Washington worried about European space-station participation, now that Canada appears firmly committed again. Gibbons notes that Japan is the only country involved which has been "constant and unwavering".
Goldin warns his troops that jobs will be lost and that the current buyout offer is the best they'll see.
Canada's National Research Council initiates project to build a better model of tropospheric effects on GPS signals. Many existing receivers use models which "assume unrealistically uniform conditions", and a better model is vital to full blind-landing techniques using GPS.
NASA does something quickly for a change... Orbital Sciences / Rockwell team picked to build X-34, and three teams (Lockheed, McDD/Boeing, and Rockwell) picked for X-33 initial studies. Seems they meant it about the fast-track schedule. Yet to be negotiated are financial details for the X-33 contracts, although all the companies offered substantial private funding.
McDD/B is slightly vague on its X-33 proposal: they bid a VTVL design but included some weasel-wording about needing to study landing more closely [which many people think means "but if you really want a VTHL, we'll do it that way" -- not everyone has complete faith in Mansfield's statements that NASA has no preferred configuration on this one]. Lockheed bid its Aeroballistic Rocket concept, as expected. Rockwell, also as expected, bid something very close to what past NASA studies have pushed: a winged VTHL, looking a lot like a shuttle orbiter with a stretched nose, powered by five SSME derivatives (the X-33 demonstrator would use one SSME and two RL10s).
OSC's winning bid for the X-34 is a two-stage air-launched design, with a recoverable first stage and an expendable second stage, both LOX/kerosene. The first stage will land horizontally on a runway. NASA will put up about half the funding and otherwise serve essentially as a subcontractor, with OSC using NASA centers for technical support as it wishes. In return NASA will get early experience with operating reusable launchers, some suborbital test flights, and first stage #1.
[Some have alleged that the X-34 selection was rigged, but the story I hear is that it was a foregone conclusion, with OSC/R offering a major financial commitment and a substantial track record, while the other two bidders offered hopes and handwaving.]
Astro 2 UV-astronomy mission going well, including observations of three fresh novae that were added to the schedule at the last minute, and an attempt at UV observations of Io's volcanic activity.
Also underway on Endeavour, among the usual run of middeck experiments, is the Middeck Active Control Experiment, a 1.5m flexible beam with sensors and reaction wheels which floats free in the middeck to explore vibration damping in free fall. The idea was to run one set of tests early in the flight, have the people on the ground fine-tune the control algorithms, and then try it again. The MACE experimenters got lucky: Steve Oswald, the mission commander and main MACE operator, appears to like the experiment and is putting about twice as much time into it as originally planned.
Third H-2 launch imminent, carrying the Space Flyer Unit recoverable platform (to be retrieved by Endeavour in Dec) and the GMS-5 metsat. The fishermen's union has agreed to extend the winter launch season -- normally closed at the end of Feb -- to permit the launch to proceed despite technical snags that have delayed it. This launch introduces two small strap-ons to increase the the H-2 payload.
The SFU payloads include a test bench for hardware meant for the "back porch" of Japan's space station module, an infrared telescope, an experimental high-voltage solar array, a magnetoplasmadynamic thruster, and various biology and materials experiments.
Oops... Photon 10 launched from Plesetsk 16 Feb, recovered in Russia 3 March... and then falls about 100m when the helicopter carrying it ran into dense fog and had to drop its load. The Russians are especially embarrassed because this Photon was carrying an assortment of German, French, and ESA experiments. Work is underway on salvaging as much as possible from the wreckage, but it's quite a mess.
There is a difference between | Henry Spencer cynicism and skepticism. | henry@zoo.toronto.edu