[Eek, I'm getting further behind... Time to tersen things a bit...]
Republican upset in Congress results in musical committee chairs, likely to be favorable to space overall. NASA is likely to be told to stick to its missions and ease off on the industrial welfare.
OHB System finally gets its Safir-R store-and-forward comsat package up, piggyback on the third Resurs-O1, launched 4 Nov.
DARA and Kayser-Threde sign with Samara to launch Mirka, a small recoverable spacecraft, piggyback on a Photon materials mission in 1996.
Wind launched by Delta 1 Nov, with boom deployment and checkout starting. Preliminary checkout results will be important input to the decision on whether to resume construction of Polar. Wind will spend its first two years in a highly eccentric elliptical orbit passing through Earth's bow shock, after which it will be maneuvered into a halo orbit around the Earth-Sun L1 point.
P&W shuttle oxidizer pump finishes its qualification testing, and the teardown inspection finds only minor problems. Extensive attempts to provoke cavitation (the bane of the Rockwell pumps) were unsuccessful. Assuming closer inspection of the parts finds nothing amiss, the pump will be reassembled for use in testing later SSME upgrades next spring (the later upgrades requiring the new pump). Flight 70 in June will have one of the new pumps, flight 73 will have three, and flight 85 will be the last for the old oxidizer pumps. Flight 86 will introduce the later upgrades, on all three engines (because they include the new large-throat combustion chamber, which changes the engine characteristics enough to make it awkward to fly a mixed set).
MSX, BMDO's Midcourse Experiment spacecraft, is being partly dismantled after a vacuum leak was found in its infrared telescope; this must be fixed before launch, which will slip "at least a few months".
Atlantis atmospheric mission launched 3 Nov, generally successful despite some technical problems. One disappointment: MAS, a German instrument which was Atlas 3's only sensor capable of measuring chlorine monoxide (a crucial intermediate in CFCs' effect on ozone), died after only about six hours of operation.
Spacelifter rises from its grave yet again... The USAF starts an "evolved expendable launch vehicle" study, nominally to result in a winner-take-all competition for the US's medium/heavy launcher needs. The notion is to transform an existing expendable into a family of launchers capable of meeting USAF needs from Delta class on up (although top priority is doing something about Titan IV's immense cost, and the low end might be sacrificed if it seems indicated). USAF will award 2-4 contracts next summer for risk-reduction studies, theoretically followed by a mid-1997 selection of one supplier, with two medium demo flights in 2000 and a heavy demo in 2003, for operational capabilities in 2001 and 2005 resp. FY95 funding will be $76M, nearly half of it from "other government" source [that is, from the NRO and its customers].
Specification documents for the 747: 1 | Henry Spencer Ditto for Air Force One (a 747): 14000 | henry@zoo.toronto.edu