Two letters in the letters column this week urging bringing back the F-1 engine.
This is Aviation Week's "Laurels" issue. Lead award in the "Space/Missiles" section is to the Hubble repair team under mission director Randy Brinkley; not only was the repair entirely successful, it was on schedule and under budget. Also cited is JPL's Magellan-aerobraking team, and assorted others. Conspicuously missing is any mention of DC-X.
GD is talking to possible customers about raising Atlas 2AS performance to 9klbs into GTO and 19.7klbs into LEO, by strengthening the interstage section; this would have to be funded by a customer.
State Dept. wants assurances from China of compliance with the Missile Technology Control Regime, as the price of authorizing launches of US-built satellites on Long March.
Rep. George Brown, possibly the most influential Congressman on civil spaceflight, decides that he will run for reelection again. [His recent campaigns have been hard ones, and he was considering retiring.]
LANL demonstrates a mobile lidar system that can track missile exhaust plumes, and is designing a satellite-based version for BMDO. The system could also be used from aircraft.
Allen Osborne Assoc. to supply Australia with 13 high-performance GPS receivers for precision mapping and differential-GPS correction broadcast.
NPO Energia, still looking for customers for the Energia launcher, is committing to hanging onto the program by retaining key people and doing necessary maintenance on the Baikonur facilities. "With the international space station issue seemingly settled, we're actively seeking Western interest in the next logical step -- using Energia as a launch vehicle for missions to Earth orbit and beyond." NPO Energia says it has an agreement with Kazakhstan for use of Baikonur for commercial launches. The Energia family has a payload of 30-100 tons into 200km LEO, and up to 30 tons to lunar or Mars trajectories.
Vigorous activity among astronomers and spacecraft-operations planners, preparing for observations of the impact of the Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet chain with Jupiter July 16-22. SL9 appears to have been torn apart by Jupiter's tidal forces in summer 1992, and is now a "string of pearls" containing at least 21 distinct fragments. Estimates of the sizes of the fragments have fallen somewhat as more observations have been made, but at 60km/s the energy release will still be massive. Annoyingly, the impact region will be over Jupiter's horizon as seen from Earth, although Jupiter's rapid rotation will bring the impact points into view 10-20min after impact. The actual impact fireballs will not last that long, so plans are afoot to watch from spacecraft, and also to watch for reflections from Jupiter's moons. Major impacts will occur every few hours for most of a week; the largest fragment is expected to hit on the 25th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing, July 20.
Galileo will have a reasonable, if still somewhat distant, view of the impacts, with Jupiter about 60 pixels across in its camera. Other instruments may also be used. Scheduling the observations will be tricky because of the glacially slow data rate through the low-gain antenna; one proposal is to shoot 130 images 2.5s apart bracketing the time of each major impact.
Voyager 2 is the only other spacecraft with a direct view. Its cameras were turned off quite a while ago, and it is too far away for useful imaging anyway, but its UV spectrometer will be used. [Last I heard, the idea was to use the Voyager spectrometer to determine the exact impact times and simplify the return of Galileo images.]
Over 23hr of Hubble time is already allocated. EUVE and IUE will be watching. Ulysses will be listening [it has no camera]. Clementine, en route from the Moon to Geographos, may get involved [although its viewpoint is not significantly better than Earth's]. And NASA is deferring scheduled downtime for upgrading of the Kuiper Airborne Observatory, to make it and its 0.9m IR telescope available.
Spacehab proposes that its shuttle-extender modules could be used as logistics carriers for the shuttle-Mir flights, increasing pressurized payload volume... and also improving Spacehab's cash flow, recently hurt by a NASA decision to stretch out the remaining planned Spacehab flights. Spacehab is working on a proposal to shift the module aft in the cargo bay, using Spacelab's access tunnel, to remove balance constraints that limit the module's total mass. Spacehab is still having trouble attracting non-NASA customers for its locker space, at least partly because the NASA Office of Space Flight charges a hefty fee for such payloads... a fee that is not applied to payloads in the shuttle middeck or Spacelab. An agreement with OSF for shuttle-Mir use would help even things out.
One of Dryden's SR-71s is flying Iridium tests for Motorola (charging circa $200k/flight), simulating the rapid passage of satellites overhead.
NASA safety officials prepare to assess the SRB-pressure-spikes review panel reports and to decide whether Discovery should launch on schedule. (Also of concern is a leak problem in Discovery's RCS system.) The spike problem is thought, as predicted, to be due to aluminum oxide pooling around the nozzle throat and slopping out into the exhaust jet. Other possibilities have been investigated, and the worst-case possibility is believed to be well within safe limits. (Charlie Bolden, Discovery's commander, has been monitoring the investigation and agrees.)
Russian officials are investigating how Soyuz TM-17 came to bump into Mir during a flyaround before its return to Earth. Neither was damaged, but the potential was there. Soyuz has very poor pilot visibility, which may have contributed.
ESA council endorses both continuation of the Columbus module and early ESA participation in Phase 2 of Fredovitch.
LA earthquake Jan 17 cracks walls at Rocketdyne, but does no damage to satellites under construction at Hughes and TRW or to orbiter Atlantis at Palmdale. The biggest problem will be the disruption of the highway connection between LA and Antelope Valley (Palmdale, Edwards, etc.), heavily used by government and contractor personnel.
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