[net.space] Summary of NASA in house seminar

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.