[Yes, this is late. Expect terse ones for a while until I get caught up. A conference and a couple of short vacations are mostly to blame.]
Highlights of the Soviet pavilion at the Paris airshow will be the full-scale Mir mockup, the first public display of the Glonass navsat, and the Energia core engine.
Pegasus wins USAF Small Launch Vehicle contract, for one launch plus options on 39 [!] more. One small dark cloud: Israel Aircraft Industries has filed a protest which must be resolved first.
First Centaur failure in a long time, as Japanese comsat goes into the drink 18 April. Atlas-Centaur launch normal until only one of the Centaur engines lit. The Centaur tumbled and range safety blew it up.
Atlantis returning to Cape after Edwards landing. Engineers are trying to figure out how a 14-inch external tank grounding strap got caught in one of the orbiter's umbilical doors instead of being left on the pad at KSC. The strap was found on the Edwards runway after landing! As a further complication, Atlantis landed nearly 600ft short of the official runway threshold on the lakebed. Steve Nagel, the pilot, blames his own conservatism plus unusual winds aloft. "Had that happened at KSC, it would have caused a few more gray hairs, but we still would have been okay". (The KSC runway has a 1000ft underrun area.) [Note added after publication: this was STS-37, Compton deployment.]
Germany will delay start of design/test phase for Saenger while ESA sorts out its manned-spaceflight priorities, in hopes of getting international partners. Estimated slip is 2-3 years, putting first flight of the Hytex X-plane back past the turn of the century and Saenger production decision back to about 2005.
Navstar comes out a big winner from the Gulf war, although the troops say that the handheld receivers need work: they want a system that can run off vehicle power and connects to an external antenna so it can be used from inside.
Much criticism of over-reliance on satellite reconnaissance, on the grounds that the chain of communications between it and the customers is too long. A lower-resolution wide-area mapping capability is also badly needed. Spot and Landsat did a landslide business with the cartographers, who are pushing for approval of Landsat 7, saying that the big spysats are ill-suited for mapping. Mapping problems were definitely serious, with some Tomahawks being fired against Iraq from the Mediterranean so that they could get their bearings over well-mapped terrain in southern Turkey before heading into Iraq.
Various improvements planned for Patriot, including a capability to use its precision radar to calculate the launch site of an incoming missile.
Soviets supply pictures and details of a previously-secret Gemini-class manned spacecraft design that is being converted into an unmanned materials-processing satellite. The manned version never flew, although unmanned preliminary missions flew in the late 1970s... including one capsule that flew three times! "And the US claimed its space shuttle was the first reusable spacecraft." Various Western customers are said to be interested, including at least one US experimenter with shuttle experience who is fed up with endless delays waiting for US flight opportunities. NASA, naturally, claims that US microgravity people "are not wanting for flight opportunities".
Energia/Buran is being stacked for an early 1992 unmanned test, although the program's future is still in doubt due to lack of customers. There are also reports that the "Mir 2" project has been cancelled or shelved as a cost-cutting move.
Synthesis Group reportedly will urge putting the F-1 engine back into production as a first-stage engine for a heavylift booster. [As per my usual policy, I'll avoid detailed coverage of stories that have been rendered obsolete by more recent developments -- in this case, the actual release of the Synthesis Group report.]
Tearing of hair at JPL after Galileo's high-gain antenna opens less than halfway. There is no desperate rush to fix it, but Galileo is in big trouble if the antenna isn't open by Jupiter arrival in 1995. The Gaspra encounter this October should still be possible with the antenna stuck [although optical navigation for precise camera pointing will be hurt badly, reducing the chances of getting good pics]. Cause is not yet determined, although the obvious finger points at the sun shades added late in the program. It's nothing simple, though, because the deployment mechanism is easily powerful enough to rip through a loose sunshade insulation blanket.
The deployment should have taken under 3min, but in fact the "deployed" sensors never did trip, and a software timer stopped the motors after 8min. Motor-current telemetry says they ran normally for the first 17s (about 7 degrees of rib movement), then slowed until they stalled at about 50s. One of the ribs partially blocked a sun sensor, indicating it was out perhaps 40 degrees. Current best guess is that the other side is hung up at about 17 degrees and the ballscrew is being bent by the unbalanced loads; there is concern that it might break if pushed too far. [Worse, private sources say that it can't be backed off -- the motor drive only works one way.] The antenna is similar to that used on the TDRS series, which have had no antenna problems. After some cautious investigation, things like warming and cooling the antenna will be tried. JPL is already thinking about what could be done if the antenna is a writeoff. One idea is to send a lightweight relay satellite to Jupiter by a fast trajectory; Galileo can easily do high-data-rate transmission through its low-gain antennas if the listener is close by.
Letter from Charles Radley commenting on an aspect of the Cape-upgrades coverage in 18 March issue. The Cape people claimed that "payloaders" want last-minute access to their birds on the pad. Radley says this is an artifact of Cape regulations, which insist that arming of rocket motors and the like be done only on the pad. The contractors would be happy to do this before final rollout, as is done at "foreign launch sites" [presumably Kourou], which would save time and money and reduce the hazards of having a technician crawling around inside the nosecone.
Lightweight protocols? TCP/IP *is* | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology lightweight already; just look at OSI. | henry@zoo.toronto.edu utzoo!henry