Space & Astronomy/Space and Astronomy (October 1993).iso/mac/TEXT/SPACEDIG/V12_5/V12_565.TXT

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Subject: SPACE Digest V12 #565

SPACE Digest                                     Volume 12 : Issue 565

Today's Topics:
               Re: New Shuttle Engines
             Re: LNLL Inflatable Stations
            Re: Ted Molczan -- online !!!
              Re: Save our Shuttle data?
              Galileo Update - 11/15/90
             Re: LNLL Inflatable Stations
              Re: Photon Engine
               Re: New Shuttle Engines
                Photon Engine
              Re: Photon Engine
            Re: Magellan Update - 11/14/90
            Save our Shuttle data?
               STS 38 Orbital Elements
       Re: T Kelso's Orbital elements in rec.ham-radio

Administrivia:

    Submissions to the SPACE Digest/sci.space should be mailed to
  [e-mail].  Other mail, esp. [un]subscription notices,
  should be sent to [e-mail], or, if urgent, to
             [e-mail]

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

Date: 16 Nov 90 05:40:39 GMT
From: monsoon.Berkeley.EDU![e-mail]  (George William Herbert)
Subject: Re: New Shuttle Engines

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Henry Spencer) writes:
>>What is the status of the Shuttle-C program now?
>
>Stalled, pending funding.  It doesn't help that a whole lot of irrelevancies
>got loaded in on top of the basic Shuttle C design in the funding plan.  It
>would almost make you think that somebody didn't want it to succeed...

Various people are doing work on it.  Even Martin Marietta is working on one
(the four-engine 100-ton to LEO shuttle Z).  But, it isn't getting funding.
Despite being a great way to put Freedom up in one chunk 8-)
    [well, with the current design tossout, maybe not, ...]


  == George William Herbert ==   **There are only two truly infinite things,**
 == JOAT for Hire: Anything, ==  *   the universe and stupidity.  And I am   *
=======Anywhere, My Price======= *  unsure about the universe.  -A.Einstein  *
 ==   [e-mail]   ==  *********************************************
  ==     ucbvax!ocf!gwh     == The OCF Gang:  Making Tomorrow's Mistakes Today

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

Date: Thu, 15 Nov 90 09:02:45 -0500
From: "Allen W. Sherzer" <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: LNLL Inflatable Stations
Newsgroups: sci.space
Cc:

In article <[e-mail]>:
>    I don't know about you, but if I were an astronaut doing an EVA to fix
>a section of the rotating platform (from damage by space flotsam) and had to
>get out to the 1 g region, I would first have to spin my body, climb down
>the rotating station hanging on to it for dear life, with the whole universe
>and earth rotating at 4 times per second above your head, with an uncomfortable
>suit on, I certainly wouldn't be in any mood to do any work!

If I was that astronaut I would be pissed. After all, I went to all that
work and trouble to get there and when I got there I found somebody had
already fixed the leak from the inside. It wold ruin my whole day! :-)

>I think if the
>kevlar shell did get damaged, the only way to get a human on the outside of
>the spinning section would be to have it despun!

Depends on the size of the leak. Most of them can be fixed from inside the
station. Some repairs outside may in fact be easier with the station
spinning. With artificial G, you can drop a ladder down the length of the
station and have the astronaut climb down and strap himself on. There would
be no need to worry about things floating away. Consider also that if an
important experiment is going on inside the lunar G part of the station
it may be worth extra trouble.

Now I'm sure some repairs will require the station to be despun. Those
however should be few and far between.

>    Have you thought about this, Allen?

Actually, the ladder idea (and a few other solutions) just came to me
when thinking about the problem you posed. The part about fixing holes
from the inside is LLNL's (although I think Freedom plans to do the same
thing).

   Allen
--
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|Allen W. Sherzer| I had a guaranteed military sale with ED-209. Renovation |
|   [e-mail]  | programs, spare parts for 25 years. Who cares if it      |
|                | works or not?  - Dick Jones, VP OCP Security Concepts    |

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

Date: 15 Nov 90 19:45:49 GMT
From: isis!scicom![e-mail]  (Bruce Watson)
Subject: Re: Ted Molczan -- online !!!

In article <[e-mail]>, [e-mail] (John Logajan) writes:
> [e-mail] (Ted Molczan) writes:
> >                      STS 38 Visual Observation Guide
>
> Ted Molczan!  Many people have requested your fine orbital elements
> file.  I have been getting them off a local space interest BBS and

I'm continuing my daily (when weather permits) observation of the
evening twilight sky searching for bright satellites.  I get 2 or
more position and calculate an approximate circular orbit.  A long
list of elements every other month or so greatly helps in identification
of the satellites I observe.    Goddard gives me but 20.

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

Date: 15 Nov 90 23:04:41 GMT
From: usc!wuarchive!rex!rouge![e-mail]  (Fraering Philip)
Subject: Re: Save our Shuttle data?

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Doug Mohney) writes:

>What steps could be (are?) taken to preserve the specs and construction
>techniques for the Space Shuttle, especially in the area of the main engines?

>There's been a lot of speculation on what it would take to (re) build a 1990
>Apollo command module or a Saturn V, and the typical answer seems to be "You
>can't; they burned/lost/destroyed/buried the plans."

>I could see us sitting around 15 years from now going "Gosh, the Shuttle SSME,
>with a few minor differences, would be a perfect application." Are the plans
>and specs to SSMEs proprietary? Or are they the property of the U.S.
>government?

>We've "lost" one set of technological plans (Apollo/Saturn) already. Some will
>argue we should be glad to lose the Shuttle whenever it is finally retired, but
>I'd rather see all the data stashed away somewhere gathering dust than
>"lost."

>Maybe we need Leonard Nimoy to do a "In Search of" the Saturn V specifications.
>Are all the engineers who worked on building and designing the F-1 engines
>dead?

(No, Doug, I don't think any less of you than anyone else, but I didn't have
space to put dm>...)

1. The ssme may not be worth saving. If it were we wouldn't be looking so
hard for the Saturn plans.

2. As for the engineers, if it was developed by Von Braun's team, they were
all given a choice between retirement and demotion back in the early '70's.
Some of them worked for private companies afterward. I think the only one
that kept working for NASA was Von Tiesenhausen (? I'm not sure), the
team's astrophysicist.

Phil

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

Date: 16 Nov 90 00:57:33 GMT
From: usc!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!jato!mars.jpl.nasa.gov![e-mail]  (Ron Baalke)
Subject: Galileo Update - 11/15/90


                       GALILEO STATUS REPORT
                         November 15, 1990

     The Galileo spacecraft's health continues to be excellent.  Today,
another delta DOR (Differential One-way Ranging) navigation activity was
successfully completed using the 70 meter antenna pairs in Goldstone/Spain and
Goldstone/Australia.  Tomorrow the spacecraft will perform, via the stored
sequence, planned thruster maintenance and sun point maneuver activities.
      ___    _____     ___
     /_ /|  /____/ \  /_ /|
     | | | |  __ \ /| | | |      Ron Baalke         | [e-mail]
  ___| | | | |__) |/  | | |___   Jet Propulsion Lab | [e-mail]
 /___| | | |  ___/    | |/__ /|  M/S 301-355        |
 |_____|/  |_|/       |_____|/   Pasadena, CA 91109 |

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

Date: 16 Nov 90 02:16:10 GMT
From: uokmax!munnari.oz.au!brolga!bunyip.cc.uq.oz.au!iceman![e-mail]  (M Parigi)
Subject: Re: LNLL Inflatable Stations

In article <[e-mail]>, [e-mail] ("Allen W. Sherzer") writes:
> Depends on the size of the leak. Most of them can be fixed from inside the
> station. Some repairs outside may in fact be easier with the station
> spinning. With artificial G, you can drop a ladder down the length of the
> station and have the astronaut climb down and strap himself on. There would
> be no need to worry about things floating away.
No, things would 'fall' away, and then be flicked off by the station (tools?)
You would have to either hook them on to something, or keep good hold of
things. You would have little chance of retrieving something if it was
dropped or came unhooked. Doing an EVA on the outside of the spinning
platform would be like doing repairs on the outside of a building (you
wouldn't want to fall) as compared to like doing a scuba dive on a
nonspinning platform. As well there's the undoubtedly giddying effect of
'knowing' that you are spinning. Mind you, this would bring back the
excitement of space travel. I would hope the need for EVA's would be much,
much less than FREEDOM's.
    By the way, how does the need for EVA's compare to that of FREEDOM's?
Is the design inherently simpler? What reasons does FREEDOM need so many?
Also, what docking arrangements are planned? Would it be cost-effective to
include ability to dock with shuttle,hermes,Soyuz etc.?

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

Date: 16 Nov 90 04:59:47 GMT
From: usc!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!rpi![e-mail]  (Jim Kasprzak)
Subject: Re: Photon Engine

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Jimmy Dean) writes:
>
>     I read an article a few months ago about a laser driven directly
>from a nuclear reactor.  (Sorry, I don't remember the name of the
>magazine.)  Supposedly, it generated an 11 Gigawatt laser beam.  Does
>anyone know anything about this?  I figure it'd generate about 10
>pounds of thrust.  Would this be a useful rocket engine?

 11 Gigawatts? But the only place you can get that much energy is...
a bolt of lightning!

 I think it could only get you going at about 88 miles per hour. (-:

--
 Jim Kasprzak          [e-mail] (internet)
 RPI, Troy, NY         [e-mail]
 "A spirit with a vision is a dream with a mission."  -Rush

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

Date: Thu, 15 Nov 90 09:07:57 -0500
From: "Allen W. Sherzer" <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: New Shuttle Engines
Newsgroups: sci.space,sci.space.shuttle
Cc:

In article <[e-mail]>:
>What is the status of the Shuttle-C program now?

It's dead Jim.

Actually, NASA was never that interested in it. Congress wanted very much
for them to put in a request but NASA refused (there's more money for
NASA is Shuttle flights). Some Congresscritters are beginning to realize
that the expendable HLV options will be cheaper and are leaning to them
anyway.

  Allen
--
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|Allen W. Sherzer| I had a guaranteed military sale with ED-209. Renovation |
|   [e-mail]  | programs, spare parts for 25 years. Who cares if it      |
|                | works or not?  - Dick Jones, VP OCP Security Concepts    |

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

Date:       15 November 90 06:30:25 CST
From: Jimmy Dean <[e-mail]>
Subject: Photon Engine

     I read an article a few months ago about a laser driven directly
from a nuclear reactor.  (Sorry, I don't remember the name of the
magazine.)  Supposedly, it generated an 11 Gigawatt laser beam.  Does
anyone know anything about this?  I figure it'd generate about 10
pounds of thrust.  Would this be a useful rocket engine?

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

Date: 15 Nov 90 15:33:39 GMT
From: usc!cs.utexas.edu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!physics.utoronto.ca![e-mail]  (Christopher Neufeld)
Subject: Re: Photon Engine

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Jimmy Dean) writes:
>
>     I read an article a few months ago about a laser driven directly
>from a nuclear reactor.  (Sorry, I don't remember the name of the
>magazine.)  Supposedly, it generated an 11 Gigawatt laser beam.  Does
>anyone know anything about this?  I figure it'd generate about 10
>pounds of thrust.  Would this be a useful rocket engine?

   Well, this is a bit outside of my field, but my understanding of laser
technology is that a %10 efficiency isn't bad for a high power laser. This
would imply a power consumption of 110GW. Clearly this isn't what's going
on. Try dissipating 99GW of heat in a laser tube......also, 110GW compares
well with the power output of entire nations.
   What you read about is probably a pulsed laser, with microsecond or
smaller pulses being fired every once in a while. The Nova laser can only
fire about a half dozen times per day, according to a visiting lecturer
here last week. When you time-average the power output of the laser I don't
think you'll find it to be a useful rocket engine. If you could manage 11GW
continuously, that would be interesting. That's almost 40N of thrust (in
real units). Put you heat radiators on the back of the spacecraft and you
might double that from the waste heat being preferentially radiated against
the direction of thrust. Even a 100 ton spacecraft could use that much
thrust for a relatively quick transit to Mars.


--
 Christopher Neufeld....Just a graduate student  |
 [e-mail]    Ad astra! |  S = k log W
 cneufeld@{pnet91,pro-micol}.cts.com             |    Boltzmann's epitaph
 "Don't edit reality for the sake of simplicity" |

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

Date: 15 Nov 90 16:24:51 GMT
From: van-bc!mdivax1![e-mail]
Subject: Re: Magellan Update - 11/14/90

The appearance of bright spots in the Magellan imagery triggered a question
about point targets on the surface of Venus ie. old spacecraft that are
metallic and are reflective to radar like some of the Russian probes that
landed on Venus.  Is it possible for Magellan to detect these and use their
radar reflections as a method of verifying the calibration of the radar
or even as markers for motion of the surface ?

John Sture

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

Date: 15 Nov 90 19:21:25 GMT
From: mojo![e-mail]  (Doug Mohney)
Subject: Save our Shuttle data?

What steps could be (are?) taken to preserve the specs and construction
techniques for the Space Shuttle, especially in the area of the main engines?

There's been a lot of speculation on what it would take to (re) build a 1990
Apollo command module or a Saturn V, and the typical answer seems to be "You
can't; they burned/lost/destroyed/buried the plans."

I could see us sitting around 15 years from now going "Gosh, the Shuttle SSME,
with a few minor differences, would be a perfect application." Are the plans
and specs to SSMEs proprietary? Or are they the property of the U.S.
government?

We've "lost" one set of technological plans (Apollo/Saturn) already. Some will
argue we should be glad to lose the Shuttle whenever it is finally retired, but
I'd rather see all the data stashed away somewhere gathering dust than
"lost."

Maybe we need Leonard Nimoy to do a "In Search of" the Saturn V specifications.
Are all the engineers who worked on building and designing the F-1 engines
dead?

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

Date: 16 Nov 90 00:17:24 GMT
From: usc!cs.utexas.edu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!utgpu![e-mail]  (Ted Molczan)
Subject: STS 38 Orbital Elements

Here are estimated orbital elements for STS 38, which was launched tonight at
18:48:16 EST:

1 90999U 90999  A 90320.04254600  .00000000  00000-0  00000-0 0    00
2 90999  28.4500 243.4000 0000000   0.0000   0.0000 16.14700000    10

Predictions made using these elements should be accurate to within several
minutes in time, over the next few days.

More precise elements will be posted as they become available.

Precise observation reports from observers would be appreciated.



--
Ted [e-mail]

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

Date: 15 Nov 90 15:20:20 GMT
From: ncis.tis.llnl.gov!blackbird![e-mail]  (TS Kelso)
Subject: Re: T Kelso's Orbital elements in rec.ham-radio

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (John Logajan) writes:
>I have been informed that T Kelso continues to post his orbital
>elements files in the rec.ham-radio newsgroup.
>
>Ted Molczan also informs me that it costs him money to upload
>his orbital elements files to USENET so he won't be doing it
>in the foreseeable future -- although he said he would like to
>and doesn't mind if anyone gets that info off a BBS and does
>it themselves.
>
>--
>- John Logajan @ Network Systems; 7600 Boone Ave; Brooklyn Park, MN 55428
>- [e-mail], 612-424-4888, Fax [phone]

I've just posted a note to sci.astro stating that there appears to be some
kind of a problem with distribution over this network of the orbital elements
I post.  I have been (and will continue to do so) posting these elements to
sci.space on a weekly basis (in addition to posting them to rec.ham-radio)
and they are showing up in sci.space at my location.  I'm not sure if the
network problem is near our node or if the distribution problem is only
affecting a few people; perhaps those of you not getting the elements (make
sure you've checked for this past weekend's copy first) could drop me a line
stating the problem and when you last received a copy.  Then we can see if we
can determine where the problem is.  Of course, if it is a network distribution
problem, the only people who get this message will be the ones getting the
elements, so pass the word.  I'm glad to hear that you all find the orbital
elements so useful that it causes such a commotion when they're missing, but
let's see if we can't get the problem resolved and get everybody back to
happily tracking their satellites.  - TS

--
Dr TS Kelso                           Assistant Professor of Space Operations
[e-mail]          Air Force Institute of Technology

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

End of SPACE Digest V12 #565
*******************