DC-X FLIES! [Not much AW&ST coverage, yet.]
The cover is a striking two-page foldout photo of the space station -- the one that's already flying, Mir -- seen against a background of cloud, with the horizon in the background. The Progress M-18 freighter has just separated, and is still visible off to one side. The photo was taken from Soyuz TM-17, waiting to dock at the port being vacated by the Progress.
Letter from Richard Oler, criticizing the government for bad decisions after Challenger. "Despite the obvious requirement that cheap access to space is the starting point for any space project, both NASA and the USAF are giving it lip service in deference to programs which are designed to perpetuate the parochial interest of each organization."
Cosmic Background Explorer data becoming available through NSSDC.
NASA decides, as expected, to postpone STS-60 to January to relieve the pileup resulting from Discovery's woes.
Aspin orders inquiry into claims that SDIO rigged the 1984 HOE test.
NASA reassures its international partners that Russian involvement in the space station will not interfere with their roles; the partners are skeptical.
US Court of Federal Claims rules in favor of Hughes in a massive lawsuit alleging government infringement on a Hughes patent for attitude control of spin-stabilized satellites. The 84 satellites named as infringing are valued at nearly $4G, and Hughes thinks that 15% of their value would be appropriate compensation. The government say it should be more like 1%, and is considering an appeal. (The case is already 27 years old and has been to the Supreme Court three times!!)
Story on possibilities being considered for a joint space station. Some small things are already pretty definite -- Soyuz TM as the lifeboat, and some of the Russian life-support gear ("it's been in zero gravity in space for some years, and it does work"). The Russian "space tug" module is being examined as an alternative to Lockheed's Bus 1 system. Broader possibilities are being looked at; US officials have been invited to inspect the Mir 2 core now under construction. (The Energia managers say "There are still skeptics who don't believe what they hear or what they read -- the hardware is there, it exists.") Also being discussed is US involvement in Mir 1 as a testbed and interim facility.
Mir 1 took a number of small meteorite hits during the Perseid shower, including one that created a fist-sized hole in a solar array. Tests are being run to determine whether the array output is down significantly, and there is talk of doing a spacewalk to inspect Mir's exterior for signs of damage.
RKA director Yuri Koptev says the Russian space program is in bad shape financially and is losing its good people. He says that international efforts and sale of hardware and services are now crucial, because they bring in urgently-needed hard currency.
To the shocked surprise of absolutely nobody, Boeing and JSC are the winners in the "who manages the space station" contest. A number of other key issues in the program are still unresolved, and NASA is finding that if it's going to stay within the budget cap, Yet Another Schedule Slip is likely. [I'm going to skip over the details lightly, since the US-Russian deal makes a lot of it somewhat moot anyway.] There are problems with shuttle lift capacity, it looks like you can't put two Soyuz lifeboats inside the shuttle cargo bay, and the assembly sequence is tricky.
Assorted official reasons have been offered for the Boeing/JSC choice, but the bottom line is that it was probably the only one that was politically feasible. The political battle boiled down to Johnson vs. Marshall, both with strong support in Congress, and picking one center plus the other's main contractor was the obvious way to minimize political backlash. And JSC's contractor is McDonnell-Douglas, of the notorious Work Package 2, so the remaining choice was fairly easy. Congress can still override this decision, since it wasn't opened to competitive bidding, but Congress has been dissatisfied with the station's byzantine management setup for quite a while.
Contracts involving the other major suppliers will be "novated" to make them report to Boeing instead of various parts of NASA. The contractors officially support the idea, but privately say that there will be considerable renegotiation involved, since the complexities of a federal contract don't transfer easily to a company-to-company commercial contract.
Richard Kohrs, ex-head of the station program, announces his decision to leave NASA.
Preliminary analysis of the Titan IV failure says it was due to burn-through of one SRB casing. This is the result of a quick-look analysis by the program office; the official investigation has not said anything yet. The telemetry record shows pitch and yaw disturbances, just before the explosion, that are attributed to gas leaking through the hole. The Navy is still looking for debris on the ocean floor, and the USAF is talking about recovering a complete SRB from the next Titan launch for inspection.
Meanwhile, Titan launches are on hold. The Titan II launch of Landsat 6 has been delayed a few weeks until the Titan core is exonerated [Titan II has no SRBs], and the two Titan-IV-Centaurs on the pads at the Cape will sit there for a while longer.
Hercules is looking forward to the imminent final test of its new Titan IV SRB design -- greater reliability is one of the benefits the new design is supposed to provide, and it couldn't come at a better time, with the old [non-Hercules] SRBs in trouble again.
Japan's Space Activities Commission orders delays in several missions due to a funding pinch. Muses-B slips from 1995 to 1996, the Planet-B Mars orbiter goes from 1996 to 1998, the ETS-7 rendezvous-and-docking test mission slips from 1996 to 1997, and the Express recoverable capsule slips to 1994. The commission did approve some new programs: Adeos-2, a second-generation followon to the 1995 Adeos Earth-observation mission, for launch in 1998; Astro-E, Japan's fifth X-ray astronomy mission, for 1999; Hiros, a high-resolution Earth-orbservation satellite for 1999; and early development of the unmanned Hope winged orbiter, for launch in 1999.
Hughes/GreatWall probe into the Optus launch failure concludes. A cautiously-worded joint statement says "At approximately 48 sec. into the flight, the Optus B2 spacecraft exploded." No cause for the explosion is cited, and it is thought that none has been determined. Hughes has already made small design changes to the HS-601 family, and the statement indicates that changes will also be made to the Long March 2E launcher, although it says that the failure was not caused by the launcher and "Hughes accepts this conclusion". The companies are negotiating terms for launch of Optus B3; Hughes did have the reflight-insurance option on the Optus B2 launch.
Story on the Mir 2 plans, with the Russians optimistic about the possibility of cooperation with the West but determined to go it alone if they must. One US source comments: "While Mir 2 and the US-led space station are starting to resemble each other more and more, the Russians worked up to their design after years of operations with Mir 1 and the experience gained with the Salyut stations. The US has come to a similar station concept after starting with an ambitious program, then cutting back time and again during nine years." Yuri Semenov of Energia says that Mir 2 is proceeding despite funding problems, and may launch as early as 1997 if no joint program is worked out. The Russians still want a 65-degree orbit, for better coverage of Russia and accessibility from Plesetsk, but "we don't rule out the possibility of changing the orbit if there is mutual agreement... a 51-degree orbit could be a compromise, smoething we can deal with..." Mir 2's core will be a Mir 1 derivative, the Soyuz TM crew transport will remain unchanged, and the Mir 2 trusses are being tested, in scaled-down form, on Mir 1 now.
Mir 1 will remain active for several more years. There are still plans to launch the remaining two add-on modules. The Russians have confirmed that the two docking ports on the Kristall module were meant for use by Buran -- one would have accommodated the shuttle itself, the other a small add-on module carried up to the station in Buran's cargo bay. Those ports are based on the APAS androgynous design used for Apollo-Soyuz, but have been improved structurally for heavier loads and greater rigidity.
Not yet determined is whether Mir 2 will use Mir 1's hand-cranked "space crane" manipulator arm, or a more sophisticated design originally developed for Buran.
Ground-control facilities will be upgraded for Mir 2, partly because the Russians plan to increase the on-board compouter capacity to permit uploading a week's worth of program at a time, compared to the daily uploads needed for Mir 1. The existing shift scheme, with five shifts of controllers, each on duty for 24 hours that include planning the work for their next shift ("so controllers cannot blame anyone else for their mistakes"), will continue. "We've looked at all kinds of schemes for organizing mission control, and this arrangement seems to work very well."
USAF Talon Lance program testing systems for feeding satellite data straight to combat aircraft, including ambitious on-board processing to filter out unnecessary information and fuse the remainder with data from the aircraft's own sensors. This is seen as particularly crucial for hitting fast-moving mobile targets, where pre-flight briefings updated only by short voice messages are seen as inadequate. Operational deployment would start on radar aircraft and airborne command posts, although combat aircraft are the intended customers in the long term.
Test flights begin on Rutan's Raptor/Talon unmanned aircraft, whose design mission is to loiter above hostile territory at 65kft for 48-50 hours, carrying a sensor package and a pair of hypervelocity ballistic-missile interceptors.
One flight test is worth | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology a thousand simulations. | henry@zoo.toronto.edu utzoo!henry