Ames exploring whether Florinef, a synthetic steroid used to treat fainting and low blood pressure, might be better than the current water/salt regime for treating the lightheadedness often felt by astronauts on return to Earth (which is caused by reduction of blood volume in free fall).
First GOES-Next launch set for April 1994, after final tests succeed.
GD completes pad rehearsal for the next Atlas-Centaur launch, considered very important after two Centaur failures [and this time the Atlas failed].
Bill Perry, deputy SecDef, tells Senate (during his confirmation hearing) that his priorities for SDI are theater defence first, light continental defence second, everything else well behind. He thinks the first two can be done successfully with ground-based interceptors and space-based sensors and warning systems.
NASDA test-fires H-2 core stage on the pad Feb 20. Short but successful. Longer firings, with progressively more representative hardware, are set for the next few months. Preparations start in Sept for launch at about the end of Jan, a year behind schedule.
NASA freezes station work while redesign is pondered: no new contracts, no extensions, no new people, no overtime. [As usual, since I run well behind real-time, I won't go into detail on stuff that is changing from day to day and already well covered, e.g. redesign ideas.] Everyone thinks Goldin has been given spending caps, but he won't say what they are. He's playing the redesign issue so quietly that there is some suspicion he already knows what he wants; this has been denied. The foreign partners are expressing their displeasure more loudly, saying that a delay is unwelcome news and will run up costs at a time when they (especially ESA) have no money to spare.
ISAS launches Asuka [renamed ASCA for foreign consumption, which is in any case pretty much how Asuka is pronounced], nee Astro-D, Feb 20. Its mission is X-ray spectroscopy; it's ISAS's fourth X-ray observatory since 1979. [Compare this to the way NASA does things, with one huge one every twenty years... ISAS comes out ahead on this one.] There is extensive US participation, including mirrors from Goddard and CCDs from MIT. The launch was postponed eight days due to a leak in the booster's thrust-vectoring system (attributed to shrinkage of seals due to use of a new non-CFC cleaning agent).
NASA adds an experimental spacewalk to STS-57, aimed at rehearsing the HST repair. This was done on the second attempt, after an earlier plan was rejected because pressure reduction to reduce prebreathing interfered with biomedical experiments in Spacehab. The spacewalk is still tentative, and might be scrubbed if Spacehab work runs behind schedule.
Canadian and Russian companies form partnership, Sovcan Star Satellite Communications, to establish a commercial comsat system for Russia. Launches and satellite buses will be Russian, the major electronics and antennas Canadian. First launch set for 1996.
USAF working on finding $300-500M to compensate Hercules for cost overruns and cuts in production volume on the SRMU upgraded-Titan-SRB program. It was a fixed-price development contract -- now considered a bad approach -- and Hercules lost a bundle on it. The third SRMU test was successful Feb 21, with the motor chilled to 36.5F before firing. Real-time X-ray equipment from LLNL was used to study slag buildup in the aft end of the motor, partly because there was concern that molten slag sloshing into the nozzle throat might cause unwanted thrust vectoring. That fear looks to have been exaggerated, but there is still concern about the slag because it's heavy, and combined with slight underperformance by the fuel, it reduces payload to orbit by about a ton. However, the tests have shown that the motor has more insulation than it needs, and the next test will feature less insulation (making room for more fuel) and a slightly improved fuel formula, which should get the performance back. Operational date for the SRMU, once mid-1991, is now late 1994.
NASA SR-71 to start flying ultraviolet-spectrometry missions in March, using an upward-looking camera in a nose bay. The initial flights will study effects of airflow on the images, but these will be followed by science-return missions. There is a lineup of projects for the SR-71, mostly exploiting its extreme altitude to get above the atmosphere or using it as a satellite simulator to test new space hardware. Of note is a plan to fly chase (!) on the Clementine launch, using ultraviolet spectrometers to examine the rocket plume's interactions with the upper atmosphere.
NASA picks 11 candidates from 73 proposals for the new Discovery program, which envisions small planetary missions with strict cost ($150M), time (3 years from start to launch), and launcher (Delta at most) limits. The two initial Discovery missions are already set: Mesur Pathfinder, a technology test [rather out of place in what is supposed to be a science program!] for the Mesur Mars-surface-network concept, and Near, a JHU-APL mission to rendezvous with a near-Earth asteroid. MP is set for launch in 1994, Near in 1998. NASA is expressing willingness to consider missions with less redundancy and greater risks, and promising that there will be less interference from the management. The 11 new candidates are:
NASA criticized many of the proposals for business-as-usual management philosophies, with too many layers for small fast projects.
The one problem with all this is that NASA does not yet have the money to get Discovery properly started. It will get about $1M total this year; each project needs $6-10M over two years for a proper design study leading up to a decision.
Meanwhile, SDIO is offering unclassified briefings on its cheap, light sensor technologies, hoping to encourage technology transfer to science and industry. It has been doing substantial technology development in areas nobody else has been pursuing actively, and NASA is starting to pay attention. The most prominent SDIO effort is, of course, Clementine. NASA scientists say that Clementine is "not all that great a payload" from their point of view, but unlike NASA's lunar-mission concepts, this one is going to fly soon: "This is an issue where there's a train leaving the station and the question is how to maximize the science on it."
JPL talking to the Russians about putting a small US rover piggyback on the large Russian Mars rover scheduled for 1996 launch, after plans for a partly-American third lander on the 1994 Russian Mars mission fell through. One technical difficulty is different design approaches to the deceleration system: the US prefers to invest weight in better deceleration systems for gentler landings, while the Russians put it into strengthening their hardware for hard landings, and it may be tricky to put US hardware through a Russian-style landing.
Meanwhile, Russian planetary workers, and a Russian rover prototype, visited Ames, and the Russian rover was tried out using Ames's surface simulator and virtual-reality hardware. Ames reports that it was fairly easy to do, and the opportunity to try their gear out on a rover they weren't involved with was welcome. They say that the Russian rover's mechanical design is a generation ahead of anything in the US, which might not be too surprising since the Russians say it is the tenth generation of development since Lunokhod.
Amroc fires the largest hybrid rocket motor yet tested, in two firings (same motor, which will be fired two more times before its fuel is gone) at Edwards. The second firing reached 233klbs thrust; the first tested fluid-injection thrust vectoring successfully. Amroc plans several more test motors, followed by a suborbital test flight tentatively set (subject to funding) for spring 1995. Amroc could fly an orbital launcher -- two of these motors in the first stage, one in the second, a United Technologies solid in the third, and a small Amroc motor in the fourth -- two years after the suborbital flight. Amroc concedes that its hybrid performance is about 15% less than good solids, but claims lower costs due to much-reduced handling hazards.
SVR4 resembles a high-speed collision | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology between SVR3 and SunOS. - Dick Dunn | henry@zoo.toronto.edu utzoo!henry