Letter from Bob Staehle [somewhat edited down; Ron Baalke posted the full text recently] of Pluto Fast Flyby, noting that they are already talking to the Clementine people about both hardware and mission operations for small, cheap missions. "Our planned Pluto operations team size is [under] 30 people during cruise, including project manager and secretary. Clementine is helping to validate our assertion that such a size would be adequate..."
GD signs deal with NPO Energia for development of the RD-180 (two-engine version of the RD-170 four-engine cluster used on Zenit and Energia) for use in the Atlas first stage.
The SEDS-2 tether appears to have broken, probably as the result of a debris hit. Meanwhile, NASA announces that the NASA/ASI Tethered Satellite System (which failed on its first flight in 1992) will be reflown.
TRW gets contract to build a small scientific satellite, ROCSAT-1, for Taiwan.
CIA believes Russia is planning to market 0.75m satellite images.
Goldin is spending considerable time talking one-on-one to undecided Congressmen regarding the space station.
Spot 2 image of North Korea's Yongbyon nuclear facility, showing extensive new construction and substantial air defences.
US and Russia working on plans to share missile-warning-satellite data, possibly to be extended later to other nations. The sharing would be of processed data -- actual missile warnings -- not of raw imagery. France is also talking to the US about collaboration on antimissile systems, including data sharing, and is interested in a European warning system that would be interoperable with the US one: "It would not be acceptable to simply become 'subscribers' to a US system."
Clementine 1 image of the lunar south pole, some of it never seen before. The spacecraft is working well. Two small data gaps in the first half of the mapping mission (now being filled in during the second half) resulted from uncommanded resets of the data handling unit; the problem is not yet understood because it has happened so infrequently, but is not considered a serious threat to the mission. Fuel reserves are ample and the possibility of extending the mission to a second asteroid flyby next year is being considered. [Well, scratch that...] Bistatic radar observations of the lunar poles are being planned, using Clementine's transmitter to illuminate the poles for DSN receivers. An early attempt, in late March, failed because of hasty setup and minor electronics problems on the ground. The bistatic-radar work is a late addition to the mission, originating in a suggestion by Stewart Nozette, the deputy project manager.
Clementine supporters pushing for a Clementine 2 mission to do further technology testing. Various ideas are being proposed, but the idea of an asteroid flyby seems to be fading in favor of using BMDO's LEAP interceptors as lunar landers, delivering small rovers to the lunar surface. There seems to be considerable Congressional support for the notion. As yet unresolved is who will run it: Clementine itself has been transferred from BMDO to the Naval Research Lab, but no money went with it, and the Navy's not sure about funding more work. The USAF is now showing interest in Clementine 2. There is also some possibility of foreign participation, notably by CNES, which supplied minor bits of hardware for Clementine 1.
White House happy with the revised space station, although Congress is less pleased and is agitating for less reliance on the Salyut FGB tug in particular. The old international partners are cautiously in favor, although all have budget worries and Canada is talking seriously about reducing its role somewhat. (Both NASDA and ESA say that the job would be "easier if there were no more doubts about the objectives and political will" of the US.) Other reviewers, including the Vest panel, also say the design and management have improved sharply.
Endeavour radar mission delayed a day (to April 8) to permit checking the main-engine pumps for substandard guide vanes (such as those recently found in a pump at Rocketdyne). The mission, the first US/German/Italian Space Radar Lab flight, will involve extensive maneuvering to point the radars in desired directions. This is considered a development and calibration flight for the SRL hardware, although the mission will nevertheless try to get as much data as possible. A second flight in August will observe the same areas at a different time of the year, and extensive photography of the targets is also planned. Selected "super sites" will also have data taken by surface teams at the same time.
NASA is reviewing testing and manufacturing approaches in the wake of the discovery of the bad pump vanes, some of which flew on the first four shuttle missions. Endeavour was cleared for flight after analysis and tests indicated that the original specs were unnecessarily tight, but NASA is not happy that a process thought to consistently meet specs had been producing widely-varying substandard parts for two decades... especially since Marshall ran an extensive review of Rocketdyne's production processes last year, and didn't find this.
"All I really want is a rich uncle." | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology - Wernher von Braun | henry@zoo.toronto.edu utzoo!henry