[Procedural note: I am discontinuing short items saying only "xxx launch set for date yyy", on the theory that since I'm always a month or two behind the publication date, there's no point in reporting plans that are already either successful or changed by the time I report them.]
South Korea tentatively picks TRW for its Komsat project, a multi-purpose spacecraft with scientific and communications payload for launch in 1998-9.
China agrees to move Apstar-1 from 131E to 138E, to satisfy Japanese protests of potential interference.
Reusable-launcher roundtable in Washington stirs up some controversy. Goldin wants to see a new launcher operational by 2005, preferably earlier, and doesn't want NASA doing the operations. Some of the contractors want to see money spread around in study contracts. Other participants think this is just a recipe for delay and dispersion of effort: "we do not need hundreds of millions of dollars of studies" (Rep. Dana Rohrabacher). Tellep (Lockheed) says "we think that many risks can be reduced on the ground"; Rohrabacher replies "I've heard that before", referring to NASP as an example of how that approach can fail. Goldin (who backed killing NASP) thinks a flying demonstrator is necessary, if only to prove that launch operations can be made more efficient.
NASA is expressing interest in a small mostly-reusable launcher, partly funded by industry, with a payload of 1-2klb to LEO. The aeronautics people are also interested in it as a way of doing high-speed flight testing. Many SSTO supporters see this (and improvements to expendables) as a diversion of scarce funding into less-important projects, delaying serious SSTO development unnecessarily.
A lot of SSTO supporters would like to see government "show you can do it and then get out of the way", rather than imposing design requirements that could strangle the potential of operational vehicles. Goldin points out that as long as the government is the big customer, it will set the specs: "Until you bring commercial payloads, we're going to be in charge."
Discovery launched 9 Sept. Lidar observations going well. Spartan deployed and retrieved successfully. SAFER tests imminent. Picture of Discovery as seen from the end of the arm, taken by a camera aboard Spifex.
JPL tentatively picks the landing site for Mars Pathfinder: a rock-strewn floodplain in Ares Vallis, 19.5N/32.8W. Engineering constraints dictated a site at low altitude, to give dense air for the parachute, and within 5deg of the subsolar latitude (15N at arrival time), to maximize performance of MP's non-steerable solar arrays. The remaining question is just *how* rocky that floodplain is -- big rocks (>0.5m) are too risky, and DSN radar studies will be done to try to estimate surface roughness. The advantage of this site is that the rocks will mostly have been washed down from highland areas, and this will permit sampling a wide variety of material within the short range of the MP rover.
Mars Pathfinder launch date is mid-Dec 1996. NASA has contracted for a Delta launch and a PAM-D upper stage. Transit time to Mars will be 7 months; the path will be adjusted for arrival on 4 July regardless of launch date, to simplify mission planning. The primary mission is 30 days for the lander and 7 days for the rover, but everyone has hopes for a much longer mission.
Russia agrees to pay $115M for use of Baikonur this year, another step toward sorting things out with Kazakhstan. A draft agreement spelling out all details of the lease arrangement is to be ready by September. The bulk of the Cosmodrome will stay under Russian Space Forces control, but RKA will assume control of facilities used for the Russian civilian space program. Russian companies will be funded to do upkeep and operation of the Cosmodrome, and they will accept workers from other CIS states.
City planners explore use of remote-sensing data. So far the data is mostly from aircraft, because satellite resolution is inadequate, but 1-5m satellite data is eagerly anticipated. Planners are only starting to figure out what the data *means*; for example, experimental work with a NASA multispectral sensor in the thermal infrared reveals that different asphalt roads show as different infrared "colors", which might perhaps relate to their state of repair.
Japan's Science and Technology Agency requests a substantial budget hike for space projects.
GPS business continues to boom. People are still trying to decide what to do about wide-area differential corrections, although some folks are already doing it. John E. Chance & Assocs. has been broadcasting DGPS corrections for most of North America for some time, using a transponder on GTE SpaceNet 3; their initial customers were oil and gas operators in the Gulf of Mexico, but a variety of other users are starting to appear.
Experiments with Stanford's pseudolite system, supplementing GPS with ground stations broadcasting similar signals to improve precision for aircraft use, continue. In the latest round of tests, the FAA measured errors at below 20cm -- the limit of the laser tracker they were using.
GPS attitude determination, once speculative, is now an off-the-shelf product. Common wisdom that it would have to be supplemented with an inertial platform due to limited response speed may be unfounded; the current receivers report attitude 20 times a second, and a few hundred should be feasible.
The GPS-vs-MLS muddle is still unresolved. The FAA is firmly committed to GPS as its navigation aid for Category 1 (moderately-bad-weather) approaches, and since 90% of the US approach aids are Cat 1, that leaves a rather small US market -- about 100 airports -- for better systems. The Europeans need a Cat 3 (really-bad-weather) ILS replacement soon, and are not happy about scrapping MLS in favor of an ill-defined Cat 3 GPS-based system that could not be available quickly. Many poorer countries would be just as happy to defer the decision a while, since the official 1998 schedule for ILS->MLS cutover is financially difficult for them to meet. There is talk of multi-mode receivers that will handle ILS, MLS, and maybe GPS as well.
The FAA now says that it is prepared to install MLS at US international airports if ICAO confirms the 1998 transition date. This is not a reversal of the decision to cancel FAA-funded MLS development; the FAA thinks that buying off-the-shelf commercial MLS systems would be cheaper.
Meanwhile, GPS is already being used operationally for transPacific air navigation. Avionics suppliers are gearing up to supply all-in-one electronics packages for new airliners, combining GPS, digital satellite communications (for automatic position reporting and two-way digital data link with air traffic control), and autopilot upgrades to exploit the new possibilities; 747s with such packages will be delivered to several Pacific airlines in 1995.
Dept. Of Unhappy Insurers: Telstar 402 launched 8 Sept by Ariane, but all telemetry is lost 10min after separation. Martin Marietta is also unhappy, since the last thing it needs now is *another* dead satellite on its record. Cause of the $200M loss is still under investigation, but data indicates rapid loss of pressure in the propulsion system, suggesting a sudden major hydrazine leak -- very bad for the electronics, given how corrosive hydrazine is, not to mention the spin that would result. Insurers say "this kind of blows our confidence" in MM. This was the second MM 7000-series comsat to fly; the first, Telstar 401, is working fine. AT&T would like to launch the ground spare, Telstar 403 (now renamed 402R), ASAP, since the Telstar 3 birds are getting near the ends of their lives. AT&T has booked an Atlas launch for 402R... but there isn't an Atlas slot available before the end of next year. Since MM now owns Atlas, there is speculation that MM management might lean on the Atlas team to reshuffle slots -- the end-of-next-year date seems to be a case of "they dumped us for Ariane, so we don't owe them any favors".
The group most nervous about all this is probably Asiasat, which has an as-yet-uninsured 7000-series bird set to go up on Long March soon.
Malenchenko and Musabayev inspect Mir's exterior for damage from the recent bumping-Progress incident; none found. They also checked the area where Soyuz TM-17 bumped Mir last January, and found only a minor insulation rip.
Soyuz launch carrying Ulf Merbold to Mir slipped one day (to Oct 4) for more efficient rendezvous trajectory. ESA says "no problem".
Mir docking assembly delivered to Rockwell, installation in Atlantis underway. Considerable overtime is going to be needed to keep its first flight on schedule. Negotiations are still underway on whether the pyros are going to have to be requalified -- RKA now thinks it can pry Russian test data out of the secretive Russian military contractors where NPO Energia couldn't. NASA is working on a contingency-EVA procedure for the hypothetical case where the docking mechanism jams and the pyros fail.
Titan IV launch from pad 40 at the Cape slips, by at least a month, because the payload (a DSP missile-warning satellite atop an IUS) has somehow been contaminated. This is very interesting because Mars Observer encountered a similar problem on the same pad; whether the two incidents are related is not yet clear.
Meanwhile, an Atlas 2A launch slips a week due to processing delays caused by thunderstorms (which tend to require evacuating the pad).
The combination of these two slips has eliminated most of the scheduled range conflicts which made Discovery's Sept 9-10 launch window so tight. NASA is a bit annoyed; Discovery did fly on Sept 9, but a lot of effort went into negotiations to try to arrange a fallback launch date just in case. NASA is considering whether it can move Endeavour's launch up to exploit the slack from the cancellations. Launching Endeavour Sept 29 would get NASA back to its preferred schedule of launching late in the week, which puts the whole countdown in the regular workweek and reduces overtime costs.
Little minds have only room for thoughts | Henry Spencer of bread and butter. --Amundsen | henry@zoo.toronto.edu