Orbital Transport Services, of Phoenix, is reviving the HARP concept of using a large gun to fire tough 50kg instrument packages into suborbital trajectories up to 180km high.
First cosmonaut crew launched since the USSR started unravelling go up Oct 2. Commander Alexander Volkov will replace Anatoly Artsebarksy on Mir, but the other Mir cosmonaut -- Sergei Krikalev -- will stay up and is expected to be up a full year.
NASA and LTV investigating the cracks in the leading-edge seals on the orbiters, now found in Columbia as well as Atlantis. (LTV makes the seals.) A quick inspection of a few of Discovery's seals found no cracks.
Consortium consisting of Spot Image, Eurimage, and Radarsat International to handle commercial distribution of ERS-1 radar images.
PanAmSat continues its war against Comsat and Intelsat: its $1.5G antitrust suit against Comsat (which is Intelsat's US part) was thrown out of court, but an appeal resulted in a ruling that Comsat is immune to antitrust in its Intelsat role, but not in its role as a common carrier. Both PanAmSat and Comsat are reportedly happy (!) about the ruling.
ESA is evaluating proposals for a Hermes Training Aircraft, to fill a role much like NASA's Shuttle Training Aircraft: flying a landing approach with the same characteristics as Hermes, to train crews and evaluate techniques.
Large article on the legal battles over the "PSN restriction", which forbids US companies from competing with Intelsat for international traffic which involves the "public switched network", i.e. the phone system. PanAmSat, aka Alpha Lyracom, has petitioned the FCC to lift the restriction. TV networks, equipment manufacturers, and large communications customers have all supported the petition; opposition comes basically from Comsat and from Loral (which is building the next generation of Intelsat birds). The NSA has reportedly voiced confidential objections to the petition, on the grounds that having a proliferation of satellite systems would make it harder to eavesdrop on the traffic. PanAmSat and its friends actually aren't all that interested in telephone traffic, but they dislike the inflexibility of being forbidden to carry it. (Another consideration is that Rene Anselmo, chairman of PanAmSat, has a private vendetta against Intelsat's monopoly, which he describes as "an agreement among thieves". He was instrumental in getting the FCC to allow non-PSN international traffic to flow outside Intelsat.)
The 1992 World Administrative Radio Conference, which sets things like frequency allocations, is shaping up to include real battles over spectrum space for mobile satellite communications and digital audio broadcasting. One complication is that US agencies cannot agree among themselves over the latter, with the FCC favoring reallocation of some of the aircraft/missile flight-test spectrum, and DoD, the aerospace industry, and various other federal agencies strongly opposed. The point might be moot, as the FCC's favorite band is also heavily used in Europe and Japan for existing (non-flight-test) communications.
Goddard's ozone-mapper ground crew is back in Moscow, working to calibrate their instrument aboard Meteor 3. There is talk of adding another ozone mapper to a later Meteor. The Soviets have suggested moving towards eventually merging the US and Soviet civilian weather- satellite systems. More possible flight opportunities for US instruments on Soviet spacecraft are being discussed for the short term; this bypasses the protracted development processes of US satellites and gives both better continuity of data and more opportunities to fly new instruments.
House approves $14.3G NASA appropriations, fully funding Fred but cutting NASP and NLS deeply, making modest cuts in EOS, CRAF/Cassini, and AXAF, and killing Lifesat, Orbital Solar Laboratory, SIRTF, and the Flight Telerobotic Servicer outright. [Of the dear departed, SIRTF is the only one I'd class as a mistake. Lifesat seems to be shaping up as another costly project with few flight opportunities, OSL is probably doomed anyway, and FTS was always Congressional pork barrel rather than anything the space station really needed.]
SVR4: proving that quantity is | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology not a substitute for quality. | henry@zoo.toronto.edu utzoo!henry