This is AW&ST's "Laurel Awards" issue. At the head of the "Space" category are Col. Pedro Rustan and Paul Regeon, BMDO and NRL managers for Clementine, and the rest of the Clementine team. Clementine went from Stewart Nozette's sketch on a bar napkin in Sept 1989 to full-scale development in March 1992 to launch in Jan 1994. Total cost, *including* launch, was $75M.
Runners-up include the Galileo team (for the SL9 impact images and the discovery of Dactyl), Bruce Burlton and his team at Telesat Canada (who rescued Anik E2), and SSTO/RLV proponents (including Daniel Graham, Max Hunter, Gary Hudson, Jerry Pournelle, Pete Worden, Bill Gaubatz, Paul Klevatt, and Jess Sponable) for actually getting some action on their dreams.
Takao Doi of Japan and Dafydd Rhys Williams of Canada to join JSC's astronaut-candidate class of 1995 for mission-specialist training.
Sweden to recommend to ICAO the use of a combination ILS/GPS system to replace pure ILS until satellite-based systems can achieve the full accuracy needed for blind landings. Their idea is to use GPS for horizontal navigation (where ILS signals are increasingly troubled by FM-transmitter interference) and ILS for vertical guidance (where GPS falls short of the desired accuracy, and ILS is still satisfactory). [A receiver that can pick up both would also be attractive during the gradual transition away from ILS.] Tests at Norrkoping have been quite successful.
US satellite companies are still trying to sell to the Chinese market, and to use Chinese launches, despite recent political problems. They complain that erratic US policy is scaring away customers who don't want to be caught in the middle when the US reverses itself again. Hughes built Optus B3 as a duplicate of B2 (lost in a launch failure), but by the time it was shipped, the rules had changed, and an encryption chip -- technically "missile technology" -- had to be removed to keep the bureaucrats happy. Both Hughes and MM are now trying to avoid use of any component on the "missile technology" list, so the State Dept. won't have any say in their satellite exports. (Control of non-M.T. satellite exports was transferred to the Commerce Dept. a couple of years ago; attempts to move all commercial satellite exports there have so far failed.) The satellite builders say the specific rules aren't nearly as important as not having them change every six months.
JPL testing new computer-graphics tools for spacecraft monitoring, as a replacement for tables of numbers that are hard to interpret quickly. The software is slated for use at Phillips Labs with the TAOS satellite in the near future, and JPL is looking at using it for the Voyagers.
The joint German/Japanese Express satellite was lost shortly after launch 15 Jan. Launch, on an M3S2, was normal until about 15-20s after second-stage ignition, at which point the vehicle started to oscillate. Propulsion performance appears to have been okay, but the attitude-control problems resulted in an extremely low orbit, 110x250km instead of 270x380km. Separation was normal, but such a low orbit threatened immediate uncontrolled reentry. The German Space Operations Center hoped to use a ground station in Chile to send commands triggering a normal reentry sequence, in hopes of making a controlled landing in the south Atlantic... but Express didn't make it to Chile. It made an uncontrolled reentry over the Pacific and was lost.
There are no plans for an Express 2. Germany hopes to refly some of its experiments on the Mirka mission, a small reentry vehicle that will fly attached to a Photon next year and land in Kazakhstan after two weeks aloft. (The launch agreement for Mirka was signed with Russia recently.) The Japanese are not sure what they're going to do about their experiments. [I dunno about all this... People in this business seem to cling to the illusion that they don't need spares because the first one is going to work, despite repeated proof that it just ain't so.]
NASA and Boeing finally sign the $5.63G space-station main contract. The number is significantly lower than the $6.2G limit agreed last summer, and it includes various incentives and penalty clauses. Boeing is still talking to a number of subcontractors. Details of post-delivery support also remain to be worked out, as do the exact program milestones that will govern assessment of Boeing's performance.
There is a difference between | Henry Spencer cynicism and skepticism. | henry@zoo.toronto.edu