From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Subject: space news from Oct 26 AW&ST
To: sci-space-news@news.arc.nasa.gov
Followup-To: sci.space
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
Date: Sun, 27 Dec 1992 05:22:47 GMT

[Oops, I'm getting behind again...]

[Small correction re Oct 19:  the NASA-chief-scientist position that Lennard
Fisk now occupies is not new, I'm told, but it has been unoccupied for some
years.  Sounds to me like he's been kicked upstairs into a position with
no real responsibilities.]

Orbital Sciences will privately fund a Taurus pad at the Cape, including
a gantry [boo hiss], because SDIO has bought a Cape Taurus launch for
Clementine 2 (and they want last-minute access to the payload, hence the
gantry).

Columbia up Oct 22 on STS-52, with a last-minute waiver of rules to permit
launch in wind conditions exceeding normal limits (specifically, high
crosswinds at the KSC landing strip that would be used for an RTLS abort).

After wading through a lot of Moscow bureaucracy, the Air&Space Museum is
displaying a model of the Soviet Vega spacecraft (used for the Venus/Halley
missions in 1985-6), on multiyear loan from IKI.

"Forum" article by Owen Garriott and Frank Echols, proposing a "faster,
cheaper, better" way to do long-duration manned flights before Fred is
fully built:  add solar arrays to the shuttle orbiter.  This would permit
11-week Spacelab missions (possibly with some other small changes), and
would also provide permanent manning of Fred as soon as it reaches the
current "man-tended" configuration, by simply having each of five yearly
shuttle missions stay docked until the next one arrives.  (As a bonus,
you can put a fresh pilot on the returning mission, avoiding the need
to either rely on pilots who have spent months in free fall or overcome
NASA internal politics that currently ban automatic landings.)  "Every
Spacelab [mission] needs as much time on orbit as possible.  Mission
productivity is roughly proportional to time on orbit..."

General Dynamics hopes to resume Centaur operations in the first half
of 1993, which would permit schedule recovery by the end of the year.
(Helpfully, there were no Atlas launches scheduled in the first quarter
and the overall pace for 1993 was slow... just as well, because 1994
will be busy and there is little margin for schedule recovery then.)
The more specific target is late January.  Changes are likely to affect
procedures rather than hardware, although GD is unhappy that no definitive
cause for the August ignition failure has been found.  The best guess
is a freezeup due to ingestion of nitrogen gas left over from plumbing
purges.  The previous failure, in 1991, was tentatively blamed on a
foreign object in the plumbing, but twice is too often for that.  There
is currently no plan to attempt recovery of the Centaur's wreckage, which
is in deep ocean, although GD is still interested in the idea.  One thing
people have noticed is that both failures were in engines rebuilt from
the modified version originally meant for Shuttle/Centaur; perhaps the
modifications and rebuilding somehow pushed the engines close to the
edge in some way, although nobody has yet been able to build that into
a detailed explanation.

GD says it is unlikely to put any more of its own money into launcher
development, although customer-funded development is possible.  Notably,
it would not be especially difficult to increase Atlas's payload to
20klbs, roughly that of the cancelled NLS.

NASA re-opens applications for Getaway Specials, for the first time since
Challenger.  Although there are many GAS reservations still extant, only
a handful of them are considered "active".  So few flight-ready payloads
exist that NASA has been flying ballast in GAS cans of late.

That's the good new; the bad news is, the GAS prices have risen 170%.
"Purely student" projects can still get the old rate, but experienced
observers say that few GAS projects will qualify.  NASA says that the
new prices just adjust for inflation since 1975.  Critics say that the
prices pay for only a tiny fraction of the costs anyway, so there is
no point to the increase.  (A full-size GAS used to cost $10k and now
costs $27k, but just running the GAS program probably costs $100k per
can and the share of payload-bay weight or volume costs about $800k.)

KSC crews are replacing the port OMS pod on Discovery due to an electronics
failure.  This will slip Discovery's launch to near the end of November,
assuming all goes well... but things are tight, because of the Thanksgiving
weekend, other Cape launch operations, and the need to have Discovery back
by mid-December to start preparations for the ATLAS 2 mission in March.

Gore speaks at Goddard, backing aeronautics research, the space station,
and ASRM, while criticizing the Bush administration for overcommitting
NASA.  The only projects he singled out as ill-advised were NLS and SEI.
Nothing clear was said about how Clinton/Gore feel about Goldin.  NASA
officials are annoyed at the use of a NASA site for this speech.

Deutsche Aerospace ships the German/Italian radar system for the Space
Radar Lab shuttle mission next October.

Editorial, illustrated with a rather striking painting of Pioneer Venus
orbiter going down, lauding the 14-year mission as a model of good space-
science missions:  on schedule, inexpensive, and extremely successful.
-- 
"God willing... we shall return."       | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
       -Gene Cernan, the Moon, Dec 1972 |  henry@zoo.toronto.edu  utzoo!henry
Newsgroups: sci.space.news