Return-path: X-Andrew-Authenticated-as: 7997;andrew.cmu.edu;Ted Anderson Received: from beak.andrew.cmu.edu via trymail for +dist+/afs/andrew.cmu.edu/usr11/tm2b/space/space.dl@andrew.cmu.edu (->+dist+/afs/andrew.cmu.edu/usr11/tm2b/space/space.dl) (->ota+space.digests) ID ; Tue, 19 Dec 89 01:25:47 -0500 (EST) Message-ID: Reply-To: space+@Andrew.CMU.EDU From: space-request+@Andrew.CMU.EDU To: space+@Andrew.CMU.EDU Date: Tue, 19 Dec 89 01:25:19 -0500 (EST) 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!henry@uunet.uu.net (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 henry@zoo.toronto.edu ------------------------------ Date: 18 Dec 89 04:03:25 GMT From: swrinde!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!samsung!munnari.oz.au!basser!metro!bunyip!miw@ucsd.edu (Mark Williams) Subject: Re: New years eve 1999 henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) writes: >In article <1642.258926e7@cc.helsinki.fi> sundius@cc.helsinki.fi 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 miw@cc.uq.oz ------------------------------ Date: 18 Dec 89 17:30:13 GMT From: bfmny0!tneff@uunet.uu.net (Tom Neff) Subject: Re: the response to Jim Bowery's parody In article <129352@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> jmck@sun.UUCP (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 : )%): tneff%bfmny@UUNET.UU.NET Station Freedom" - release 1989-9891 :(%( : ...!uunet!bfmny0!tneff ------------------------------ Date: 16 Dec 89 22:51:59 GMT From: ibmpa!szabonj@uunet.uu.net (Nick Szabo) Subject: Re: NASA Reform White Paper, Part 1 of 2 (long) In article <8912132056.AA06751@trout.nosc.mil> jim@pnet01.cts.COM (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 szabonj@ibmpa.tcspa.ibm.com uunet!ibmsupt!szabonj ------------------------------ Date: 18 Dec 89 17:50:59 GMT From: cs.utexas.edu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!utgpu!utzoo!kcarroll@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu (Kieran A. Carroll) Subject: Coelecanths dietz@cs.rochester.edu (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 kcarroll@zoo.toronto.edu ------------------------------ Date: 18 Dec 89 06:48:57 GMT From: norge!jmck@sun.com (John McKernan) Subject: Re: Scientific value of Apollo (was Re: Motives) In article <1989Dec12.193633.28964@utzoo.uucp> henry@utzoo.uucp (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. jmck@sun.com 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!steve@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu (Steve Nuchia) Subject: Re: Space industry projects: dismantling moons and asteroids In article <25145@cup.portal.com> hkhenson@cup.portal.com (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 (713) 964-2462 "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!yee@ames.arc.nasa.gov (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 *******************