[Lest we forget, in working up to the 25th anniversary of Apollo 11: this is also a sadder anniversary. Today, 11 July, is the 15th anniversary of the fall of Skylab.]
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Letter from John Lemay, inquiring why the USAF is spending a bundle on the Titan SRB upgrade when the new SRBs cost twice as much, the old ones are good enough for almost all Titan missions, and people are working hard to get payloads off Titan altogether.
William H. Pickering, ex-director of JPL, gets the Japan Prize.
The Hubble-repair team gets the Collier Trophy.
Russian military eavesdropping satellite goes into the water after a launch failure from Plesetsk. Cosmos 2281 was originally listed as a successful Cyclone launch, but was later admitted to have been a failure due to third-stage problems. The Kettering group identified it as an eavesdropping satellite based on the orbital inclination indicated by the impact area.
FAA cancels development work on the Microwave Landing System, in favor of development of GPS-based precision approach technology.
Russians and JPL meet to consider joint Mars exploration, in the wake of the official admission that Mars 94 and 96 will each slip two years. Under consideration are a joint orbiter in 1998 (combining hardware from the Russian Mars 96 orbiter and the US Mars Surveyor program) and fitting the Russian 1998 rover with a McDonnell Douglas arm, a JPL mini-rover, and German and Italian surface instruments.
Also being proposed is splitting Mars 94 into two missions, with some international funding for the second. The original Mars 94 orbiter was to carry two landers and two penetrators, but the 1996 launch opportunity is not as good and it won't all fit. With two orbiters, it might be possible to add a third lander, and to carry extra fuel to maneuver one orbiter into an orbit better suited to data relay.
DoD and NASA examining using Clementine 2 to land a miniature lunar rover, using BMDO's LEAP interceptor as a lander. This appears to be politically and technically better than using LEAP as an asteroid-impact probe, as earlier proposed. The USAF Phillips Lab recently flew a demonstration at their National Hover Test Facility at Edwards, with a LEAP making a soft landing and deploying a 1kg video-carrying rover on simulated lunar terrain. [A videotape of this test was shown at the International Space Development Conference last month.] This mission would involve more NASA participation, and more industrial contracting, than Clementine 1. It would space-test chlorine pentafluoride as a storable oxidizer, and would also test new electronics and composite structures.
Clementine 2 supporters are pushing the idea to Congress and the White House as an appropriate way to mark the 25th anniversary of Apollo 11.
Atlantis returns to KSC 29 May after its overhaul. It will fly an extended- duration Earth-sciences mission in Oct, followed by several flights to Mir. (It was equipped to carry a Mir docking system, to be delivered by RKA later this year.)
OSC reaches preliminary agreement to buy Fairchild Space & Defense Group from Matra, nearly doubling OSC's size and greatly improving its satellite- building capabilities. Payment will be part cash and part OSC stock, making Matra a major shareholder (and the largest foreign one) in OSC. OSC is particularly hoping that Fairchild's satellite-construction facilities will make it easier to build 24 more Orbcomm satellites in the next year.
STEP-2 appears healthy despite its lower-than-intended orbit, and the USAF is hoping to get the full planned data return. Meanwhile, OSC is trying to figure out why the Pegasus fourth stage didn't perform properly, not helped by serious difficulties encountered in reading the downlinked data from the on-board telemetry recorder.
SMASH! "Sayy... I *liked* that window."| Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology "I enjoyed it too!" "Hmph! Some hero!"| henry@zoo.toronto.edu utzoo!henry