Wilbur Trafton, new head of space station Fredovitch, visits Russia and is impressed. "I do not have any reservations at all about the Russian Space Agency organization, leadership, or ability to pull off this program."
A bad day for Arianespace... Jan 24, all was normal until 60s into the third-stage burn of the Ariane carrying Turksat 1 and Eutelsat 2F5. Then temperatures on one of the LOX-pump bearings started to climb, and 20 seconds later the bearing seized and the pump self-destructed. Splash.
Minor temperature rises in the bearings have been seen before, but never before this drastic. Ariane had flown 26 flawless missions since the last failure four years ago.
Arianespace's busy 1994 schedule is, of course, shot to hell. The insurance companies are deeply unhappy. And the schedule slip will cause problems for a number of satellite owners waiting for launches.
The most immediate impact, of course, will be on Eutelsat and Turkey. Eutelsat was fully insured for its satellite, and has what amounts to a free launch for a replacement bird (although it has not yet decided whether it will build one). Eutelsat 2F6 is in the queue, slated for October launch, and Arianespace will give it priority when flights resume. Turkey has bigger problems: not only will the start of its satellite operations be delayed until Turksat 2 is launched (slated for June, also to receive priority from Arianespace), but the start of full two-satellite operations may be delayed up to two years while Aerospatiale builds a replacement satellite.
Experts are trying to sort out what caused near-identical electronics failures in Aniks E1 and E2 on Jan 20. Anik E1 lost its primary momentum-wheel control system, but was eventually restabilized using its secondary momentum wheel. About an hour after the E1 failure, Anik E2's primary momentum-wheel controller also died... and this time the secondary didn't work either. Anik E2 has lost attitude control and is currently useless, although Telesat Canada is working on a plan to use E2's thrusters for attitude control. This will take some time to work out, and will shorten E2's life, but it's better than nothing. The cause of all this mayhem was probably a buildup of high-energy electrons due to solar activity, causing charge accumulation within the satellites and eventually arcing. Intelsat K, over the Atlantic, had attitude-control problems a few hours earlier. A similar disturbance last summer caused temporary pointing trouble in several satellites.
Clementine 1 launched Jan 25, on budget and on schedule. Titan 2G performance was flawless, placing Clementine into LEO. There were some communications problems after launch, but these were coordination problems on the ground rather than hardware problems on the satellite. Firing of Clementine's solid-rocket motor for boost into lunar-intercept orbit is imminent.
First H-2 launch imminent at Tanegashima. Payload is the VEP, Vehicle Evaluation Package, which will end up in GTO where it will be tracked for a few days (partly to verify injection accuracy and partly to check out tracking facilities), plus OREX, the Orbital Reentry Experiment, which will be deployed in low orbit between the first and second burns of the second stage, and will make a deorbit burn an hour and a half later to come down near Christmas Island. The primary emphasis of this flight, however, will be the first-stage burn, the LE-7 engine being the reason why this flight is two years late.
Now that the H-2, with payload roughly in the mid-Ariane-4 range (ten tons to LEO), is ready for flight, NASDA is talking about derivatives. Using six SRBs instead of two would boost payload 50%. A slight further increase could be had by dispensing with the SRBs in favor of a pair of LH2/LOX LRBs, or payload could be nearly doubled by replacing them with a pair of kerosene/LOX LRBs using four modified LE-7s each.
Rocket Systems Corp is facing an uncertain future in trying to market the H-2 commercially. NASDA will retain responsibility for launches with R&D payloads, which will dominate the H-2 manifest for a while. Worse, high manpower costs and the soaring yen make the H-2 rather uncompetitive internationally. RSC wants to simplify the launcher for cheaper production... but will have a delicate balance to maintain, as the H-2's current selling point is NASDA's reputation for building highly reliable launchers. A further complication is the restriction of Tanegashima launches to two 45-day periods per year by the powerful fishermen's union. A second mobile launch platform is being built, and will make it possible to do two launches per 45-day window, but it is not clear whether there will be enough demand even for that.
NASDA still does not have clearance for full development of its HOPE unmanned spaceplane, and probably will not get it until the end of the decade. Right now, all that is authorized is one demonstration flight in 1999. The government appears to have decided on a "go slow" policy until the shape of Japan's future space activities (notably, the fate of Space Station Fredovitch) is clearer.
Discovery launch imminent, carrying Spacehab, the Wake Shield Facility... and mission specialist Sergei Krikalev, who tends to get more publicity than the payloads. WSF is the first attempt to exploit the high vacuum attainable in orbit, with a predicted pressure of 10e-14 torr and "semi- infinite" pumping speed because molecules that leave don't come back. One of the principal investigators for WSF, Ron Sega, joined the astronaut corps while development of his experiment was underway, and ended up as one of the mission specialists for this flight. The plan [not carried out, in the end] is to deploy WSF as a free-flier and then fly Discovery in a gravity-gradient attitude to absolutely minimize thruster firings. "WSF is probably the most contamination-sensitive payload we have ever flown. It makes Hubble look very tolerant." Toward the end of the free- flight period, Discovery will close in and do several thruster firings for evaluation by WSF's instruments. WSF was built by Space Industries on a commercial basis, with costs estimated at 1/6th of what a normal NASA procurement would have cost. Three more WSF flights are planned.
Also along on Discovery are Oderacs (which will eject a set of aluminum spheres for space-debris radar calibration) (it flew on a previous flight but didn't work) and Bremsat (a small satellite, built by the University of Bremen, to be ejected during the flight).
Krikalev is the first Russian to fly on a US spacecraft, and notably is flying as a mission specialist, not a payload specialist. It would have been difficult to relegate him to the more usual rank for "guest astronauts", since he has more experience in space than the rest of the crew combined -- 15 months in orbit, seven spacewalks. (More widely known, although less consequential, is that he was the cosmonaut who watched his country break up below him -- the one who the media incorrectly reported as being "stranded" when his stay was lengthened to permit a Kazakh engineer to fly as a political gesture.) Discovery's orbital inclination was changed to 57deg when he was added to the crew, giving it some time over Russia and greatly increasing the overlap between the territory it will overfly and that of the usual Russian flights, one objective of the mission being a systematic comparison between US and Russian techniques of Earth observation.
Krikalev says the differences in training are unsurprising, given the different nature of the missions. Mir cosmonauts have more control of their flight but also run into more surprises, as plans change during the long flights. The larger US crews can specialize while cosmonauts must learn to do everything, but on the other hand the cosmonauts have more say in their training schedules. He says that on the whole, he was surprised at how similar the training is, and for that matter how similar a lot of the equipment is, given that they were developed quite independently.
Krikalev's backup, Vladimir Titov, will fly on a shuttle in about a year. He'd like to do a spacewalk. On the other side of the coin, Norman Thagard has been picked as the first US astronaut to fly in a Soyuz, in March next year, to stay 2-3 months on Mir and return with Atlantis when it visits Mir. Bonnie Dunbar is his backup.
Boeing to fly another crystal-growth experiment on Mir, following a successful test mission late last year. Boeing project manager Harvey Willenberg: "I couldn't have been more impressed with their willingness to do whatever it took to meet the schedule and commitments... all of the contractual elements were met -- on time." The experiment went up on a Progress and came back down in a Raduga reentry capsule a month later. The capsule was located by helicopter within an hour of landing, and the experiment was removed and flown to Moscow, where a Boeing crew was waiting. "Even though the Raduga landing was on a Sunday and the temperatures were -27C, the hardware was in our hands within 8 hours... I can't think of doing the same thing here." One notable change from early Raduga flights is that this one came down in Russia, abandoning the former landing area in Kazakhstan to simplify the politics.
Editorial saying that DoD's agreement to share management of GPS with DoT is a good first step... and the next step should be US leadership in putting together a plan to move GPS to international management, a step it calls "inevitable in the long run and... advantageous for all". There are some problems to be resolved, notably the fact that an international management would have to start paying for maintaining and upgrading the satellite constellation, and the money would have to come from somewhere. A further complication would be guaranteeing that the system will remain usable to its current supporters, notably military aviation, as they become a minority in its management.
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