LE-7 development firing March 27 halted due to hydrogen gas leak; NASDA thinks this is a minor problem that will not delay the first H-2 launch.
Trimble Navigation is marketing a differential-GPS system specialized for crop-dusting aircraft, with a head-up display for the pilot and a portable ground station to supply the differential corrections.
ESA chooses Integral, a gamma-ray observatory, as its next medium-size science project; formal ratification of the choice should come soon.
Rockwell successfully tests what it calls a SLIC (Simple Low-cost Innovated Concept) turbopump, designed and built in a fifth the time (for a fifth the cost) of a conventional rocket turbopump. The new turbopump has only four pieces and would be expected to be longer-lived than conventional ones.
USAF General Charles Horner, head of Space Command, expresses concern about the US's continued inability to do quick-reaction launches on large payloads. He sees a possible need to get one or two more DSP missile-warning satellites up on short notice "in cases the Serbs have Scuds", and the satellites exist -- in storage -- but there's no way to get them up fast. "...when my people tell me it takes a year to put one on station, this fighter pilot has trouble with that".
Hans Mark's prediction on the station redesign: the redesign team will produce a plausible technical solution which will fail politically, delaying an operational station 5-8 years.NASP is at death's door, as Congressional frustration with slow pace and rising costs becomes increasingly evident. Rohrabacher (Republican congressthing from California) charges that many NASP participants see the program as a "milk cow", a long-term jobs program, rather than an opportunity to actually do something innovative. Others question the commitment of NASA and the USAF to the project, noting erratic funding requests.
The current attempt to keep NASP going as a program is focussed around doing a handful of unmanned test flights atop surplus Minuteman ICBMs, trying to reduce risks enough that a full-scale X-30 test vehicle could proceed in about 1999. This effort would cost about $5G; the total program cost (including full-scale X-30 flight in 2002) is now guessed at $12-15G, about three times the original estimates. There is some possibility that these "Hyflite" tests will show the X-30 to be too difficult, although the guess is that the odds are better than 50-50.
Independent NASP task force, established by ASME at House request, says that the original NASP goals were too ambitious -- trying to achieve SSTO with the first prototype drove the program to a conservative approach that imposed "severe risk, cost, and schedule penalties". The task force agrees that the Hyflite tests are a good idea, and also strongly recommends building and flying a hypersonic X-plane to explore the Mach 10-15 range as a precursor to an eventual attempt at an airbreathing SSTO. This would be an aggressive, risk-taking program, probably unmanned, with no significant payload, aimed at extending flight experience quickly.
Five US aerospace companies -- Boeing, GD, Lockheed, MM, Rockwell -- join to do a major survey of launch-market needs, followed by a study of concepts and technologies for a new launch vehicle. The idea is to investigate new markets before trying to pin down the vehicle design. Goldin likes the idea; others claim the markets have been studied to death already.
Russians make things clear: they are interested in participating in a joint space station, but they don't feel any compulsion to. They are going ahead with Mir 2 even without US participation, they are increasingly fed up with on-again-off-again US interest, and there is a growing feeling that NASA needs them more than they need NASA.
Also in the news, Yuri Semenov (head of NPO Energia) says that a Mir crew will soon go up for an 18-month mission.
First flight of Comet slips to late summer, at the earliest, after serious budget overruns surface. Space Industries, one of the three contractors involved, has stopped work pending word on funding.
Lockheed announces the Lockheed Launch Vehicle project, a family of solid-fuel launchers initially aimed at small US-government payloads (although they are interested in the civilian market in the long run). First flight of the LLV1 will be Nov 1994, lifting about 2300lb into a 100nmi orbit at a cost of about $14M; negotiations with potential payload suppliers are underway. LLV1 is a Castor 120 first stage plus an Orbus 21D second stage. The next model up puts that on top of another Castor 120, for 5300lb payload. After that, 2-6 Castor 4s get added as strap-ons, for a max payload of nearly 9000lb at a cost "in the low $20M range". The launchers are designed to be checked out and launched by a crew of 20-25.
FAA will soon request industry proposals for flight tests to evaluate GPS use for Category 3B precision landing approaches. This will probably require carrier-phase tracking, a still-experimental technique, to get the required accuracy. Carrier-phase tracking is in operational use for applications like land surveying, but it relies on Doppler shifts to resolve ambiguities, and this is tricky to do quickly on a moving platform. Stanford researchers have demonstrated doing this with the aid of "pseudolites", low-powered GPS-like transmitters located near the runway. The ground reference receiver, needed anyway for differential GPS, would also do measurements to resolve the phase ambiguities, and transmit those to the aircraft along with the differential corrections; the aircraft, using both the satellites and the pseudolites, could then fix its position to within a fraction of a meter.
KSC team pulls a turbopump out of Endeavour after a similar pump fails on a test stand at Stennis. The Stennis pump began to fail at a total accumulated running time of 4250s, and the pump on Endeavour has run for 4587s. This will not delay Endeavour's launch, now set for June 3. The earlier target date, May 19, required a night launch and a night landing, but was feared necessary to pick up Eureca promptly; ESA has tested Eureca carefully and reports that it can stand a retrieval delay, and NASA prefers to avoid night shuttle operations.
Columbia lands at Edwards, after being waved off from KSC due to low clouds. The mission was extended one day to permit longer payload operations.
GD investigating four possible scenarios for the latest Atlas failure, trying to set a fast pace to avoid disrupting the increasingly-crowded Atlas schedule with a long delay. The failure has been traced to the LOX flow regulator; possible mechanisms are partial blockage of an inlet orifice, moisture freezing in the plumbing, or loss of adjustment due to a loose set screw in one area or a loose locknut in another. [They've fingered the set screw.] The USN has written off the stranded satellite: some experimental work is planned before shutting it down, but it is useless for operational purposes.
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