From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Subject: space news from Sept 28 AW&ST
To: sci-space-news@news.arc.nasa.gov
Followup-To: sci.space
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1992 05:57:42 GMT

The cover story is the "pathfinder" Taurus erected at OSC.

New joint venture between NPO Energia and Kayser-Threde to market and
distribute stereo imagery with 7.5m resolution taken from Mir.

General Dynamics investigators rule out presence of a foreign object in
the RL10 engine that didn't start in the Aug 22 Centaur failure.  Icing
within the turbomachinery is considered the probable cause.  The April 1991
failure was attributed to a foreign object, but after this near-identical
repetition, that no longer looks likely.

NASA HQ preparing to issue RFP for a single contractor to supply medium
launchers for medium-size NASA missions for the next twenty years.

After 32 years as the secret that everybody knew about, the existence of
the National Reconnaissance Office has finally been officially admitted
by the Pentagon.  Not its budget, not its organization, just its name.
[Previously, it was a breach of security for legislators to even mention
the NRO in budget debates, which didn't sit well with them.]

High-level talks on sharing missile defences between the US and Russia
are underway, although they are being conducted very carefully.  To
nobody's great surprise, objectives differ:  the Russians are particularly
interested in better early warning and tactical-missile defences, but have
powerful factions which want to see the ABM Treaty more or less preserved,
while the US sees relief from the treaty's limits on R&D as essential.

Endeavour lands after the successful Spacelab-J mission.

House and Senate give Bush part of what he wanted in the 1993 NASA budget.
He gets near-full funding for Fred, $360M for ASRM (with a slight schedule
slip), but zero for NASP, zero for SEI, and near-zero for NLS.  This is
just the appropriations conference, not final approval.

NASA and Thiokol are sorting out a small modification to SRB joints to
prevent a repetition of the assembly damage to O-rings that required
destacking of Discovery's right SRB.

Goldin announces some reforms, notably some streamlining of EOS (a common
design for most of the spacecraft, and elimination of the High Resolution
Imaging Spectrometer instrument), the possibility that incentive fees for
Fred will be pooled to encourage the four main contractors to work together
better, and a renewed pledge to crack down on cost overruns (after a GAO
report cited NASA programs as averaging 75% overrun).

Big article on stacking of the pathfinder Taurus, which has all systems
live except fuel.  It will be stacked again next month to time the
individual steps, then again to time the whole process, then again in
a dress rehearsal at Vandenberg.  The contract requirement is to stack
and ready Taurus within five days, starting with a bare concrete pad,
and then launch within three days of payload arrival.

OSC will offer two souped-up versions of Taurus as part of its initial
offering to commercial customers.  Taurus XL will use stretched Pegasus
XL stages to improve payload somewhat, Taurus XL/S will add two small
strap-ons for a further increase.  (Basic is 3000lb to LEO, 860 to GTO;
XL is 3500 and 1140, XL/S is 4300 and 1515, all at 28.5 deg inclination.)

The major challenge for Taurus has turned out to be the noise environment
of its first stage.  The motor is an MX first stage, designed to ignite
200ft in the air after ejection from a silo, but Taurus will light it on
a stand only 10ft up.  OSC has been sweating to insulate payload and
avionics from the fierce vibration that results; a traditional pad with
flame duct and water spray would largely eliminate the problem, but the
contract doesn't allow it.  OSC hopes to move quickly to Thiokol's new
Castor 120 motor, a revised version with better properties for launcher
use.

The first Taurus launch is slated for early 1993, using a concrete pad
at an old Atlas site at Vandenberg.  The payload will be a 400lb classified
DARPA satellite plus an 1100lb USAF satellite whose major mission is to
test use of GPS for navigation of satellites.  DARPA has options for four
more Taurus launches.  The price to DARPA was about $13M; commercial rates
will be higher (one outside estimate is "double") because OSC appears to
have deliberately planned to lose money on the DARPA contract for the
sake of establishing Taurus as a proven launcher.  OSC wants to make Taurus,
unlike Pegasus, competitive on cost/pound with larger launchers in the
long run.

First science results from the Ulysses Jupiter flyby are out, including
indications that the solar wind exerts rather more influence on Jupiter's
magnetosphere than once thought, and data showing that the Io plasma
torus is patchy rather than uniform.  Ulysses is in good shape and is
returning continuous data coverage (8 hr/day of real-time data plus
16 hr/day recorded).  It is currently about 16 degrees south of the
solar equator and moving further from the ecliptic.

Article on Texas Instrument's efforts to commercialize its NASP materials
work, notably foils of difficult materials and laminates with many very
thin layers.  NASP companies are pushing possible applications of NASP
materials to applications like automobile engines; there is interest from
car manufacturers, although so far it is piecemeal and unsystematic.
-- 
MS-DOS is the OS/360 of the 1980s.      | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
              -Hal W. Hardenbergh (1985)|  henry@zoo.toronto.edu  utzoo!henry
Newsgroups: sci.space.news