[No, this is not a belated April Fools' joke. The Post Awful finally coughed up my copy of the April 1 issue. So, herewith a real quick look at what got missed...]
SP-100 space reactor project undergoing revisions to aim it a bit less at SDI applications and a bit more at NASA applications, for budget reasons.
Hughes sues US government for breach of contract, the contract in question being a 1985 agreement to launch ten comsats on the shuttle. Hughes is claiming $288M in damages, mostly to cover the increased costs of booking expendable launches.
General agreement that satellite communications will replace HF radio for transoceanic airline operations within this decade. Less certain is whether VHF will be replaced for continental operations; VHF, unlike HF, works pretty well, and replacing it with satcom gear would be costly. The transoceanic folks have no doubts about their end of it, though. Among schemes being tested are automatic transmission of airliner positions to air-traffic control centers and transmission of weather-satellite data to airliners in flight.
Atlantis preparing for Gamma-Ray Observatory mission with its multiple EVAs. The last US EVA was in 1985, and the gap shows: most of NASA's support crews with EVA experience have moved to other jobs, and only 5 of the 15 shuttle astronauts with EVA experience are still with the program.
Various NASP design details settled in the first of five scheduled design cycles. The main structure will be the skin, built from titanium-based composites. The internal tanks, made of graphite-epoxy composites, will not be structural. The hot areas of the skin, perhaps 20-25% of the exposed area, will be covered by large carbon-carbon insulating panels. The engine people are still fiddling with their designs, but their choice of materials has been frozen at those fabricated and tested as of the beginning of this year. It was thought that this might drive up the engine weight, but so far that hasn't happened. Finally, recent work at Lewis has resulted in a firm decision to use slush hydrogen as the fuel.
Lightweight protocols? TCP/IP *is* | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology lightweight already; just look at OSI. | henry@zoo.toronto.edu utzoo!henry