The cover story is the "pathfinder" Taurus erected at OSC.
New joint venture between NPO Energia and Kayser-Threde to market and distribute stereo imagery with 7.5m resolution taken from Mir.
General Dynamics investigators rule out presence of a foreign object in the RL10 engine that didn't start in the Aug 22 Centaur failure. Icing within the turbomachinery is considered the probable cause. The April 1991 failure was attributed to a foreign object, but after this near-identical repetition, that no longer looks likely.
NASA HQ preparing to issue RFP for a single contractor to supply medium launchers for medium-size NASA missions for the next twenty years.
After 32 years as the secret that everybody knew about, the existence of the National Reconnaissance Office has finally been officially admitted by the Pentagon. Not its budget, not its organization, just its name. [Previously, it was a breach of security for legislators to even mention the NRO in budget debates, which didn't sit well with them.]
High-level talks on sharing missile defences between the US and Russia are underway, although they are being conducted very carefully. To nobody's great surprise, objectives differ: the Russians are particularly interested in better early warning and tactical-missile defences, but have powerful factions which want to see the ABM Treaty more or less preserved, while the US sees relief from the treaty's limits on R&D as essential.
Endeavour lands after the successful Spacelab-J mission.
House and Senate give Bush part of what he wanted in the 1993 NASA budget. He gets near-full funding for Fred, $360M for ASRM (with a slight schedule slip), but zero for NASP, zero for SEI, and near-zero for NLS. This is just the appropriations conference, not final approval.
NASA and Thiokol are sorting out a small modification to SRB joints to prevent a repetition of the assembly damage to O-rings that required destacking of Discovery's right SRB.
Goldin announces some reforms, notably some streamlining of EOS (a common design for most of the spacecraft, and elimination of the High Resolution Imaging Spectrometer instrument), the possibility that incentive fees for Fred will be pooled to encourage the four main contractors to work together better, and a renewed pledge to crack down on cost overruns (after a GAO report cited NASA programs as averaging 75% overrun).
Big article on stacking of the pathfinder Taurus, which has all systems live except fuel. It will be stacked again next month to time the individual steps, then again to time the whole process, then again in a dress rehearsal at Vandenberg. The contract requirement is to stack and ready Taurus within five days, starting with a bare concrete pad, and then launch within three days of payload arrival.
OSC will offer two souped-up versions of Taurus as part of its initial offering to commercial customers. Taurus XL will use stretched Pegasus XL stages to improve payload somewhat, Taurus XL/S will add two small strap-ons for a further increase. (Basic is 3000lb to LEO, 860 to GTO; XL is 3500 and 1140, XL/S is 4300 and 1515, all at 28.5 deg inclination.)
The major challenge for Taurus has turned out to be the noise environment of its first stage. The motor is an MX first stage, designed to ignite 200ft in the air after ejection from a silo, but Taurus will light it on a stand only 10ft up. OSC has been sweating to insulate payload and avionics from the fierce vibration that results; a traditional pad with flame duct and water spray would largely eliminate the problem, but the contract doesn't allow it. OSC hopes to move quickly to Thiokol's new Castor 120 motor, a revised version with better properties for launcher use.
The first Taurus launch is slated for early 1993, using a concrete pad at an old Atlas site at Vandenberg. The payload will be a 400lb classified DARPA satellite plus an 1100lb USAF satellite whose major mission is to test use of GPS for navigation of satellites. DARPA has options for four more Taurus launches. The price to DARPA was about $13M; commercial rates will be higher (one outside estimate is "double") because OSC appears to have deliberately planned to lose money on the DARPA contract for the sake of establishing Taurus as a proven launcher. OSC wants to make Taurus, unlike Pegasus, competitive on cost/pound with larger launchers in the long run.
First science results from the Ulysses Jupiter flyby are out, including indications that the solar wind exerts rather more influence on Jupiter's magnetosphere than once thought, and data showing that the Io plasma torus is patchy rather than uniform. Ulysses is in good shape and is returning continuous data coverage (8 hr/day of real-time data plus 16 hr/day recorded). It is currently about 16 degrees south of the solar equator and moving further from the ecliptic.
Article on Texas Instrument's efforts to commercialize its NASP materials work, notably foils of difficult materials and laminates with many very thin layers. NASP companies are pushing possible applications of NASP materials to applications like automobile engines; there is interest from car manufacturers, although so far it is piecemeal and unsystematic.
MS-DOS is the OS/360 of the 1980s. | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology -Hal W. Hardenbergh (1985)| henry@zoo.toronto.edu utzoo!henry