NASA approves a revised plan for the Hubble repair mission: *five* spacewalks spread over 11 days. Alternating teams will make the spacewalks. Two more spacewalks are available for contingencies.
Astra 1C launch on Ariane rescheduled for May 11. Astra's antenna has been repaired after it was damaged during prelaunch setup work.
This year's Collier Trophy will go to the GPS team (assorted agencies and companies).
Station critics (and supporters) charge that Goldin is inflating cost estimates for the current space-station plan -- by adding in extra baggage like facilities construction and shuttle-Mir docking hardware -- to make the numbers look better when a redesign budget appears.
Large feature on the station redesign proposals. [I'll skip most of the gory detail.] The redesign team is unhappy about the tight schedule and the lack of clearly-defined priorities, and have grave doubts about their ability to produce credible cost estimates for options that involve major redesign. Some of the changes offered as potential cost reductions are a bit dubious; for example, the drop in lifetime from 30 to 10 years may not help that much, since spares will still be needed for most hardware.
Joe Shea leaves the redesign team, at least partly due to illness.
The international "partners" are seriously displeased about the latest station turmoil, especially since it is clear that they and their contributions to the project are being treated as afterthoughts. Canada is wondering what the priorities are, and thinks the emphasis on the 51-degree-orbit option has not been adequately justified. ESA wants to see the cost numbers for all the options carried to the point where the "internationals" are on board. Japan is perturbed that the Option-B people seem to be spending most of their time on the 51-degree orbit (rather than on cutting costs), is severely unhappy about the limited field of view for the Japanese module (which includes Earth-observation experiments) in Option C, and is concerned that all three teams are rather vague about making any sort of commitment to a launch schedule for the international modules.
One proposal that several people are making, but NASA is ignoring, is simply to delete the US lab module. The US already has 46% of both European and Japanese lab modules, by the partnership agreement.
Arabsat chooses Aerospatiale over Hughes and British Aerospace for its next two comsats.
France is asking the US to exchange technology and atmospheric data relevant to spy satellites.
Consortium of French, Italian, and Germany companies will propose that the Western European Union develop an experimental missile-warning satellite of its own, with an eye on a two-satellite operational system that could eventually be the starting point for a European missile- defence system.
April 22 test of using satellite data to fire missiles from tactical aircraft at targets beyond their own detection range was successful.
Spacelab D2 launched April 26 on Columbia, with two German payload specialists aboard. [Is this the first time there have been two foreign specialists from the same customer on board? I can't remember an earlier case.] A launch attempt April 24 was aborted when one of Columbia's inertial guidance systems acted up -- it wasn't a clear-cut failure, but the flight rules dictate an immediate landing if one fails in orbit, and they didn't want to chance that happening [on a politically-sensitive mission, in particular]. "Columbia always seems to be a tough one to get off the pad..."
Los Alamos's Alexis X-ray satellite was successfully launched by Pegasus April 25... but is not communicating. Video from a camera system aboard Pegasus showed one of Alexis's solar-array paddles -- which should not have been visible from the camera's position -- after the payload shroud was jettisoned, and it looked like it might have broken off. Worse, that paddle also carries Alexis's magnetometer, which is crucial to attitude control. How it came to come loose is unclear; the spacecraft was tested to well beyond the expected stresses of launch, and the video showed clean shroud separation according to Orbital Sciences [it sounds to me like that's what the video was there for]. Alexis ground control is trying to establish contact with the bird, so far without success; it's not clear just what's wrong. [Latest word: they got one or two short bursts of contact eventually, and in one of them they managed to command Alexis to turn off most of its power-consuming hardware. That did the trick -- evidently it's in a bad orientation and power consumption was outrunning what the solar arrays could produce -- and they're now in continuous contact and working on salvaging the mission.]
Official formation of Sea Launch Services, a joint US-Russian private effort to provide launch services using old Russian SLBMs. The launcher, dubbed "Surf", will be an SS-N-23 on top of the first stage of an SS-N-20. It will be water-launched from a vertical floating position. Payload to 200km equatorial LEO is estimated at 2400kg. The missiles are watertight and well-suited to water launch, and combining the -23 and -20 is not expected to be difficult. Greater capacity could be had with strap-ons or additional stages, and due to water launch, this would not require pad modifications. Surf will need some floats, as it's a little too dense to float by itself, but the Russians have done this sort of thing, and so did the USN's Hydra program in the 1960s. SLS has the support of the Russian Navy. In principle, space launches would count as "launch to destruction" under the START treaty, although US-Russian government agreement would be needed on this. SLS plans a demonstration launch in 1994, and is seeking a payload; they hope this can be a full Surf, but if it is not ready in time, a plain SS-N-23 will be used.
Russia restarts its ocean-surveillance-satellite program, which some had thought defunct when its last satellite decayed recently. [Note, this is not the nuclear-powered radarsats, but another program.]
Altruism is a fine motive, but if you | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology want results, greed works much better. | henry@zoo.toronto.edu utzoo!henry