Cover is the Aug 14 Long March 2E launch, carrying the Australian Optus B1 comsat.
Wes Huntress, director of solar-system exploration for NASA, gets the Korolev medal from the Russian Federation of Astronautics and Cosmonautics.
Last week's NASA funding agreement goes to Bush; approval expected.
NASA picks Hughes to build the ground system for EOS.
GAO says the dispute over Patriot effectiveness may never be fully resolved due to inadequate evidence, noting that the evidence for some of the Army's claimed 25% "high confidence" kills is weak.
Rep. George Brown circulates a draft bill for a slimmed-down NASP program, to produce a smaller craft flying sooner at lower cost.
NASA complains to USAF, asking it to please stop citing Mars missions as a justification for developing nuclear thermal propulsion. NASA is worried that military support for a Mars mission may hurt its chances, due to suspicion of the military's motives.
Mars Observer launched Sept 25, after a short delay due to weather and problems getting the pad properly cleared (the newly-refurbished pad has bugs in its personnel-checkpoint procedures). It was a textbook launch with one nerve-racking exception: no telemetry from the new TOS upper stage. MO people chewed their nails for an hour until MO fired up its own transmitter after separation from TOS. TOS did work perfectly in all other respects, so MO is on its way. MO should have been recording TOS telemetry on its tape recorder as a backup measure, although first attempts to retrieve it have not been successful. Preliminary assessment is that a pre-launch command error may have turned off power to TOS's transmitter.
Mars Observer itself appears healthy. Some minor problems have been seen with its star tracker, probably as a result of dust released when booms and antennas were deployed. And the high-gain antenna deployed most of the way to its cruise position but did not actually lock into place for another several hours, possibly because fluid-filled dampers were colder than expected. Finally, there were minor attitude-control problems at antenna-deployment time, tentatively ascribed to the slow deployment, and one of the sun sensors may be shadowed by the solar array somewhat more than expected in cruise configuration. None of this is considered very serious.
Planetary-mission planners meet at Toulouse, cite need for strong leadership and cooperation at a crucial time for Mars efforts. Some cooperative work is already underway; Goldin is in Moscow to buy an engineering model of a Russian Mars lander, to be used by JPL to develop US instruments for the Mars 1994 mission. JPL is also pushing the idea of adding a US microrover to the Russian 1996 rover mission, and the US is encouraging Italy to do a Mars-orbit comsat. Finally, there is considerable pressure in the US for NASA to buy proven Russian Mars reentry/landing systems rather than reinventing the wheel at great expense, but this is not going to be popular with US contractors. [Prediction: some reason will be found why the Russian systems can't quite be adapted to meet US requirements.]
The real problem, though, is defining what will follow MO and the Russian 1994/1996 missions. Several groups have ideas. JPL and Ames are pushing MESUR, Mars Environmental Survey, using small rovers and landers (including a pathfinder mission in 1996 for $150M). ESA is examining Marsnet, another small-multiple-lander/rover scheme with Russian collaboration, but it has been criticized as too similar to MESUR. CNES is studying a large, long- range rover as a followon to either of these, but costs would be high and lack of coordination with the earlier efforts has been criticized. The various groups also differ on basic approach: the US would like to see a single international program, but the French don't want to abandon their plans for cooperation with the Russians for the sake of a minor role in an unwieldy multi-way partnership.
DASA proposes keeping the Columbus man-tended-free-flier concept alive by combining it with the Russian Mir 2 effort into a "Euro-Russian" space station. MTFF is in danger of cancellation at the November meeting of ESA ministers.
Long March launch of the Swedish Freja auroral-research satellite is imminent; it will go up together with a Chinese recoverable imaging mission.
APT Satellite gets a major customer for its APStar-1 satellite, slated for launch in 1994 -- probably on Long March -- to compete with Asiasat 1.
More details on the abortive Chinese launch in March, which left a Long March 2E and its Optus payload sitting live on the pad after an ignition problem aborted launch at the last possible instant. Rescue crews spent 39 hours putting out minor fires and deactivating pyrotechnic hardware, during which some technicians were hospitalized for gas poisoning (presumably from nitrogen tetroxide, although it might have been hydrazine) due to poor breathing equipment and crew carelessness. The payload was unhurt and the booster took only minor damage; the successful August launch used both.
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