eugene@ames.UUCP (Eugene Miya) (09/07/84)
[leq: what's so "user-friendly" about a pushdown automata?] We had a Director's colloquia today (AIAA speaker's name I cannot remember) on the international considerations of a space station. The speaker presented various early designs for space structures. Point was brought up that prior to Shuttle development (pre-ESSA), European space interests could not launch a rocket. There was an active interest in NASA to make space an international effort. The result was SpaceLab, and the Canadian arm (etc.). This left a rather bad taste in their mouth because it could not be used without the "American" shuttle. There was a slide of the European Hermes version of Ariane (a sort of mini reuseable shuttle to supplement the Ariane). Word was mentioned of the follow on to the SpaceLab which would be Shuttle and Ariane useable. A small informal description of ESSA was presented which showed that each member nation was independent in its work, but supported by other member nations. With regard to the Japanese, a slide was shown from the Japanese version of Omni which shows a power unit 100 meters from a US space station beaming microwaves to the space station. This brought up the possibility of better cooperative efforts among nations: note (the speaker) that Japan is the only country actively producing GaAs solar cells, and Japan might be called upon to act as a power company and provide power to a US station. This brings up (of course) the problem that US industry might backlash at such international cooperation. Partitioning such work to various nations is feasible: Japan has expressed interest in doing power and robotics. Various European nations have expressed various mechanical interests like Ariane compability and interior design aspects. The future of NASA is to eventually get out of the space station business as well as the Shuttle business, but both are still in the development stage. Future considerations are lunar manufacturing bases and Mars missions. Reporting. --eugene miya NASA Ames Res. CTr.