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Subject: SPACE Digest V10 #358

SPACE Digest                                     Volume 10 : Issue 358

Today's Topics:
             space news from Oct 30 AW&ST
            Re: New years eve 1999
           Re: the response to Jim Bowery's parody
       Re: NASA Reform White Paper, Part 1 of 2 (long)
                 Coelecanths
       Re: Scientific value of Apollo (was Re: Motives)
     Re: Space industry projects: dismantling moons and asteroids
           Payload Status for 12/18/89 (Forwarded)
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: 18 Dec 89 05:02:28 GMT
From: mnetor!utzoo![e-mail]  (Henry Spencer)
Subject: space news from Oct 30 AW&ST

[The latest Pegasus report is a short slip of the dress-rehearsal flight
test due to telemetry problems.]

Soviet Union definitively approves funding for the 1994 Mars balloon
mission.

National Space Council considers the idea that NASA may not be "structured
appropriately" to carry out Bush's Moon/Mars program.  One possibility is
more involvement from some of the national labs, e.g. Los Alamos.

Amroc cuts staff and seeks additional funding in wake of the Oct 5 launch
failure.  There would have been some staff reduction and need for more
money in any case.  The company is disappointed, but points out that the
failure was unusually mild:  both payloads survived and appear reflyable,
and pad damage has been estimated at $1000.  What happened was that the
LOX valve didn't open far enough and the rocket did not develop enough
thrust for liftoff.  The engine was shut down successfully, but hydrogen
peroxide used for thrust vectoring continued to flow and started a fire,
which in turn ignited both the fuel (synthetic rubber) and the casing
(graphite-epoxy composite).  An attempt to re-engage hold-down clamps
was unsuccessful, and the rocket fell over.  Amroc had considered a pad
water-deluge system to extinguish fires, but had decided against it
because of the elaborate environmental paperwork for the runoff water!
The cause of the sticking valve is not known with certainty, but a
strong possibility is icing:  Vandenberg is much more humid than the
test sites at Edwards, and before launch the valve has LOX on one side
and atmospheric air on the other side.

Amroc says that potential customers are "still talking to us" and no
financing has been withdrawn, although a successful launch would certainly
have made things easier.

First major test of SDI ground-based interceptor technology slips several
months due to problems with the destruct system (!).

Another Navstar goes up on Delta Oct 21.

Pictures of Galileo before and after leaving Atlantis's payload bay.
Atlantis came down two orbits early to avoid forecast high winds at
Edwards, after preparing for possibly staying in orbit up to three
days extra to wait it out.  Final approval for the early reentry came
only twelve minutes before retrofire, as fog at Edwards dispersed.
One of the APUs was started late during the reentry sequence, as it had
stuck in high-speed mode during launch and going easy on it was expected
to minimize repairs.

NASA faces some of the pre-Challenger problems again, as Columbia tries
to get up for the LDEF rescue as soon as possible after the Discovery
military mission.

ESA council confirms choice of Matra's design for the Columbus polar
platform.  The Matra design is based on the Spot-4/Helios bus.  This
is characterized as a "classic" satellite design rather than a "true
platform" design, avoiding the possibility of delays due to problems
elsewhere in Columbus.  The losing British Aerospace proposal was based
on other Columbus hardware.  The council has asked for a study on
incorporating some of the advantages of BAe's design in the Matra bird,
and on payload growth capacity, although this is considered primarily
a face-saving move for the British.  Ironically, due to ESA politics,
BAe is prime contractor for the polar platform regardless of the choice
of design.

Ozone-hole images from Nimbus 7; the hole is back despite its disappearance
last year.  NASA is worried that the ozone mapper on Nimbus 7 is 11 years
old, and indeed is one of only two instruments still working aboard N7.
NASA has arranged to fly a replacement on a Soviet Meteor 3 in 1991,
followed by a US replacement in 1993 and another mapper aboard Japan's
AdEOS in 1995.

NASA and General Dynamics strike deal:  GD gets parts and tools from NASA's
Atlas-Centaur and Shuttle-Centaur programs, in return for a commercial A-C
launch in June for the Combined Release and Radiation Effects Satellite.
--
1755 EST, Dec 14, 1972:  human |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
exploration of space terminates| uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry [e-mail]

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

Date: 18 Dec 89 04:03:25 GMT
From: swrinde!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!samsung!munnari.oz.au!basser!metro!bunyip![e-mail]  (Mark Williams)
Subject: Re: New years eve 1999

[e-mail] (Henry Spencer) writes:

>In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] writes:
>>   According to what I have read, the coming of the next millenium should
>>   be celebrated towards the end of the year 2000, since there was no year
>>   0 according to our calendar ...   Thus it would more appropriate
>>   to postpone the celebration until new year's eve 2000, but I wonder if
>>   anybody (except for chronology fans) have thought of it?

>57000 chronology fans have thought of it, and never cease to remind everyone
>about it, at great and tedious length, every time the subject is mentioned.
>NOBODY ELSE CARES; so far as everyone else is concerned, it's that top
>digit turning over that matters, and our ancestors' silliness in putting
>a one-year offset into their calendar is boring and irrelevant.
>Sorry, Tom, not aimed at you personally...  It really gets tiresome to be
>lectured about this every few months.

    Wow. The world is more stupid than I thought. Someone suggests
we celebrate the turn of the millenium by destroying the world. (well -
nearly....). And then we get 40 000 followups pointing out that he got
the date for the turn of the millenium wrong. Then we get 50 000
followups pointing out that the previous 40 000 people were silly
pedants. Meanwhile the first person quietly blows up the world.

(Presumably while 250 000 people are arguing that 240 000 people are
wasting time arguing that 230 000 people are pedants........ :-) )

sheesh!

Mark Williams
[e-mail]

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

Date: 18 Dec 89 17:30:13 GMT
From: bfmny0![e-mail]  (Tom Neff)
Subject: Re: the response to Jim Bowery's parody

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (John McKernan) writes:
>                                   Thus manned space research makes sense
>even if it is expensive if the goals of that research make sense, which is
>currently not the case.

I agree with John's position in this posting and also his response to
Henry on the usefulness of Apollo; except that we're PRETTY close to
making manned on-orbit research worth it -- close enough that we should
probably get off the pot and do it.  (And we are, in the persons of
various heroes of socialist labor.)  Manned planetary stuff is
premature.  But putting people off-planet, at minimal distance but over
that space threshold, can act as a catalyst for future results.

What human presence can bring to the party is serendipity.  There is
a good chance that if you just bring a few wheelbarrows full of stuff
to play with on-orbit, you will come up with something unexpected that
revolutionizes the way we think about space.  After it happens everyone
looks back and says it was inevitable -- but until you take a chance and
play, you don't see it.

Unfortunately the ruinous expense of space travel and bureaucratic
mindset of space agencies combine to discourage this sort of thing.  The
operating paradigm for space flight is still that of the test pilot.
You plan everything down to the second and rehearse, rehearse, rehearse
on the ground until you're blue in the face, so when you go up it's all
second nature and "just like the simulator" as our astronauts are so
fond of saying.

Well, if all you want is for things to be "just like the simulator" you
can do this more cheaply than launching a rocket -- just stay in the
simulator!  The discoveries that spark next century's revolution in
space thinking will in every case NOT have been "just like the
simulator."  They will be unexpected and unplanned-for.  The people who
make them will perforce be people who are open to new, messy,
inconvenient ideas.  Confirming them may require dumb activities that
don't fit the mission timeline.

Such ill-organized "play" is not something we ought to expect from
today's NASA cadre of tanned, overachieving worker-bees, or even their
Soviet colleagues drifting overhead.  Our own crews, evenly divided
between 'Nam-decorated fighter jocks and straight-A engineer
valedictorians, spend their brief visits waking to college fight songs
each morning and waving their hand lettered "truck driver" slogan signs
lazily through the zero-G cabin air for the folks back home, proud to
have made it to this white-room sweatshop, while downstairs the Beltway
corridors hum with nickel shaving and manifest stretchouts.  Meanwhile
the Soviets keep loggin' those marathon hours in their hand-repaired
monument to socialist progress, watching the empty orbits streak by
outside, forlornly tending the telescopes, giving each other physicals
and waiting for orders.

Real discoveries are going to have to wait for crews with time on their
hands, money and equipment and freedom to play with, and nothing
nationalistic or bureaucratic to prove.  I would put my money on the
Japanese or the soon-united and strong Europeans.

--
"NASA Awards Acronym Generation       :(%( :  Tom Neff
System (AGS) Contract For Space       : )%):  [e-mail]
Station Freedom" - release 1989-9891  :(%( :  ...!uunet!bfmny0!tneff

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

Date: 16 Dec 89 22:51:59 GMT
From: ibmpa![e-mail]  (Nick Szabo)
Subject: Re: NASA Reform White Paper, Part 1 of 2 (long)

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Jim Bowery) writes:
>The following is part 1 of a 2 part white paper proposing a reform
>of our civilian space program.

>About the coauthor:
>
>Andrew Cutler is a well known researcher in the economics of space
>resource utilization and edits an international scientific and technical
>journal, "Space Power" devoted to that topic.  He was a primary force
>behind the introduction and imminent passage of HR2674, the Space
>Transportation Services Act.
>...........


For those of you who have been asking about what alternatives to
NASA planning we NASA-critics propose, this is the most definitive and
agreeable that I have seen.  My differences with it are only on the
trivialities.  Great work, guys!

********** These opionions are not related to Big Blue's **********

--
---------------------------
Nick Szabo
[e-mail]
uunet!ibmsupt!szabonj

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

Date: 18 Dec 89 17:50:59 GMT
From: cs.utexas.edu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!utgpu!utzoo![e-mail]  (Kieran A. Carroll)
Subject: Coelecanths

[e-mail] (Paul Dietz) writes:
>
> >So which will it be?  Sitting on our thumbs, muttering about "maybes" and
> >"might-haves", or taking a step that's every bit as significant as the
> >coelecanth's coming out of the ocean?
>
> Oh no, not the "next step in evolution" argument again.  It's a flawed
> analogy, mainly used for emotional impact.  Evolution is not directed,
> certainly not directed by a government agency.

Paul, I agree that the "next step in evolution" argument is not a particularly
good one to apply here (I tend to agree with those who argue that
mankind has by and large ceased evolving; technology is keeping alive
people that natural selection would have eliminated in past centuries),
However, the movement of mankind into space will >still< be as significant
as the movement of sea-dwellers onto land, for >another< reason.

In our case, we'll be expanding from one habitat (a seemingly very
fragile one, at that) into many other ones, just as the sea dwellers expanded
from their range in the sea, into another one on land. Sea dwellers had to
evolve in order to fit into their new environment, while we take the approach
of changing the environment to suit ourselves, so evolution is not the question
here. The significance comes from the potential to improve the likelihood of
survival for our species.
--

     Kieran A. Carroll @ U of Toronto Aerospace Institute
     uunet!attcan!utzoo!kcarroll [e-mail]

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

Date: 18 Dec 89 06:48:57 GMT
From: norge![e-mail]  (John McKernan)
Subject: Re: Scientific value of Apollo (was Re: Motives)

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Henry Spencer) writes:
>  Apollo
>accomplished much more than some of its detractors admit, and it would
>have taken a very large and costly unmanned program to get similar
>results.  It *may* be true that it would have been cheaper to do things
>that way, but it is *not* a self-evident fact.

Our experience in space makes it empirically evident that unmanned space can
currently achieve as much or more than manned space for orders of magnitude
less. Everything that Apollo accomplished (sample returns, pictures, etc)
could have been done for less with unmanned technology. Given the greatly
increased capabilities of unmanned technology that is even more true today
than it was then.

In a previous posting you broke space exploration into three areas:
taking a look at things from a distance, extensive on site exploration,
and long term science on specific details. Technologically we are still
at the point were we can only reasonably do the first. If we really
want to explore the moon, we need a base were at least a couple of
dozen people can live for a long time. They need the ability to
travel over the entire surface of the moon. The base needs to be self-
sustaining and self-expanding with no or low mass supplies from Earth.
All of this needs to be done for a maximum of roughly 200 billion
dollars. We don't have the technology to do this now and we need a
diverse R&D effort to get there.

The real failure of Apollo is not that nothing was accomplished, but that
given our capabilities it's goals were inappropriate. Our manned space
effort should consist of developing the technology needed for the true
manned exploration of the moon and the solar system.

John L. McKernan.                                                  [e-mail]
Disclaimer: These are my opinions but, shockingly enough, not necessarily Sun's
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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

Date: 18 Dec 89 18:25:54 GMT
From: zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!wuarchive!texbell!nuchat![e-mail]  (Steve Nuchia)
Subject: Re: Space industry projects: dismantling moons and asteroids

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (H Keith Henson):
>process metals in space.  I would be interested if Steve has any new
>ideas on how to get heat to the metal *without* curding up the mirrors
>with various rock and metal vapors.

Hey, what's a major engineering hurdle or two when you're talking about
launching a ten year mission complete with at least several megatons
of nuclear demolition charges?   :-)

I hadn't looked at that too closely, but:  The energy density on
the primaries is low, staying close to that at the earth, so crud
reduces your collection efficiency but won't destroy the reflectors.
Any secondaries will be close enough to clean.

Any escaping crud is potentially valuable reaction mass, it may
pay to collect it all carefully and feed it to the thrusters,
which of course aren't pointed at the mirrors.  Some of the crud
will be oxygen, which you may as well process and tank -- it will
be darned near as valuable as the steel.

One could design the primaries with several layers of removable
transparent film over them, to be peeled off as required (and
fed to the thrusters, wouldn't want to litter :-)

Good question though, thank you!

Another good question:  How to stop when you get there.  It would
not be a real popular move to use another nuke so close to the
nest, and I bet a lot of people would be real nervous about
an aerobraking manoeuver (gotta learn to spell) ...  I guess I'll
just have to keep a certain amount of slag and ease into the
parking spot real gentle-like.

Or have an outgoing mission bring a jumper cable and trade
a bunch of momentum.  Can't plan on that though.
--
Steve Nuchia          South Coast Computing Services      [phone]
"If the conjecture `You would rather I had not disturbed you
 by sending you this.' is correct, you may add it to the list of
 uncomfortable truths."   - Edsgar Dijkstra

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

Date: 19 Dec 89 05:27:39 GMT
From: trident.arc.nasa.gov![e-mail]  (Peter E. Yee)
Subject: Payload Status for 12/18/89 (Forwarded)

Daily Status/KSC Payload Management and Operations 12-18-89


- STS-31R HST (at VPF) -

The wide field planetary camera (WF/PC) was moved to the VPF
airlock and the GNT purge was initiated.  Installation of the
third HST vertical hoist fixture and assembly of the HST
auxiliary support fixture was completed on Friday.  On Saturday
the HST pitch and roll operations were completed.  Final
preparations are being completed this morning for the (WF/PC)
installation.

- STS-32R SYNCOM (at Pad A) -

Battery conditioning will pick up again Today and Wednesday prior
to the planned launch on Thursday.

- STS-35 ASTRO-1/BBXRT (at O&C) -

BBXRT software validation is continuing.  FEP interface test,
CCTV rack set up, and vacuum monitoring in WUPPE GN2 purge checks
are complete.  Decable and preps continue for move of ASTRO-1
from test stand 3 to cite test stand four.

- STS-40 SLS-1 (at O&C) -

Rack mods continue on racks 4, 6, 7, 11, and 12.  Rack 3 and 6
front mods are complete.  Eddy currents checks were performed on
racks 3, 6, 11, and 12 with no defects noted.  Eddy current
checks will continue today.  Pyrell foam replacement continues.

- STS-42 IML (at O&C) -

Rack shipping container mod work was accomplished on Friday.

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

End of SPACE Digest V10 #358
*******************