Letter from F.A. Beswick, urging that the now-vacant backup Hubble-servicing mission slot late this year be used to carry Spektr or Priroda to Mir. No docking would be needed, he suggests, as the shuttle arm could pass the module to Mir's arm.
Letter from Charles Lurio of the Space Frontier Foundation, criticizing the NASA notion of flying the shuttle until 2030 and the inflated cost estimates for SSTO development.
Planetary Society contracts with Russian organizations to study a possible Russian role in Pluto Fast Flyby, in the belief that NASA is not adequately considering the idea. Emphasis is mostly on propulsion, including Proton, upper stages, and solar-ion thrusters.
Japan's Broadcast Satellite System Corp buys two broadcastsats from Hughes, for launch 1997-8.
Euroconsult describes use of Russian SLBMs for launches as "likely to remain a short-lived and largely unsuccessful experiment", citing difficult satellite integration, declining hardware reliability after the time needed to gain customer confidence, and arms-control restrictions.
Two Russian spysats demonstrate rather longer life than usual for their predecessors, suggesting new more-durable hardware.
Goldin announces (long-predicted) shakeup of center directors. Carolyn Huntoon, now associate director of JSC, will take over JSC (directorless since Cohen retired). Porter Bridwell, involved in the latest station redesign, will take over MSFC from Jack Lee. Ken Munechika, a state space official in Hawaii and former commander of Onizuka AFB, will take over Ames, as Compton retires. Ken Szalai remains head of Dryden, but becomes a center director as Dryden regains its independence from Ames. Don Campbell, currently a USAF asst. sec., takes over at Lewis, succeeding Lawrence Roth. Several other people named to lesser positions.
China issues a new version of the official story on the FSW-1 satellite that went out of control last autumn, acknowledging that part of it has reentered.
Mars Observer failure report criticizes design of propulsion system as the probable cause of the accident, while conceding that other possibilities remain. The investigating board says that several significant flaws were present in the spacecraft, and that they could have been found with better management. The report criticizes use of a firm fixed-price contract, and casts doubts on building a one-of-a-kind planetary mission as a modified copy of an Earth-orbit spacecraft. (Originally MO was the first of a series, but no change in approach was made when it became the only one.)
The highest-probability failure, says the board, is oxidizer leaking through check valves and condensing in cold helium lines during the 11-month cruise phase. Opening of the helium valves did not sweep the lines clear adequately, and when the second set of valves opened to connect the helium system to the fuel tanks, fuel and oxidizer mixed. The resulting internal fire ruptured the plumbing, and the ensuing spill either destroyed electronics or sent MO into an unrecoverable spin.
Other possibilities in the propulsion system are regulator failure and tank rupture [both fairly unlikely] and violent ejection of an initiator from a pyro valve on firing (which has happened to ESA, although not to NASA). A power-supply short to the spacecraft chassis is another good possibility, hard to correlate with the pyro-valve firing but still on the list because examination of the spare revealed defective workmanship in several areas. The board largely rejected various multiple-failures hypotheses, including the popular one of a double clock-oscillator failure.
JPL says that the MO propulsion-hardware developers did not blindly assume that the check valves would work. They tested them with helium, thought to be a fairly worst-case test because of its small molecule, and they passed. Unfortunately, post-accident tests indicate that they don't pass with nitrogen tetroxide. [This *is* a bit surprising.] Results from these tests and computations at NRL suggest that as much as 2g of oxidizer could have been in the plumbing. Or possibly more: some of the check-valve seats used an elastomer which, according to its manufacturer, will deteriorate with lengthy exposure to the oxidizer.
The board recommends having one more try at activating MO's balloon-relay transmitter, in hopes of getting a bit more information.
More details on MM's internal review. Notably, it recommends streamlining management, and urges that future organizational changes and reassignments of people should be made with attention to the impact on continuity and morale.
GD is happy: the first Atlas 2AS flew perfectly 15 Dec, carrying a Telstar 4 for AT&T. Further 2AS production commitments now total 14, with 6 of those sold.
The Telstar 4 spacecraft is also noteworthy for its use of arcjets for north-south stationkeeping [the usual limiting factor for comsat life].
NASP officials, looking at a total budget of $60M, are closing down the X-30 effort and organizing and archiving data. What remains will be a generic hypersonic-technology effort, not directed at supporting a specific full-scale-vehicle program. (This will simplify proposals to do flight experiments, since they need no longer accurately simulate a larger vehicle.)
Plesetsk prepares to launch a modified Meteor 3 weather satellite, carrying a French instrument and Tubsat-B, a small piggyback German satellite exploring new attitude-control technology. Launch will be on a Cyclone, made in the Ukraine, and there was concern that politics and finances might prevent purchase of the launcher... but a barter deal was struck, in which the Ukraine supplies two Cyclones and the other one is used for Plesetsk launch of a Ukrainian "Okean" satellite.
Would-be modernizers of air-traffic control systems for large-scale use of GPS navigation and automatic dependent surveillance (in which each aircraft automatically reports its position to the ground by digital data link at regular intervals) are stuck on the question of choosing technology for a two-way digital data link between aircraft and ground. Rapid deployment and long-term capability conflict somewhat, cost issues indicate that light aircraft will probably continue using voice, and any data link also used for tracking airport surface vehicles faces severe cost constraints.
"Forum" article by Jerry Grey of AIAA, on SSTO. He's actually pretty reasonable, saying that we need better engines and that the mass-ratio requirement is demanding, with SSTO at the edge of feasibility overall. He urges separation of near-term USAF concerns -- best met by either a new conventional expendable or upgrades to existing ones, depending on funding -- and long-term technology issues. He says that the best answer to the latter is small evolutionary steps, citing DC-X as a good first step and the SX-2 proposal as a logical next step. He criticizes lack of long-term planning, says that it's now "both practical and beneficial to include SSTO development" in such a plan, and concludes: "Above all, it is critical that the SSTO role be formulated on the basis of engineering reality, not wishful thinking." [I'd call his assessment pessimistic but not grossly unreasonable -- unlike some -- and the suggested "small steps" approach to SSTO technology a sensible one.]
Successful static test of the Astrid rocket, testing an LLNL piston-pump rocket engine, meant as a technology demo for fast lightweight missile interceptors. Launch expected later this month.
The new Technology Reinvestment Program gives Amroc $22.2M for flight demonstration of its 250klb-thrust hybrid rocket motor, tentatively set for about two years from now.
Micro Pulse develops a GPS antenna for cheap retrofit to large military aircraft: it fits into the sextant port already found in many of them.
Iridium and Globalstar jointly petition the FCC to authorize spectrum use for LEO comsats on a first-come-first-served basis.
GPS officially achieved Initial Operational Capability 9 Dec. This triggers FAA authorization for aircraft to use it for non-precision approaches, given that they use a sophisticated receiver that can detect a bad satellite.
The editorial this week is excerpts from the Rand study urging that DoD reconsider Milstar 2. The study says that M2's data throughput is very limited and its cost may not be justified, given the clear need for something better.
Critics have long said "NASA specializes| Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology in pork"; now that's White House policy.| henry@zoo.toronto.edu utzoo!henry