[My, I'm a long way behind... I moved to a new house about a month ago, and that has thrown everything into chaos. Expect some terse summaries while I do some catching up. This one begins non-terse because it was started before the move...]
Ariane flubs it again... PanAmSat PAS-3 goes into the water due to below-spec Ariane third-stage performance 1 Dec. PanAmSat says the bird was fully insured, spare hardware is on hand, and a replacement will go up within a year.
Republican upheaval continues... Newt Gingrich, new Speaker of the House, plans to push NASA firmly toward R&D (specifically, R&D aimed at reducing the cost of space access, especially X programs), move the rest of the civil space program toward commercialization (with simpler paperwork but stricter accountability for contractors), and push for a partly-space-based limited missile-defence system. The big question is how all this squares with the deficit mess.
McDonnell Douglas and Boeing team up for the X-33 bidding. (There is speculation that this might be the opening move in a merger of the two companies' space activities.) A team of 50-100 engineers drawn from both companies will work at McDD's Huntington Beach site, with all financial aspects split 50-50. Bill Gaubatz of McDD [the man who ran DC-X] will be in charge, with Livingston Holder Jr. of Boeing as deputy. The joint X-33 bid will be a clean-sheet-of-paper design with no preconceived ideas. McDD/B will not bid on the X-34.
Lockheed says it will build a reusable launcher on private funding, if the government will give it a five-year contract to launch all Titan and shuttle payloads (at $2G/yr less than Titan+shuttle). L is proposing a rather large vehicle, with a 40klb payload (compared to the 25klb NASA envisions for the X-33's successor), to "capture the full range of mass and volume". L would build it as an unmanned vehicle, with NASA covering the cost of man-rating it if desired. L puts the annual cost of Titan and shuttle operations (excluding manned-research missions like Spacelab) at $5G, and would want a five-year commitment of $3G/yr. They are being cagy about expected development costs; "several aerospace companies have said $5G; we could do it for a lot less..." This would be L's AeroBallistic Rocket, a lifting-body LOX/LH2 linear-aerospike VTHL. L says it has no interest in the X-34 and thinks small expendables (like its own LLV) are the right approach on the low end.
ITT signs on as partner in the commercial-spaceport-at-Vandenberg project (they already do range support at Vandenberg).
China's Dong Fang Hong 3 comsat launched 30 Nov by Long March 3A.
Orbital Sciences and Magellan to merge, with Magellan retaining its name and operating as a semi-independent subsidiary. Magellan will build the digital radios for Orbcomm.
Germany formally enters the Helios-2 spysat program, although funding is yet to be established.
Atlas 2A launches Orion 1 comsat 29 Nov from the Cape. Of note is that the Centaur boosted Orion 1 into a supersynchronous transfer orbit, to minimize fuel needed to enter Clarke orbit. Orion has been reselling capacity on Intelsat and Eutelsat birds for some time, in preparation for launching its own satellites.
Major article on the Discovery program. NASA is sorting through 28 proposals, aiming to select a few for investigation and eventually one or two for flight. NASA emphasizes that it wants maximum results per dollar, not just the best results within the $150M ceiling; they hope for an average cost of perhaps $100M/mission. Scientists are wary of the new restrictions, but like Discovery's goals of frequent missions and less NASA meddling... if NASA can deliver on the flight frequency and restrain its bureaucrats. The price of independence is cancellation upon cost or schedule overrun.
This Discovery round prohibited RTGs, which produced some proposals for novel power systems, but generally seems to have eliminated outer-planet missions.
CNES seeks French government approval for a new series of small science missions, circa 500kg and $100M each, the first being a radar-altimeter mission as a Topex/Poseidon followon. CNES would like to see international collaboration, but that may be difficult.
JHU-APL's NEAR asteroid-rendezvous mission, which will be the first Discovery mission to launch (Mars Pathfinder was approved earlier but its launch window is later), is under construction. The launch window is two weeks in Feb 1996, to make the planned arrival at Eros in early 1999. Instrument calibration is currently the pacing item.
Mars Pathfinder has also entered construction at JPL. It is on schedule and under budget, but challenges remain, notably the problem of testing the airbag landing system under Earth conditions.
Titan IV officials talk to payload suppliers, trying to decide whether a substantial inventory of SRB segments with repaired bonding failures can be used. Those segments were grounded after the 1993 Titan IV failure was blamed on a faulty repair. The USAF would like to requalify them and fly them; the customers are less enthusiastic. Analysis of the 1993 failure located a casing burn-through by indirect evidence, such as the Titan guidance system's attempts to compensate for the jet effect... and it was right at the point where a major repair had been done. The repair involved cutting slits in the fuel grain, and naive assumptions that the slits would close under ignition pressure appear to have been wrong. Changes in fuel casting procedures have largely eliminated the bonding failures that required repairs.
MM study concludes that using the RD-180 engine in an Atlas would not be difficult. The hypothetical Atlas AR would have slightly higher payload than the current 2AS, with no solid strap-ons and no booster- engine staging, at the price of a somewhat streched LOX tank because of the different mixture ratio. Cost reductions could be up to 20% because of simplification, and substantial payload increases might be possible in the long run. Acceleration loads on payloads could also be eased by the RD-180's throttling capability (down to 40%).
There is a difference between | Henry Spencer cynicism and skepticism. | henry@zoo.toronto.edu