NASA to fund half of the $22.4M cost of developing a sounding rocket using a hybrid rocket engine, to be done by a consortium including Amroc.
Hercules fires a gimballing-nozzle variant of its GEM solid strap-on, meant to replace Thiokol's Castor series in sounding rockets etc.
That Cape Titan IV launch slips again, to May 3, after an April 26 attempt aborted at T-17s due to a battery problem.
Russia formally notifies the US that Mars 94's launch will slip to 1996.
Goes 8 executes its last apogee-motor firing.
NASA gets "lots of good proposals" for its Small Satellite Technology Initiative, with two winners to be announced next month. The objective of the $108M program is two small satellites that push existing technology in useful ways: lower mass, greater payload fraction, more reuse of software, design independent of precise launcher characteristics, use of "smart" materials to replace pyrotechnics, lower power, lower cost, etc. The actual missions to be carried out are up to the bidders. NASA is also trying to be innovative in its handling of the program: heavy penalties for failure (no payment at all if it doesn't work for a year in orbit), substantial bonuses for success, a three-man project office, and a promise (which not everybody has a lot of faith in) of no meddling after contract signing. There have been some claims that the program is aimed mostly at traditional satellite suppliers, and that new small companies with actual lightsat experience have been discouraged from bidding.
Clementine 1 lunar-mapping mission complete. The primary mission formally ended 22 April, followed by some fill-in imaging and stereo coverage of interesting areas, plus some experiments. One experiment was to try really pushing Clementine's on-board autonomy, telling it what to map and leaving the execution up to it. It worked: Clementine extrapolated its own orbit, planned its own observations, powered up and calibrated the cameras, ran the imaging sequences (including changes of exposure), recalibrated its attitude-control system with a star sighting, and re-pointed its antenna at Earth. This autonomous-operations mode will be important for the Geographos flyby. Clementine will leave lunar orbit May 3. Lt.Col. Pedro Rustan, Clementine's program manager, says "Clementine 1 has shown the US can get away from the syndrome of 'viewgraph managers and engineers', who are always planning something but never build anything".
Clementine star-tracker image: Moon (lit by Earthlight) in foreground, solar corona showing at Moon's edge, and Venus off in the distance.
ESA Space Science Advisory Committee about to thin seven "medium mission" proposals down to 4-5 missions for in-depth study, leading to development start for one of them in early 1996. Each would cost about $400M. The candidates are: COBRAS (Big-Bang astrophysics mission, with much better sensitivity and resolution than COBE), Intermarsnet (an ESA Mars orbiter carrying four small landers from European nations, the US, and Russia), STARS (stellar-seismology telescope, observing oscillations and variations of nearby stars), MORO (lunar geophysical orbiter with multispectral imaging, chemical-mapping instruments, and a subsatellite for gravity measurements), STEP (gravitational-physics mission in LEO), a Mercury orbiter including multispectral imaging, and Lisa (an array of four spacecraft forming a laser interferometer for detecting gravity waves). The last two will probably be rejected as too ambitious, but may be recycled as candidates for the next "cornerstone" major mission.
Also on SSAC's agenda will be the preliminary design review of Huygens. Major Huygens hardware, including the heatshield, is under construction.
Goldin tells ESA that he will recommend keeping Cassini/Huygens on a Titan IV, rejecting the dual-shuttle-launch concept.
Eutelsat picks Atlas 2A rather than Ariane to launch its "Hot Bird Plus" broadcastsat in 1996, citing fears that Arianespace might not be able to deliver a mid-1996 launch. (GD is also thought to have offered a relatively low price.)
ESA accuses Alenia/MatraMarconi/DASA/BAe consortium of collusion and "anticompetitive practices", including many violations of ESA rules, in its bid for the X-ray Multi-Mirror satellite project. ASI is also implicated. Alenia says "we deny everything". The bidding process has been extended and restarted by ESA.
Fatal explosion at Xichang April 2 destroys Fengyun-2 weather satellite during fuel-loading test, and damages the only processing building qualified to Western standards. Great Wall says remaining Long March launches this year will proceed on schedule. Hughes team, sent to Xichang at request of APT Satellite Co (whose Apstar 1 is set for Long March launch this summer) says "Their safety procedures were fine, it was just purely an accident" and says Hughes launches can proceed.
Booz Allen & Hamilton shows data-fusion technology which can combine Landsat 30m multispectral images with Spot 10m panchromatic images to give sharper color images.
"All I really want is a rich uncle." | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology - Wernher von Braun | henry@zoo.toronto.edu utzoo!henry