Space & Astronomy/Space and Astronomy (October 1993).iso/mac/TEXT/SPACEDIG/V09_3/V9_312.TXT

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Subject: SPACE Digest V9 #312

SPACE Digest                                      Volume 9 : Issue 312

Today's Topics:
          Re: Manned vs. unmanned mission popularity
             Re: Solar cells on the moon
               Re: SPACE Digest V9 #302
               Re: loft-1 info
            Statistics (was: Astrology...)
               RE:  USSR launch prices
               Re: SPACE Digest V9 #302
               Primordial Hydrocarbons
            "Piddle On The Pad"...
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: 22 Mar 89 21:55:56 GMT
From: thumper!gamma!pyuxp!nvuxj!nvuxr![e-mail]  (David Lewis)
Subject: Re: Manned vs. unmanned mission popularity

In article <[e-mail]>, [e-mail] (Peter Scott) writes:
> Noticing the attention in the media to the shuttle mission, and the comments
> from the politicians (such as Bush's recommitment to the space station), I
> have to wonder about the unknowable value to the space program that this
> constitutes, and compare it to what I've seen for unmanned missions: were the
> first encounters with the planets Saturn and Uranus the banner items on the
> network news?

Uh, well, yes.  As I recall (being rather young at the time), the
Voyagers' flybys of Saturn (and Jupiter) were very big news items.  Big
ticket items on network news, front-page items of weekly newsmagazines,
and so on.

However, I also think that the Uranus flyby wasn't nearly the item that
the others were.

I also note that the last shuttle launch wasn't nearly the news item
that the September Discovery launch was.  Here in the NYC area, the
networks were showing soaps all morning until about five minutes after
the countdown resumed (I seem to recall coming back at about T-4).  On
the evening news, it was about the third-fourth item -- "Oh, by the way,
another shuttle went up again..." kind of thing.

The reason?  Americans bore easily.  Voyager is flying by another
planet?  Big deal.  We already saw Jupiter and Saturn, what's so
exciting about another planet?  The shuttle is taking off again?  So
what?  We've proven we can get back into space.  It flew in September.
(*I* know that was a different shuttle.  Joe Average American doesn't
know nor care.)

It's not a question of manned vs. unmanned.  It's a question of
capturing the public's imagination vs. the public remaining blase'.  If
you capture the public's imagination, if the public thinks that space is
exciting, the pols will listen.  If the public thinks that space is
boring and useless, the pols will listen.
--
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
David G Lewis             "somewhere i have never travelled..."
Bellcore                          201-758-4099
Navesink Research and Engineering Center       ...!bellcore!nvuxr!deej

------------------------------

Date: 22 Mar 89 22:36:21 GMT
From: jpl-devvax![e-mail]  (Larry Wall)
Subject: Re: Solar cells on the moon

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (John Roberts) writes:
: ... If use
: of a tracking solar array raises the peak power cost by a factor of 2-4
: (a cautiously pessimistic estimate), but you only get ~60% more total power,
: then it may be a poor economic decision to choose a tracking system.

Why do you need a tracking system to get most of the sunlight?  Perhaps most
of the time you don't need the other 40% of the power, but when you do, you
just send someone out with a bit of tubing and aluminized mylar to put up
a mirror on the back side of the solar array to reflect light down onto
the array.

Maybe aligning the mirror is one of those daily chores for what's-his-name's
kid...

While we're at it, how much power would a solar array put out in earthshine
compared to sunshine?  Enough to keep the Dust Buster charged up?  At night
you set up mirrors on both sides to focus earthshine on your array.  And
you don't have to change them for two weeks.

Perhaps with newer pulsed soliton lasers that don't diverge much you could
power the solar array from earth at night.  I hear FELs are getting pretty
efficient.  Tune the FEL to emit the best frequency for the potatoes growing
next to the array.  Call it a spin-off from SDI...

Larry Wall
[e-mail]

------------------------------

Date: 23 Mar 89 04:44:18 GMT
From: sgi!daisy![e-mail]  (Mike Wooding)
Subject: Re: SPACE Digest V9 #302

In article <[e-mail]>, [e-mail] (ERIC WALLIS) writes:
>
>      Volatiles in the moon? Unlikely, as a geology major I can say that
> volatiles(if you mean hydrocarbons such as gas) would require the burying
> and heating of dead plants and animals... unlikely on a lifeless body.

 Perhaps I could prevail upon a geology major to elucidate the assumptions
 underlying the above hypothesis. I know it's the usual assumption among
 us lay people that oil and gas are somehow byproducts of the decomposition
 of life forms, but is this the only way hydrocarbons can form. E.g. wouldn't
 methane form if carbon and hydrogen (not uncommon elements I believe) were
 subjected to some appropriate heat/pressure? Thus, might there not be some
 hydrocarbons if they were trapped deeply in moon's crust? In fact might it
 be possible that hydrocarbon compounds preceded life on Earth?

 m wooding

------------------------------

Date: 23 Mar 89 17:04:14 GMT
From: att!ihlpb![e-mail]  (R. M. Jungclas)
Subject: Re: loft-1 info

>a while back i recall seeing some discussion of the loft-1
>launch from cape canaveral.our machines archives did not contain
>the articles on this.can anyone enlighten me on this launch ?
>mainly the specs of the rocket,the telemetry involved and whom
>was responsible for the idea inception,permission,and construction
>of the rocket and launch.any information would be appreciated.

The folowing response is from my posting of about late January 1989:

5.  >A high power rocket built by North Coast Rocketry and carrying a
    >research payload was recently launched (past 6 months) from Cape
    >Canaveral after months of red tape.

Mark Johnson ([e-mail]) reports info on LOFT-1:
   The flight was launched from Canaveral Air Force Station on November
   17, 1988 at 0745 EST, reaching an altitude of 3.25 miles. (LC 47 was
   the launch site, using a modified Loki-Dart launcher; telemetry was
   set up at LC 41). The vehicle itself and the Vulcan N5000-20 motor
   performed essentially perfectly, although E-Prime's aneroid
   main-chute deployment feature failed to eject...it was rigged to
   reduce drift by holding the main chute until the vehicle reached an
   altitude of 3000 feet on the way down, and it got fried by the
   ejection charge on the motor, which was used to eject a 24" (or so)
   drogue chute.  The drogue chute thus was the only recovery system
   on the bird, which suffered only minor damage on splashdown.

   The flight vehicle was recovered within 1 hour of the flight, and
   was opened up in front of the news media shortly thereafter.
   Telemetry data was received the entire time the vehicle was airborne.

   Several NAR members were involved in the project in various ways:
   (The LOFT effort is NOT an NAR activity, but rather one that some
   NAR members branched out into by applying their model rocket
   technology and experience.)

   Matt Steele, part-owner of North Coast Rocketry, designed the
    vehicle and did some or most of the construction.  Project
    engineer with Morton Thiokol-Huntsville.
   J. Wayne McCain, a PhD candidate at Univ. of Alabama/Huntsville,
    was payload integration manager.  Wayne is an amateur radio
    operator.
   David Babulski, longtime MR telemetry builder (his series is
    currently running in AmSpam), ran the telemetry ground station
    for the flight. Dave is employed as a curriculum developer/trainer
    with Harris/3M in Atlanta (copiers, fax machines, etc.)
    Dave is also an amateur radio operator.

   Some other details...one of the original payloads scheduled to be
   launched on LOFT was a high-school biology experiment, coordinated
   by Dave Babulski, from Brookwood High School (east suburban Atlanta).
   When LOFT was repeatedly delayed, Dave, Wayne, and North Coast put
   together a replacement vehicle, called BABE-2 (the original
   experiment package was BABE-1), which was flown from Huntsville
   (Redstone Arsenal) last spring. This vehicle was powered by a
   Vulcan I283 and reached an altitude of 10,000 feet...15,000 had been
   projected but a structural failure occurred in the bird at Mach 2+
   causing the vehicle to break up and the payload did a free-ballistic
   number.  The experiment package was recovered with only minor damage,
   somewhat surprisingly; I think telemetry even survived the aerial
   breakup although it stopped rather suddenly on meeting the region of
   extreme drag coefficient known as earth.

Another friend of mine reports that details of this flight are reported
in a recent issue (January?) of Discovery magazine.

R. Michael Jungclas                    UUCP:      att!ihlpb!rjungcla
AT&T Bell Labs - Naperville, IL.       Internet:  [e-mail]

------------------------------

Date: Thu, 23 Mar 89 19:58:15 EST
From: John Roberts <[e-mail]>
Formerly: National Bureau of Standards
Sub-Organization: National Computer and Telecommunications Laboratory
Disclaimer: Opinions expressed are those of the sender
    and do not reflect NIST policy or agreement.
Subject: Statistics (was: Astrology...)


>From: att!ihlpl![e-mail]  (Knudsen)
>> In particular, it is plausible to infer that base
>> hits, which are of great personal importance to professional players, ought
>> to be influenced by the "astrological forces", as shown by correlation with
>> some astrological phenomenon, if these forces indeed have considerable

>I agree that the study was worthwhile, but it ignored the effect
>of astrological forces on a small but important minority of
>baseball players for whom it is of great personal importance that
>there NOT be base hits, and whose playing skills in fact do
>significantly negatively impact the other players' batting performance.

>These players are commonly referred to as "pitchers."
>If they have a good day when the batters also have a good day,
>do the effects cancel out?

I suspect that the study is about the most detailed one that can be done
without a greatly increased effort to find data. You would have to research
actual astrological predictions concerning the relative effectiveness of
offensive and defensive efforts, find out which players had read astrological
forecasts, etc. You could try correlations just for pitchers, but they form
a smaller statistical sample, and are more prone to the whims of managers
than other players. The study as it stands looks for *any* correlation,
positive or negative, and you would not expect any possible "opposing
influences" to always exactly cancel out.

Many laymen would be shocked to find out that some of the most cherished
statistical models are used, not because they are proven to have the best
fit to real-world situations, but because using any other model would
greatly increase the difficulty of the calculations. There is considerable
temptation to force a measured real-world parameter to fit a given model,
such as by eliminating "obviously spurious" data points. I had an older
friend who got in trouble (company politics) when he decided to use a
standard model to predict the size distribution of rocks on the moon.
(This was before anything had landed on the moon, and they wanted to predict
the conditions a lander might encounter.)

Some of my favorite horoscopes come from MAD Magazine. Two that I remember:
"Your chemistry teacher knows it was you."
"Your day will start out terribly, but then take a turn for the better. A
promotion and a big raise at work enable you to pay for your emergency
brain surgery."
                                     John Roberts
                                     [e-mail]

------------------------------

Date:     Thu, 23 Mar 89 19:16 EST
From: <[e-mail]>
Subject:  RE:  USSR launch prices

John Roberts writes:

>One thing I would like to learn about the Soviet space program is how much
>it costs. I have seen numerous postings on the net comparing the American
>and Soviet space programs, but never a solid attempt to estimate the
>actual cost to the Soviets of a specific launch or of their entire space
>program. It is probable that the cost to launch a person into orbit is
>less than that of the US, but by how much? I suspect that the quoted price
>of $10 million for a launch is heavily subsidized. There are at least three
>plausible incentives for maintaining an artificially low rate:

[...  stuff deleted ...]

> - Economies of scale: The ability to maintain a high volume of launches
>     and to accelerate the learning curve (and possibly to discourage the
>     competition) can make it economically attractive to sell products or
>     services for less than the actual cost. This has been a favorite
>     Japanese strategy for years.

Yes, it's called competition.  The Japanese are good at it.  This is usually
considered to be something good, unless Americans are on the wrong end of
the deal - then it is labeled unfair trading practices.

     The general comments sound like typical American geocentrism to me.  Why
must the rest of the world pay the inflated prices that Americans, with their
artificially stimulated (by the military-industrial complex) economy, are
willing to pay?  Cheap labour exists all over the world, especially behind
the Iron Curtain, and it has little to nothing to do State subsidies.

     A similar situation was the economic blackmail that the US used against
the Chinese and their fledgling space program.  Talk about slimy tactics!
So what if the Chinese launches are cheaper?  Isn't economic competition
something that Americans love to preach?  It is likely to be due to the
Chinese labour/bureauocracy costs being much lower than the American ones,
as well as the use of cheaper, older, but often more reliable,
technological systems.  If you can't compete on the world market place,
then get out or adjust your prices.  Just don't use a bludgeon on someone
else just because you don't like the way that they are running their
business!  Mafia tactics rule in the US Government's economic policies.

                                         -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Arnold Gill                             | If you don't complain to those who  |
Queen's University at Kingston          | implemented the problem, you have   |
gill @ qucdnast.bitnet                  | no right to complain at all !       |
                                         -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

------------------------------

Date: 23 Mar 89 12:33:38 GMT
From: calvin![e-mail]  (John Sahr)
Subject: Re: SPACE Digest V9 #302

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (ERIC WALLIS) writes:
>     Volatiles in the moon? Unlikely, as a geology major I can say that
>volatiles(if you mean hydrocarbons such as gas) would require the burying
>and heating of dead plants and animals... unlikely on a lifeless body.
>     Water? as far as I know the moon is nothing more than a large block
>of basalt, any water would have been driven off during the moons creation.
>and with no atmospheric pressure to speak of how could water be maintained?
[]
Thomas Gold, an astronomer/geologist, has suggested that there are plenty of
hydrocarbons on Earth that are _not_ due to metamorphosis of dead plant
and animal matter.  Having heard him speak on this topic, I can say that
he makes a convincing case.  Some outfit in Sweden is digging for some of
his "primordial" hydrocarbons on the rim of an ancient meteor strike.

Comets seem to contain quite a bit of water ice, as well as other ices.
Some asteroids are "too dark", suggesting presence of some carbon compounds.
The temperature and pressure regime of space allows the presence of some
energetically strange organic compounds, reagents that would be quite
chemically useful if they could be harvested.

Caveat:  I have met geologists, I know geologists, I have worked with
geologists; but I am no geologist.  I'm not an astronomer, either.

--
John Sahr,                          School of Elect. Eng.,  Upson Hall
                                    Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853

ARPA: [e-mail]; UUCP: {rochester,cmcl2}!cornell!calvin!johns

------------------------------

Date: 23 Mar 89 20:46:14 GMT
From: vsi1!v7fs1![e-mail]  (Mike Van Pelt)
Subject: Primordial Hydrocarbons

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (John Sahr) writes:
<In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (ERIC WALLIS) writes:
<>Volatiles in the moon? Unlikely, as a geology major I can say that
<>volatiles(if you mean hydrocarbons such as gas) would require the burying
<>and heating of dead plants and animals... unlikely on a lifeless body.

<Thomas Gold, an astronomer/geologist, has suggested that there are plenty of
<hydrocarbons on Earth that are _not_ due to metamorphosis of dead plant
<and animal matter.  Having heard him speak on this topic, I can say that
<he makes a convincing case.  Some outfit in Sweden is digging for some of
<his "primordial" hydrocarbons on the rim of an ancient meteor strike.

As luck would have it, last night's NOVA episode was on exactly
this topic.  The outfit in Sweden found methane, but not enough
to make the well viable at this time.  They said that the gas
had been verified as being of non-biological origin, but they
didn't explain how they had verified this.

It should be noted that this site is an area that has been
repeatedly scoured clean by glaciers, and by the "biological
origin only" theory, they shouldn't have found *any* methane.

--
Mike Van Pelt                                When guns are outlawed,
Video 7                                      only Carl Rowan will have guns.
...ames!vsi1!v7fs1!mvp

------------------------------

Date: 23 Mar 89 01:11:24 GMT
From: portal!cup.portal.com![e-mail]  (Andrew Lionel Dalrymple)
Subject: "Piddle On The Pad"...

Could someone strike up a description of what happens to
launch-pads (towers and all) after a lift-off?  I was told
that ALL articles (excluding the cement) is scraped after
a launch.

------------------------------

End of SPACE Digest V9 #312
*******************