Cover picture is the Endeavour rollout.
Edsat Institute, which promotes use of satellites for education, is lobbying Congress for a dedicated education comsat. Educational programming mostly comes under "occasional user" provisions, and is subject to being bumped if demand is high... and comsat demand was so high during the Gulf War that satellite education work was badly disrupted, including some students who were unable to complete degree work in time to graduate this spring.
Titan 4 improved-SRB failure investigation finds that internal pressures exceeded 1800psi just before the explosion, against the casing's maximum normal operating pressure of 1200 and ultimate design limit of 1700.
Bush bars export of US components for Chinese domestic comsat, due to the belief that the Chinese companies involved have been active in selling missiles to the Third World (a subject of much negotiation right now). However, exports for Australian and Swedish projects to build satellites for launch on Long March were approved.
Postmortem on STS-39, the first US manned mission ever devoted entirely to military R&D. The mission generally went well, despite tape-recorder failures and unexpectedly high coolant consumption in the Cirris infrared telescope. (Schedules were shuffled to complete Cirris work before it ran out of coolant.) There was an unusual amount of aurora australis activity during the mission, and Discovery passed through auroral displays near Antarctica. Also of note were television images of thruster firings, taken from the Spas subsatellite, which showed exhaust plumes visible to much greater lengths than expected.
The Discovery mission went off on time despite a string of minor problems during countdown. Novel during this flight were abort options to land at one of four East Coast military bases in the event of multiple engine failure.
SDI notes that the fully unclassified nature of STS-39 saved quite a bit of money. (Well, not quite fully unclassified: the data is secret, although the hardware used to get it is not.)
Investigation reveals that Jay Apt punctured the pressure bladder of his spacesuit during his spacewalk April 8; the leak was too small to be noticed until postflight inspection. A stainless-steel "palm bar" in the glove, designed to prevent the glove from ballooning, wore a small hole and also seems to have scratched Apt's hand -- a small amount of dried blood was found. Gloves for STS-39 hastily altered.
Senior Soviet official reports that a slight increase in the Soviet space budget is possible over the next five years, although emphasis will shift. Gregori Cherniavsky adds that the Soviets lead the world in space propulsion but have too many different launchers, and suffer from excessive secrecy in many areas of their space program.
Space station budget in trouble in House.
Big color pictures of the Gamma Ray Observatory deployment and the spacewalk experiments that followed.
Story on the scaling-down of the KSC space-station processing facility to match the shrinkage of the station.
Landsat images of Kuwait showing the huge smoke plumes from burning oilfields.
Brilliant Pebbles suborbital test uses new LLNL wide-field star tracker for attitude sensing. Picture showing a star-tracker view from 100 miles up, including lights from several East Coast cities. The tracker's unusually wide field of view lets it orient itself immediately using only a small catalog of about 500 of the brightest stars.
Lightweight protocols? TCP/IP *is* | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology lightweight already; just look at OSI. | henry@zoo.toronto.edu utzoo!henry