Return-path: X-Andrew-Authenticated-as: 7997;andrew.cmu.edu;Ted Anderson Received: from holmes.andrew.cmu.edu via trymail for +dist+/afs/andrew.cmu.edu/usr1/ota/space/space.dl@andrew.cmu.edu (->+dist+/afs/andrew.cmu.edu/usr1/ota/space/space.dl) (->ota+space.digests) ID ; Sat, 15 Apr 89 05:16:33 -0400 (EDT) Message-ID: Reply-To: space+@Andrew.CMU.EDU From: space-request+@Andrew.CMU.EDU To: space+@Andrew.CMU.EDU Date: Sat, 15 Apr 89 05:16:25 -0400 (EDT) Subject: SPACE Digest V9 #369 SPACE Digest Volume 9 : Issue 369 Today's Topics: Re: space news from Feb 13 AW&ST Re: Questions and Henry Soviet shutdown of manned space program Re: Hubble Space Telescope Re: space news from Feb 20 AW&ST Re: long ago and far away SPACE Digest V9 #361 Re: Bored public Cold fusion Russian sneakiness? List of Space Launches, Jan-Mar 1989 UK astronaut to be launched by Soviets ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 11 Apr 89 14:59:02 GMT From: att!cbnewsl!sw@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU (Stuart Warmink) Subject: Re: space news from Feb 13 AW&ST In article <1989Apr11.021301.16521@utzoo.uucp>, henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) writes: > [Problem with Phobos probes] > [..................... The way you find out about these things is to try > them. The major factor in how quickly you learn is how often you try. Another point of view is that with careful systems design and good engineering you don't need to learn from your mistakes. That is what engineering is all about. For instance, see the many successful Mariner, Pioneer, Voyager and Viking missions. -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Captain, I see no reason to stand here | Stuart Warmink, Whippany, NJ, USA and be insulted" - Spock | sw@cbnewsl.ATT.COM (att!cbnewsl!sw) -------------------------> My opinions are just that <------------------------ ------------------------------ Date: 12 Apr 89 15:43:42 GMT From: mailrus!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!utgpu!utzoo!henry@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu (Henry Spencer) Subject: Re: Questions and Henry In article <7702@thorin.cs.unc.edu> leech@zeta.UUCP (Jonathan Leech) writes: >>... Magellan and Galileo. They >>are basically the last big things out of the Apollo-era pipeline, with >>very little left in the pipe behind them... but they're nifty all the same. > > Disagree. After VOIR was cancelled in 81-82, Magellan was what they >managed to replace it with. This can hardly be called Apollo-era. But it's a cut-down version of an Apollo-era project, which is why I referred to it as coming out of the Apollo-era pipeline. Remember that both of these projects have had a gestation period of 15-20 years. -- Welcome to Mars! Your | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology passport and visa, comrade? | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 12 Apr 89 15:21 EDT From: Subject: Soviet shutdown of manned space program I just heard that the CCCP is not putting up manned missions for a while (anyone heard how long?). Maybe all the discussion of how much the sov governments subsidises things is true. Could be there is a big shakedown in their equivalent of OMB. My theory is that they are conserving resources for upcoming grandiose missions. Possiblities: a series of more Mars probes (hopefully triple redundant :) ), a big manned construction effort to use shuttleski to put up VERY big space station later (not likely if their budget is in trouble, and they can't also send up a lot of Energias), or maybe waiting 5 or 10 years to go for the gold...manned Mars mission (again highly unlikely if they don't even have probe success). I hope it isn't what it looks like on the surface... economic surgery to save a drowning economic system. I'd say the latter if you hear about unilateral MAJOR cuts in military spending. Maybe they want to get into the fusion game ala Pons et al to avoid the above disasters later. Cheap power might save economically depressed industrial powers (like ours). One can only hope. Korac MacArthur ****************************************************************************** NO DISCLAIMER REQUIRED (ha!) ****************************************************************************** ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 13 Apr 89 09:34 EST From: ELIOT@cs.umass.EDU Subject: Re: Hubble Space Telescope > What are the capabilities for rotating this baby and using it for > spying purposes??? > Why bother? A KH-12 recon satellite is undoubtedly comparable in mirror size and probably uses better technology, optimized to such a purpose. ========= Much more interesting is the question of how well a KH-12 or KH-11 would work as an astronomical observatory if it were rotated 180 degrees. ------------------------------ Date: 12 Apr 89 15:59:22 GMT From: mailrus!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!utgpu!utzoo!henry@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu (Henry Spencer) Subject: Re: space news from Feb 20 AW&ST In article <19530@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu> cdaf@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu (Charles Daffinger) writes: >>... Some of the [RL10] upgrades are derived >>from work done on the late, lamented Shuttle-Centaur program. > >What was the Shuttle-Centaur program, and why did it croak? Since the demise of the Space Tug early in shuttle development, any shuttle payload that wants to go beyond low Earth orbit has needed an upper stage of some kind. The Inertial Upper Stage (nee Interim Upper Stage) is okay for many things, but is short on performance for seriously demanding missions, like large deep-space missions and boosting really heavy loads into Clarke orbit. So NASA undertook to develop a version of Centaur optimized for the shuttle cargo bay. (Basically this meant fatter tanks.) This would give much higher performance, since Centaur is oxygen/hydrogen against IUS's solid fuel. Originally Shuttle-Centaur was earmarked to launch Galileo, Ulysses, Magellan I think, and at least some USAF payloads. There were some complications, like needing a way to dump the Centaur fuel if an emergency landing was needed, but things were more or less on track for Galileo and Ulysses in late spring 1986. Then Challenger exploded. In the safety hysteria that followed, Shuttle-Centaur was cancelled on the grounds that having cryogenic fuels in the payload bay somehow presented safety problems that were utterly beyond NASA's ability to solve. What this really meant was that NASA didn't feel like solving them just then, and the people who needed Shuttle-Centaur didn't have enough political clout to keep the program alive. Some of the other post-Challenger safety restrictions have since been relaxed, but the momentum was lost on Shuttle-Centaur and there is no chance of reviving it now. (If there were no other way to launch Galileo, the situation might be different, but the Galileo people have found that by making some sacrifices, they can use an IUS.) -- Welcome to Mars! Your | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology passport and visa, comrade? | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu ------------------------------ Date: 13 Apr 89 13:53:59 GMT From: prism!ccoprmd@gatech.edu (Matthew DeLuca) Subject: Re: long ago and far away In article <1989Apr12.173025.23295@utzoo.uucp>, henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) writes: > 28 years ago today, April 12, Yuri Gagarin was the first human in space. > > His successors are still using most of the hardware that got him there, > and very successfully too. > -- AH, so they are. Unfortunately, it seems that the Soviet space program has been costing too much for the economy to support. Does anyone have the cost (in dollars) of the Russian space program? The Soviet GNP for a recent year was somewhere around 2.1 trillion dollars, and the gov't budget (total) was 800 billion, including the 160 billion deficit. Perhaps someone can come up with the costs of the Russian program as a percentage, and compare it to the U.S. budget. Perhaps we *have* won the Cold War; we've driven each other into the ground, but we have better shovels! :-) Incidentally, the first flight of Columbia was 8 years ago today, and while we're on a history kick, the Civil War started 128 years ago... Matthew DeLuca : Georgia Institute of Technology : Certainty is the lot of those who ARPA: ccoprmd@hydra.gatech.edu : do not question. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------ Date: 12 Apr 89 11:17:58 MST From: SHAVER@EPG1-HUA.ARPA Subject: SPACE Digest V9 #361 Reference to the Utility Companies required to buy power. I am a director of a Co-Op power company. We must buy the power, the conditions are determined partially by the FERC or PURPA (I can't remember which) and partially by the regulating state organization and partially by the rules and regulations within the power company. The utilities pay only for avoided cost. The safety comes largely from the situation where the utility power is shut down for service and the consumer supplies power to the dead lines and injures a workman. Other than that, fuses provide reasonable protection against most accidents. The utility might get concerned if the consumer equipment generates noise on the line which interferes with other customer radio or TV reception, which in remote areas is already marginal. Small, unreliable power sources really don't do anyone much good. They may pay for themselves in the power not purchased from the utility. Large plans in the megawatt region pose problems of reliability, supplies greater than the distribution network can handle (the company probably didn't plan on accepting large amounts of power at that location) and may have to reconstruct its transmission system to account for the extra supply. Not very neat nor tidy. ------------------------------ Date: 13 Apr 89 12:18:01 GMT From: nsc!andrew@decwrl.dec.com (andrew) Subject: Re: Bored public In article <2404@viscous.sco.COM>, joed@sco.COM (Joe Di Lellio) writes: > P.S. The above mentioned eco major is the same one who dislikes (if we ever > had the reason for it) dumping nuke waste into the sun, since "it will > all come back to us in the solar wind", or in deep space, since "there's > only so much space out there". Don't worry about this. We will conduct a survey as soon as we figure out cheap personal spaceflight, and these people will simply not be issued a licence! They will be confined to earthbound automatic robotic transport (which they can't fix) and counting leaves, while we selectively colonise somewhere we don't tell them about. Just fantasising...actually, these people provide some entertainment, which would be lacking in a monobloc of pure science types. We should therefore take some technocrets along rather as one would transport one's personal menagerie of pets :-) Even alien telephones need sanitation.. ===== Andrew Palfreyman USENET: ...{this biomass}!nsc!logic!andrew National Semiconductor M/S D3969, 2900 Semiconductor Dr., PO Box 58090, Santa Clara, CA 95052-8090 ; 408-721-4788 there's many a slip 'twixt cup and lip ------------------------------ Date: 13 Apr 89 18:08:41 GMT From: cs.utexas.edu!varvel@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu (Donald A. Varvel) Subject: Cold fusion In nearly all chemical reactions, deuterium reacts exactly the same as normal hydrogen. (Rates may differ slightly in a few cases.) This leads to the obvious question: Has the Pons et. al. experiment been run with two setups identical except that one uses deuterium and the other ordinary hydrogen? Vastly different results would be an indication (although not a proof) that something other than ordinary chemical reactions was going on. -- Don Varvel ({tektronix,gatech}!cs.utexas.edu!varvel) ------------------------------ Date: 13 Apr 89 14:53:40 GMT From: prism!dsm@gatech.edu (Daniel McGurl) Subject: Russian sneakiness? Anyone happen to notice the timing of the Russian announcement that they will be leaving Mir unmanned for a time? Seems to me that this announcement comes a suspicous time, when you consider that the funding for Freedom is coming up for a vote. Also, one must consider just last week there were announcements about sending products up to the station just to say "They've been in space." While I know that this may get flames from people who say "Freedom has other uses" (which I completely agree with), I think that politicians would be more likely to kill the project if we wouldn't be perceived as being far behind any more. Comments? -- Daniel Sean McGurl "He's got to make his own mistakes, Office of Computing Services and learn to mend the mess he makes." Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta Georgia, 30332 ARPA: dsm@prism.gatech.edu ------------------------------ Date: 12 Apr 89 18:11:36 GMT From: cfa!cfa250!mcdowell@husc6.harvard.edu (Jonathan McDowell) Subject: List of Space Launches, Jan-Mar 1989 Space Launches 1st Qtr 1989 --------------------------- No. Date Satellite Agency Launched by From Status at 1 Apr 89 01A Jan 10 Kosmos-1987 GK GK Proton KB 64.9 deg,19113x19147 km 01B Jan 10 Kosmos-1988 GK " 64.9 deg,19114x19146 km 01C Jan 10 Kosmos-1989(Etalon) GK " 64.9 deg,19102x19150 km 02A Jan 12 Kosmos-1990 TsP GUGK GK Soyuz KPL Landed KRZ Feb 11 03A Jan 18 Kosmos-1991 GRU GK Soyuz KB Landed KRZ Feb 1 04A Jan 26 Gorizont MSvyazi GK Proton KB GEO at 53 deg E 05A Jan 26 Kosmos-1992 KGB? GK Kosmos KPL 772x807 km, 74 deg 06A Jan 27 Intelsat VA F15 INTELSAT AE Ariane V28 CSG near GEO,drift over IOR 07A Jan 28 Kosmos-1993 GRU GK Soyuz KB Landed KRZ?, Mar 27 08A Feb 10 Progress-40 GK GK Soyuz KB Deorbited over POR Mar 7 09A Feb 10 Kosmos-1994 VMF? GK Tsiklon KPL 82.6 deg 1397x1416 km 09B Feb 10 Kosmos-1995 VMF? " 82.6 deg 1414x1417 km 09C Feb 10 Kosmos-1996 VMF? " 82.6 deg 1409x1416 km 09D Feb 10 Kosmos-1997 VMF? " 82.6 deg 1402x1416 km 09E Feb 10 Kosmos-1998 VMF? " 82.6 deg 1392x1416 km 09F Feb 10 Kosmos-1999 VMF? " 82.6 deg 1386x1416 km 10A Feb 10 Kosmos-2000 TsP GUGK GK Soyuz KPL Landed KRZ Mar 2 11A Feb 14 Kosmos-2001 PVO GK Molniya KPL 62.8 deg 693x39672 km 12A Feb 14 Kosmos-2002 ? GK Kosmos KPL 65.8 deg 181x2052 km 13A Feb 14 Navstar GPS 14? USAF USAF Delta 184 CCAFS 55.1 deg 19861x20269 km 14A Feb 15 Molniya-1 MSvyazi GK Molniya KB 63.0 deg 475x39879 km 15A Feb 17 Kosmos-2003 GRU GK Soyuz KPL Landed KRZ Mar 3 16A Feb 21 Akebono (EXOS-D) ISAS ISAS Mu-3SII-3 KagSC 75.1 deg 281x10428 km 17A Feb 22 Kosmos-2004 VMS GK Kosmos KPL 83.0 deg 974x1018 km 18A Feb 28 Meteor-2 GUGMS GK Tsiklon KPL 82.5 deg 940x962 km 19A Mar 3 Kosmos-2005 GRU GK Soyuz KPL 62.8 deg 171x291 km 20A Mar 6 JCSAT 1 JCSAT AE Ariane V29 CSG GEO at 152 deg E 20B Mar 6 Meteosat 4 (MOP 1) EUMETSAT " nr. GEO,at 7W, drift E 21A Mar 13 OV-103 Discovery NASA NASA STS 29 KSC Landed EAFB Mar 18 21B Mar 13 TDRS 4 Contel " GEO 168W drifting E 22A Mar 14 Kosmos-2006 GRU GK Soyuz KPL Landed KRZ Mar 31 23A Mar 14 Progress-41 GK GK Soyuz KB Docked to Mir,358x383 km 24A Mar 23 Kosmos-2007 GRU GK Soyuz KB 64.7 deg, 217x304 km 25A Mar 24 Kosmos-2008 VMF? GK Kosmos KPL 74 deg 1395x1471 km 25B Mar 24 Kosmos-2009 VMF? " 74 deg 1409x1473 km 25C Mar 24 Kosmos-2010 VMF? " 74 deg 1425x1472 km 25D Mar 24 Kosmos-2011 VMF? " 74 deg 1440x1472 km 25E Mar 24 Kosmos-2012 VMF? " 74 deg 1457x1472 km 25F Mar 24 Kosmos-2013 VMF? " 74 deg 1465x1481 km 25G Mar 24 Kosmos-2014 VMF? " 74 deg 1471x1492 km 25H Mar 24 Kosmos-2015 VMF? " 74 deg 1470x1511 km 26A Mar 24 Delta Star (USA-36) SDIO USAF Delta 183 CCAFS 47.7 deg 482x503 km ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Acronyms: AE Arianespace, Inc. CCAFS Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida Contel Continental Telephone Inc. (USA) CSG Centre Spatial Guyanais, Kourou, Guyane, S. America EAFB Edwards AFB, California EUMETSAT European Meteorological Satellite Organization GEO Geostationary Earth Orbit GK Glavkosmos SSSR (Soviet Central Space Agency) GPS Global Positioning System GRU Glavnoye Razvedivatel'noye Upravileniye (Soviet Military Intelligence) INTELSAT International Telecommunications Satellite Organization IOR Indian Ocean Region ISAS Institute for Space and Astronautical Sciences, Japan JCSAT Japan Satellite Communications Co. KagSC Kagoshima Space Center, Kagoshima, Japan KB Kosmodrom Baykonur, Kazakhstan KGB Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti SSSR (Soviet State Security Committee) KPL Kosmodrom Plesetsk, Russia KRZ Kazakhstan Recovery Zone (* my nomenclature) KSC Kennedy Space Center, Florida MOP Meteosat Operational Programme MSvyazi Ministerstvo Svyazi (Soviet Ministry of Communications) NASA US National Aeronautics and Space Administration POR Pacific Ocean Region PVO Protivo-Vosdushnaya Oborona (Soviet Air Defense Force) SDIO Strategic Defense Initiative Organization, US Dept of Defense STS Space Transportation System TDRS Tracking and Data Relay Satellite TsP GUGK Tsentr "Priroda",Glavniye Upravileniye Geodesiy i Kartographiy ("Nature" Center, Soviet Central Geodesy and Cartography Agency) USAF United States Air Force VMF Voenno-Morskoy Flot (Soviet Navy) ------------------------------ Date: 13 Apr 89 05:51:22 GMT From: mcvax!ukc!acorn!ixi!clive@uunet.uu.net (Clive) Subject: UK astronaut to be launched by Soviets According to BBC Ceefax news this morning (Thursday), the UK's first astronaut will be launched by the Soviets in 1991. The astronaut will spend a maximum of two weeks on Mir. A formal agreement will be signed tomorrow. The item stated that plans for a Briton to fly on the shuttle were abandoned after Challenger. -- Clive D.W. Feather clive@ixi.uucp IXI Limited ...!mcvax!ukc!acorn!ixi!clive (untested) +44 223 462 131 ------------------------------ End of SPACE Digest V9 #369 *******************