ESA begins FESTIP, the Future European Space Transportation Investigation Program. The first phase, lasting two years, will assess a variety of post-Ariane-5 launcher concepts, including Saenger, Hotol, and SSTO concepts. The hypothetical second and third phases would be technology development and a flight demonstrator.
Third Titan IV launch from Vandenberg (sixth overall) goes up Nov 28.
NASDA shuts down another LE-7 engine test due to a hydrogen leak, tentatively ascribed to a faulty installation of a pressure sensor.
Joint Russian/French project test-flies a scramjet on a surface-to-air missile, improving supersonic combustion time from the 5 seconds of the earlier Russian tests to 15s.
Deutsche Aerospace buys a 12.25% share of Space Systems/Loral, bringing European ownership to 49%.
Optus B2 launch on Long March slips from Dec 12 to Dec 23 at Hughes's request, after discovery of possible defects in components similar to some used in the satellite.
Goldin seeks comments on a proposal to streamline small-contract paperwork within NASA. 80% of NASA's contracts are between $25k and $2.5M, but the paperwork is comparable to that for much larger contracts.
Senior defense officials propose $100G of military budget cuts in the next five years (in hopes that reasonable proposals from the services will give them some influence on what happens), including saving $20-30G by limiting SDI to ground-based continental defense.
Discovery successfully deploys classified military satellite and proceeds to secondary experiments, after a launch delayed 85min due to cold weather. This is the seventh mission in a row to launch on the intended day. The classified payload meant that voice and data transmissions were encrypted during payload operations, and no views of the cargo bay were allowed afterwards, due to fears that the nature of the satellite would be revealed by its support equipment. The nature of the bird is somewhat of a mystery. It probably isn't an imaging spysat, because that's most likely what the recent Titan launch carried. Orbital inclination hints at a radarsat, but some details of deployment don't match those of previous radarsats. It might be a new version.
NASA decides to assemble a Joint Vehicle Integration Team, to be based in Houston, as a single entity responsible for space-station integration. Both NASA and contractor personnel will be included. Meanwhile, top station managers will move from Washington to Reston, and some mid-level people will move from Reston to Houston. [I read this as a low-key way of doing what has obviously needed doing for some time: putting one NASA center in charge of the station, so some specific group is responsible for making sure it all works. More blatant attempts to do so have run into political trouble in the past.] [The last major NASA program with nobody in overall charge was Hubble... and that only had two contractors, where the station has four.]
NASA managers are worried about station funding. Clinton did support the station... but between him and a lot of new Congressmen, things could change.
There is still no money for the station lifeboat, although it is still officially required before permanent manning. The investigation of using Soyuz TM for this is looking good so far.
On the other side of cooperation, the idea of using Energia to launch the station is probably dead. The definitive study will be delivered Dec 5, but opinion is that it will be shelved, because too much redesign of the station would be needed to turn it into Energia-sized pieces.
USAF Phillips Lab is investigating the idea of airborne lasers as tactical missile defenses, given the desirability of an effective defense that can be deployed with quick-reaction forces. The concept would attack missiles at ranges of up to several hundred km during boost phase, simplifying the problem and ensuring that debris falls on the launching nation.
Ariane launches Superbird A comsat Dec 1, finally putting the Superbird program back on track after a launch failure and an accidental loss of a satellite in orbit. The program will not fully recover its financial losses until at least the turn of the century. The launch is also a feather in Loral's cap, since they built two replacement Superbirds on an emergency three-shift schedule that delivered them a year ahead of the usual three-year lead time for advanced comsats.
Major changes will be made at Space Communications Corp to prevent another on-orbit satellite loss. In late 1990, the first Superbird took a cosmic-ray hit that upset attitude-control electronics. When ground controllers tried to deal with this (relatively minor) problem, they made procedural errors that damaged valve seals in the satellite's thrusters, and over the next day or two all the satellite's oxidizer was lost through the damaged seals. The new Superbirds have better radiation-hardened electronics, and the transfer of control from Loral to SCC will be made more gradually to give controllers more experience.
Western launch providers are worried about Russian and Chinese competition. The US government seems to be relaxing old rules that have largely prevented launches of Western comsats on Long March and Proton, organizations like Intelsat and Inmarsat are already booking such launches, and a growing number of other customers are eyeing the lower prices and assuming that the political problems are now manageable.
Draft of a new high-level US policy report calls for serious changes in US government spaceflight. Concepts of space leadership should be rethought: "earning leadership rather than proclaiming it". The US should take "a more activist approach to international collaboration". Government organizations involved in spaceflight should be consolidated to simplify bureaucracy. Finally, military space activities should be unclassified unless there is specific reason to classify them, the exact reverse of the current situation.
OSC targets January for the next Pegasus flight [in fact, it slipped a bit, but flew this morning]. This one will carry a Brazilian data-relay satellite, and will be launched at Wallops, with the B-52 operating from KSC. If this one goes okay, that will open the floodgates for seven flights in 1993 and nine in 1994. The delay has been due to two separate problems seen on the second flight. First, first/second stage separation did not work properly, thought to be due to a failure in the separation- charge initiators; the system has been redesigned. Second, the right half of the payload fairing did not separate immediately, causing a violent yaw that put the launcher off course; this failure has been duplicated in ground tests, and redesigned joints should cure it. The Pegasus and its Brazilian payload -- a small satellite to relay data collected by automatic environmental monitoring stations -- are ready to go, but remaining preparations are on hold to give the crews a Christmas break.
The next Pegasus, for DOE's Alexis satellite, is in storage awaiting launch, pencilled in for mid-Feb [obviously that will slip a bit] launch off Vandenberg. After that, the DARPA/USAF Apex mission will fly in May off Vandenberg. The four remaining 1993 missions are the SeaStar ocean- monitoring satellite (built by OSC with NASA committed to buying the data), SDIO's MSTI-3 sensor test, the USAF's STEP-1, and a secret DARPA payload. There are five firm bookings for 1994 -- two military, two NASA, one commercial -- and options that could add more. OSC plans to expand its facilities to permit launcher assembly at Vandenberg and Wallops, since its Dryden facility can only do one at a time and that is looking like a bottleneck.
OSC has also announced tentative plans to add two afterburning turbojets to Pegasus for initial boost.
Galileo's second Earth flyby is imminent, with plans afoot for a variety of studies of Earth and Moon, plus the start of the "hammering" effort to deploy the main antenna by pulsing its drive motor. (If the antenna is still stuck at the end of February, it will be written off and plans will assume it is unusable.) The full load of data accumulated during the Gaspra flyby, including a number of yet-unseen images, was sent to Earth in late Nov and analysis is underway.
C++ is the best example of second-system| Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology effect since OS/360. | henry@zoo.toronto.edu utzoo!henry