[I'm posting this one to sci.space and sci.space.shuttle as well as sci.space.news as a transition; future summaries will go only to s.s.n.]
Cover is the Tsiklon launcher carrying the Meteor weather satellite with the NASA ozone mapper, being elevated to launch position.
Discovery astronauts about to deploy the Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite.
NASA HQ is talking to Martin Marietta about using Titan 3 for the EOS birds. The top-end Atlas derivative has been discussed for the job, but NASA is nervous about using a launcher that has never flown before.
NASA EOS Engineering Review Panel says (to nobody's surprise) that the satellites need reconfiguring from the giant platforms, and (somewhat less well-known in advance) that the EOS ground facility design also needs a major reworking.
Pictures of the launch of India's second remote-sensing satellite from Baikonur.
The Soviet Military Satellite Control Center (SOOP in Russian) is... available for lease! Not the whole thing, mind you, but its facilities are available for lease to any non-Soviet group doing commercial or scientific missions. The SOOP staff reportedly did not like the idea, not so much because of military security but because they did not want to be embarrassed by the center's primitive (by Western standards) technology.
Long report of the AW&ST visit to Plesetsk Cosmodrome (the world's busiest spaceport, and until recently highly secret). Plesetsk has launched more spacecraft than the entire non-Soviet world put together. It averages 50% more launches than Baikonur despite having only nine operational pads and one-third of Baikonur's personnel, mostly because of highly automated operations and the absence of the more complex manned missions. Plesetsk is preparing for Zenit launches, doubling payload into polar orbit.
Lockheed offers its "F-SAT" concept of a semi-standard mid-size spacecraft bus. The USAF is very interested in the notion, and most major satellite builders are believed to have similar projects in the works. F-SAT is not meant to be particularly cheap; in particular, it includes a lot of on- board computing capability, a high-precision attitude-control system, and quite a bit of power. F-SAT is being done along lines recommended by Lockheed's famous Skunk Works, with a small group of experienced people all located in one building with the best support tools and a relatively free hand to make their own decisions. [They've only made one serious mistake: they plan to use Ada for the software. :-)]
SunOS 4: the only operating system | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology where integer divide is a security hole.| henry@zoo.toronto.edu utzoo!henry