From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Subject: space news from Sept 7 AW&ST
To: sci-space-news@news.arc.nasa.gov
Followup-To: sci.space
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
Date: Thu, 15 Oct 1992 04:09:30 GMT

[This one is mostly Farnborough Air Show preview, so not much space news.]

Letter from Allen Thomson observing that while DoD works hard to deny
accuracy better than 100m to non-DoD users of GPS, the FAA and the Coast
Guard are busy building differential-GPS stations to achieve 10m accuracy,
and suggesting that there is a certain lack of coordination here...

NASA awards small initial contracts for design work on the first EOS birds.

Mir cosmonauts perform first of several EVAs to install Mir's new thruster
system.

US Attorney's office revealed to have quietly dropped its investigation of
Intelsat procurement bribery.

Quayle's speech opening the World Space Congress in Washington criticized
as a domestic political pitch to a heavily international audience.  Quayle
did talk about expanding international cooperation, but also laid down the
law on missile-proliferation control.  A European attendee commented:  "it
was a typical heavy-handed US approach.".

Germany and Japan sign a major space-cooperation agreement, including work
on a recoverable capsule which will also involve the CIS.  There is talk
about the possibility that the capsule might eventually be manned.  The
agreement is widely seen as a chance for Germany to get involved in major
international space activities without the obstacles presented by the US
and ESA.

ESA is examining the possibility of taking a role in Mir 2.  One feature
that has particularly caught their eye is that Mir 2 is now planned for
an orbital inclination of 65 degrees, excellent for Earth-sensing work.
[My personal guess would be that the inclination is chosen to permit
launches from Plesetsk, so that Kazakhstan won't be able to blackmail
Russia over access to Tyuratam, but the Earth coverage is a nice bonus.]
Mir 2 work is reportedly underway in Russia despite funding uncertainty.

ESA is looking at a variety of other cooperative ventures with Russia,
including a possibility of three flights to Mir by ESA astronauts.  The
first would be a standard 10-day "guest cosmonaut" flight, but later
ones would be long-stay flights.

Russia announces that it will proceed with Glonass, although with some
schedule slips, the Russian military having promised full support.

The recent Centaur failure is causing tearing of hair at General Dynamics.
It appears to be identical to the one last year:  the ignition sequence
started properly in both engines, but engine #1's turbomachinery did
not spin up.  This was despite mods made, since the 1991 failure, to
provide extra startup torque in the event of a slow start.  Another
post-1991 change was adjustments to the Centaur software to permit a
second try at start, and this functioned properly:  when the problem
was noticed, the software automatically shut down both engines and
then tried again.  Unfortunately engine #1 still wouldn't cooperate,
and the software gave up.  This is considered very puzzling:  the changes
for greater torque should have permitted a successful start even in the
presence of ice in the engine, the presumed cause of the 1991 failure.
The debris (from both) went down in deep ocean; the evaluation last time
was that recovery for analysis was not practical, but "there will be
another look taken...".  Centaur was previously a remarkably reliable
engine, over 200 flight firings without a failure.

GD estimates that if Centaur is grounded for no more than six months,
there will be no serious long-term effect on launch schedules.  The
hiatus after the last failure was eight months, but some of that was
attributed to extra care taken preparing for first flight of a new
Atlas-Centaur variant.

NASA and NASDA prepare for Spacelab-J, a flight that wil have several
modest firsts.  It will be the 50th shuttle flight, the first dedicated
to Japanese payloads, and the first for one of Japan's professional
astronauts (Mamoru Mohri).  It will also be the first flight of a black
woman (Mae Jemison) and the first of a married couple (Jan Davis and
Mark Lee were married late in training, and NASA decided that keeping
the flight on track was grounds for waiving its normal rule against
two family members on the same flight).

Lockheed is offering a new spacecraft bus, somewhat smaller than its
previously-announced F-Sat, derived from its Iridium design.

In a related development, the Iridium constellation has shrunk from 77
to 66 satellites as the result of design changes that made the individual
satellites bigger and more powerful.  [There is no mention of any plan
to rename the system Dysprosium. :-)]

Orbital Sciences stacks a dress-rehearsal Taurus launcher, authentic
in every way except that the fuel in the motors is inert.  First flight
is to occur in the first half of next year under the DARPA contract.
The contract also includes options on four more flights.

Mars Observer launch slips to the 25th due to the contamination cleanup.
There is considerable puzzlement over the contamination, which involved
a variety of types of particles and doesn't seem to be fully accounted
for by the known use of a dirty nitrogen line.  Several general precautions
have been taken against a recurrence from any cause.  The delay has also
permitted sorting out an electrical problem in TOS.

The Farnborough coverage is mostly nothing new, but does note an interesting
little episode...  In 1990, when the Gulf crisis was at full boil, US
officials showed French president Mitterrand several spysat photos as part
of an intelligence briefing.  Mitterrand asked if he could have copies of
the photos.. and was told "no"!  That little faux pas turned France's
Helios spysat program from a promising project to a top national priority.
-- 
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