Editorial urging the US to get its act together on access to space for materials work. "Soviet success in luring Western business to its materials processing flights should rest on the merits of the Soviet capabilities -- not the dissatisfaction of Western researchers with their own national capabilities."
NASA adds replacement of a failed rate gyro to the list of things to be done by the HST repair mission. Meanwhile, persistent software work has greatly eased the solar-array "flapping" problems, but at the cost of just about saturating HST's computers, and replacing the arrays is also on the list.
It's the month for antenna problems: Anik E2's C-band antenna fails to deploy in Clarke orbit. [They got it deployed yesterday, to everyone's relief.]
Les Aspin hints that there may be an effort to take theater antimissile defences out from under SDIO; efforts aimed at such defences can expect plenty of money but very sharp scrutiny of management and policies.
The importance of space systems in the Gulf war has stirred up more debate about export controls on space hardware. However, current policy is that most spacecraft bus hardware will be off the "critical list", as will civilian comsats without antijam capability. Policy issues are still being debated for high-accuracy navsats and high-resolution remote sensing.
DoD officially decides to proceed with a new-generation missile-warning satellite design.
Endeavour rolls out, on schedule and under budget. [One would hope that NASA and Congress would learn something from this nearly-unprecedented situation, but they won't...] The orbiter lifting fixture recently moved from Vandenberg to Palmdale is being readied to load Endeavour on 747back for the flight to KSC. The orbiter will effectively be in storage at KSC for about five months until the time comes to move it into the processing flow for its first mission, the Intelsat 6 repair. Four SSMEs (including one spare) are finished at Rocketdyne, and will go to KSC shortly for installation in September. These are the first SSMEs to have a new improved engine controller, which is lighter, cheaper, more capable, and built with more modern parts to ease the increasingly difficult spares situation for the old ones. (The rest of the SSME inventory will get the new controllers over the next two years.)
And now the bad news... with no replacement planned, never mind in sight, the orbiter production facilities are closing. Nearly half of Rockwell's people at Palmdale will be laid off when Endeavour leaves, and most of the rest will go when refurbishment of Columbia is finished in February. The only thing left is the contract to build a new set of structural spares (the previous set having been used to build Endeavour), and that won't last long or use many people.
The chairman of Alenia Spazio (formed by merger of Aeritalia and Selenia) is urging that Italy take over development and production of ESA's Columbus space-station module if Germany can't be talked out of its determination to scale down the project. "It would be a terrible mistake if we cut the module's length to save a few hundred million dollars now..." Alenia is also studying development of a small logistics module to be attached to the station to support early operations, until Boeing's full-size module becomes available late in the construction; this would be a straight US-Italy deal with no ESA involvement.
Alenia proposes Ecosat, an environmental-monitoring satellite carrying an X-band radar and a multispectral scanner.
More on the Centaur failure. The turbopump in one engine did not spin up properly, which prevented that engine from starting. The reason is unknown; all telemetry readings were fine until the turbopump refused to turn. It is unlikely that any physical evidence can be recovered, and the cause of the failure may never be known. This is the first RL-10 engine failure in many years.
Meanwhile, with the BS-3H broadcastsat joining BS-2X in the water (2X was lost in the Ariane failure in Feb 1990), NHK and Japan Satellite Broadcasting are trying to figure out how to avoid suspending a substantial fraction of Japan's commercial TV broadcasting in May. That's when BS-3A, now in orbit, may have to cut back from three channels to two for a while due to unfavorable sun angles. One idea is to reactivate BS-2B temporarily, but very little control fuel is left aboard 2B and it would last only 6-8 weeks. BS-3B is scheduled to go up in August on an H-1, but it will not be ready for use until late fall. (3B is ready to go, but it cannot be launched earlier because agreements with the fishermen's unions limit launch seasons at Tanegashima.) There is starting to be some muttering in Japan about the unreliability of foreign launchers and the need to get the H-2 operating sooner.
Lightweight protocols? TCP/IP *is* | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology lightweight already; just look at OSI. | henry@zoo.toronto.edu utzoo!henry