NASA abandons plans to move orbiter overhauls from Palmdale to KSC, due to political pressure over loss of jobs in California.
US industry offers a grab-bag of improved expendable-launcher designs, in hopes that the White House will prefer to stall plans for more ambitious new launchers. Hercules proposes Low Cost Launch System, a family of expendables based on its SRMU (new Titan SRB) and existing upper stages, to replace Delta, Atlas, and Titan. Hercules thinks the mid-size member of the family could fly in 3.5yr for $200M development, and is proposing that the US government support development by ordering an initial batch of launches rather than by providing direct funding. Martin Marietta is proposing a new two-stage liquid-fuel booster, using a Russian first-stage engine system, probably the RD-180 (a two-engine derivative of the four-engine cluster used in Zenit and Energia). General Dynamics is also interested in the RD-180 as a bigger replacement for the Rocketdyne engines currently used on Atlas.
First flight-ready set of Titan SRMUs ships to Vandenberg.
First Taurus launch successful 13 March. Both payloads are doing fine. The 291x302nmi orbit was slightly higher than the planned 290nmi, but within the +-30nmi specs. Launch acoustics -- a major worry that delayed the launch a year -- were well below predictions. Taurus needs to fly a few more times to verify its fast-reaction specs -- nominally 8 days from request to launch -- but the upper three stages were stacked only 4 days before the original 4 March launch date, and the delays from the 4th to the 13th were mostly weather and range conflicts.
Taurus does not yet have firm customers for any more launches, although ARPA and BMDO between them hold eight options. Clementine 2 was a firm customer but is no longer funded. However, OSC points out that it had no firm second-launch customer for Pegasus until after the first launch, and Pegasus backlog is now 18 launches and 52 options. They do expect Taurus growth to be slower, partly because it's a new payload mass range (Pegasus attracted some ex-Scout payloads) and partly because there is competition from Lockheed and EER.
France approves a new space budget, including starts for Spot 5 and a new communications-technology mission.
SES orders four Proton launches from Lockheed-Khrunichev-Energia, the first to be late next year. Proton probably won because Ariane and Atlas are fully booked. This order, plus the previous one from Loral (which is now for five launches, all four options having been converted), remains within the restraint-of-trade agreement limiting Proton commercial sales. LKE is starting to drop hints that demand is higher than expected and the agreement should be renegotiated.
Russia and Kazakhstan agree in principle on terms for lease of Baikonur, with some details yet to be ironed out.
Successful test of the SEDS-2 small tether system on the second stage of the 9 March Navstar Delta. The 20km tether deployed fine, and its dynamics will be observed for a month. Paperwork is now underway to qualify the system for a shuttle flight in 1996, on which it will deploy U of Alabama's SEDSat 1 satellite to a higher orbit.
Russia backpedals somewhat on sharing of information on advanced optics for space-debris tracking -- an area where the Russians are ahead -- citing concerns over military value. The new concerns may reflect the strong showing of nationalists in the recent Russian elections.
NASA studying use of one of its SR-71s to lob a MESUR Pathfinder reentry test into a simulated Mars-entry trajectory. Also being looked at (among various non-space projects) is the possibility of flight-testing an aerospike rocket engine over Mach 0.8-3.0.
Intelsat buys another Long March launch, another Intelsat 8A, and a Russian "Express" comsat.
"All I really want is a rich uncle." | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology - Wernher von Braun | henry@zoo.toronto.edu utzoo!henry