to 1994 launch) due to cost overruns and NASA's budget problems. SDI looking at cancelling the Space-Based Interceptor project as too expensive. SDI's priorities are also shifting, toward sensors and a treaty-compliant ground-based interceptor system, partly to make the Soviets happier about strategic arms reduction. Morton Thiokol drops out of the bidding for the advanced SRB, officially to concentrate its efforts on the current SRBs. NASA denies that M-T dropped out because it had no chance of winning after Challenger. Ariane 4 first flight delayed by minor electronics problems. [Went fine.] Shuttle rollout imminent. [As you might expect, I'm cutting some of this pretty short because it's old news.] Trouble in the offing: the oxidizer shortage is likely to wreak havoc with the 1989-90 shuttle manifest. A further problem is that orbiter Columbia's updating has slipped farther and farther onto the back burner, and it may be late 89 before it's flyable again. First launch of the new version of Delta slips a month or so due to parts shortages. First launch now expected late Oct or early Nov. Soyuz TM-5 launched to Mir June 7, carrying two Soviet and a Bulgarian researcher. [Flight International reports that after currently-agreed foreign participation in Soyuz launches is completed, all further "guest cosmonauts" will fly on a fare-paying basis -- no more freebies.] Detailed space station negotiations with all three international partners reported complete, agreements to be signed over the summer. "Aerospace Forum" piece by Lowell Wood, urging "brilliant pebbles" approach to missile interception. The basic notion is simple: since about 20 grams at 10 kps will kill an ICBM, and there appear to be no fundamental barriers to shrinking "smart rock" technology to this size, it should be possible to orbit "brilliant pebble" interceptors in very large numbers at manageable cost. Many SDI problems get simpler if interceptors are available in near- unlimited numbers. But he's got a touching faith in our ability to solve certain software problems, the ability of DoD and its contractors to cut manufacturing costs the same way personal-computer manufacturers have, and the extent to which all this technology will be so routine that it can be given to the Soviets without any technology-transfer problems! Letter from Robert Stefan: "With the way many of our government programs have been run lately, NASA might as well name the space station Icarus. Naa, that's too optimistic -- Icarus at least got off the ground." [And from the 28 May Flight International...] Several European companies, including British Aerospace, are investigating building a small low-orbit launcher, LittLeo, capable of putting a few hundred kilos into low polar orbit from the sounding-rocket base at Ando/ya [well, how would *you* type a slashed o on an ASCII keyboard?] in Norway. This would be an entirely commercial venture, with minor help (but no money) from ESA and a policy of using off-the-shelf hardware. It could fly in 1992; development cost is estimated at "tens of millions [of pounds]". [Note, yet another bunch who don't believe that you need a decade and a billion dollars to put something into orbit.] -- Intel CPUs are not defective, | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology they just act that way. | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu