Letter from Prof. Douglas Way of Ohio State U, suggesting the Landsat 6 fiasco as "a great business school case study" of mismanaging a program with known-to-be-significant risks: "Where is the backup?"
Joint US-Russian life-sciences experiment in the works, with a rapidly- built prototype already flown on Mir to test the hardware.
Goldin to present plan for the four-year $100M/yr pre-station cooperation with Russia, involving up to 10 Shuttle-Mir flights.
IBM told that its contract for station computers is being terminated.
DC-X grounded as test-flight funding runs out just before the fourth flight [actually a pair of flights!] planned for Oct 23. The flight had been scrubbed twice, once on the 20th due to an instrumentation problem and once on the 21st due to a slow engine startup.
The out-of-control Chinese spacecraft came down in the Pacific off Peru on the 28th.
First Intelsat 7 launched by Ariane Oct 22. The launch was precise enough that estimates of its lifetime have been raised a year.
NASA eases the low-temperature limits for shuttle launches slightly, by figuring in humidity, turbulence, and later warming -- the old rules assumed smooth flow of dry air, which is decidedly unrealistic, and did not really consider that things would warm up again after a brief temperature dip.
"Forum" piece by C.A. Willits, proposing an alternate space-station design: a bigger and more complex station, launched on Energia, built from modules of somewhat-revised design, powered by ground laser illumination of rather-smaller solar arrays. [His ideas on schedule and assembly seem plausible, given use of Energia, but the laser-illumination idea frankly seems half-baked -- the concept is technically sound, but just how many laser stations is it going to need, and where is he going to put them all?]
[This issue was just plain light on space news otherwise.]
Belief is no substitute | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology for arithmetic. | henry@zoo.toronto.edu utzoo!henry