Space Digest Wed, 28 Jul 93 Volume 16 : Issue 935 Today's Topics: 11 planets ALEXIS Satellite "First Light" Buran Hype Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 at Jupiter (2 msgs) Cryogenic Rockets Good news on Delta Clipper confirmed Karla: can anyone give me some information on a new object called Karla ? Low Tech Alternatives, Info Post it here! (2 msgs) Mir-shuttle hook up NASA, Space Advertising! PR Work is needed. Satellite Assembly/Factory in Space! (2 msgs) SPACE TRIVIA LIST Welcome to the Space Digest!! Please send your messages to "space@isu.isunet.edu", and (un)subscription requests of the form "Subscribe Space " to one of these addresses: listserv@uga (BITNET), rice::boyle (SPAN/NSInet), utadnx::utspan::rice::boyle (THENET), or space-REQUEST@isu.isunet.edu (Internet). ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 27 Jul 93 02:32:00 BST From: h.hillbrath@genie.geis.com Subject: > Date: Sun, 25 Jul 1993 00:03:07 GMT > Henry Spencer writes: > Fuel costs have never been a significant part of even NASA's launch costs. > Liquid oxygen is commercially available in large quantities in most parts > of the US -- just place an order and let the suppliers worry about how > to get it to you. Liquid hydrogen is a bit harder to come by, but even > it is commercially available in a reasonable number of areas. Henry is, as usual, right about all this. A few years ago, I was having a drink in a Huntsville bar, and got to talking to a guy who was the chief of government marketing for the major supplier of LO2 and LH2 (or LOX and LH2, in the case of NASA) to NASA. (We had met at some meeting we were both attending, I don't want anyone to think I talk to strange people in bars. He will have to make up his own story as to why he was talking to a strange person. ) He was remarking that the way things were going, that NASA was already not a major consumer of LH2 and getting smaller by the day. (they have never been a major LO2 customer, not in the NASA days, and maybe not ever.) I was quite surprised by that, and asked where most of the LH2 went, and he said that most of it is used for processing atmospheres in the electronic chip manufacturing industry. (It is cheaper to deliver as liquid and gasify, than to ship as gas.) I subsequently read a very fascinating book on industrial accidents, ("Major Chemical Hazards" by V. C. Marshall) and the author was quite interested in the relative safety of various "volatile" liquids, and he was of the opinion, though he could not get exact statistics, that hydrogen was greatly under represented in the accident history. There have been some serious explosions involving methane, but most of the really scary ones have been propane, LPG, etc. and the worst single one was in a nylon plant involving cyclohexane (which was, admittedly, superheated at atmospheric pressure.) and he surmised that hydrogen is probably too light to ever have an unconfined "Vapor Cloud Detonation" under accident conditions. (The Hindenberg is not a counter example, as it did not detonate, but burned very smoothly and politely. Marshall is English, and in typical English fashion, he had rooted out all the airship accidents that ever were, and even in cases where hydrogen filled airships were being bombed, machine gunned, subjected to fire from a variety of anti aircraft guns, were caught in burning hangers, etc. he could only find one very poorly documented report of one which was shot down over Britain which was said to have broken a few windows. The nylon plant took out a reinforced concrete control room and a good part of Flixborough, England, the adjacent town.) (Understand, you DO NOT want to be in a building, or anything that remotely resembles a building, that has free hydrogen in it!) It is also interesting that the government consumption of helium, gaseous or liquid, is no longer a dominant part of the market, either, so much for being on the cutting edge of technology. Henry S. Hillbrath ---------------------------------------------------------- NO ONE believes an analysis... | EVERYONE believes a.test... - except the guy who did it. | - except the guy who did it. T. M. ("Scotty") Davidson ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 28 Jul 1993 04:26:02 GMT From: Michael Moroney Subject: 11 planets Newsgroups: sci.space debbiet@tecnet1.jcte.jcs.mil writes: >I keep wondering. Seems to me I've read there is a planet >closer to the sun than Mercury. One which has an orbit which >most of the time we earthlings can't see. Better start reading books newer than the early 1900s. The orbit of Mercury precess and this was not explainable then except by hypothesizing a planet inside its orbit. Attempts to find it failed. But then along came Einstein whose Relativity theories explain what's going on with Mercury, and its orbit now shows there is no such planet there. > Also seems I >remember there is a planet the other side of Pluto. Now A few iceballs have been recently found out there but they are too small to be planets. Best described as asteroids or giant comets. -Mike ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 28 Jul 1993 06:28:23 GMT From: Jeffrey J Bloch Subject: ALEXIS Satellite "First Light" Newsgroups: sci.space LOS ALAMOS NATIONAL LABORATORY CONTACT: John R. Gustafson, (505) 667-7000 CompuServe Acct: 71742,1311 "FIRST LIGHT" FOR ALEXIS LOS ALAMOS, N.M., July 27, 1993 - Los Alamos National Laboratory scientists early Tuesday morning powered up one of the six X-ray telescopes on the ALEXIS satellite and operated the novel instrument for the first time in orbit. The ALEXIS telescopes capture and focus "soft," or low-energy, X-rays. Other telescopes onboard ALEXIS will be turned on later this week, building toward all-out astronomical observations with the full suite of telescopes. "All indications are that the telescope worked beautifully," said Jeff Bloch, lead scientist for the X-ray telescope experiment. "We adjusted the voltage on the telescope's detector until we were getting decent count rates for photons detected and then had about a four-minute exposure at that voltage level. There is exciting information in this data that we need for running the telescopes for real astronomical work." "First light" is a special time for telescopes, but does not represent the start of regular observations. The ALEXIS team needs to determine the optimum operating conditions for the telescopes and measure the background radiation from sources in the near-Earth environment so those effects can be separated from the astrophysical X-ray emissions of interest. ALEXIS, which stands for Array of Low-Energy X-ray Imaging Sensors, is Los Alamos' first full-scale entry into the small satellite field. The $17 million satellite, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Intelligence and National Security, was designed and built by a laboratory-industry team led by Los Alamos and is operated from a ground station at the Laboratory. "ALEXIS is first and foremost a technology demonstration mission," said Bill Priedhorsky, ALEXIS project leader. In addition to the six X-ray telecopes, ALEXIS carries a broadband radio experiment called Blackbeard, which has been used successfully in a series of experiments that started July 11. Both experiments on ALEXIS were built to demonstrate advanced instrumentation for possible use in future space systems to detect nuclear weapons proliferation, but "by testing the technology with astrophysical and atmospheric sources we can conduct valuable scientific studies," Priedhorsky said. Data from ALEXIS' X-ray telescopes, for example, will be made available to researchers through NASA's astrophysical data program. The coffee-can-sized telescopes, each with a 30-degree-wide view of the sky, use recently developed multilayered coatings on their curved mirrors to reflect and focus X-rays much the way that optical telescopes focus visible light. ALEXIS' telescopes will monitor the entire sky in three separate low-energy X-ray windows: 62 electron-Volts, 72 eV and 93 eV, respectively. A typical medical X-ray, by comparison, has an energy of 80,000 eV. The telescopes' combination of wide-field view and precise energy resolution offer a unique view of the cosmos that complements information being returned by other orbiting observatories. The detectors on the X-ray telescopes were built by the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. The detectors have to time precisely the arrival of each X-ray photon so researchers can determine where the spinning satellite was pointing when the photon arrived. The ALEXIS team will need to "despin" the data to reconstruct an unblurred picture of the sky, a task complicated because damage ALEXIS suffered during launch requires that the computer programs to reconstruct the X-ray images be rewritten from scratch. ALEXIS was launched April 25 on a U.S. Air Force Pegasus booster built by Orbital Sciences Corp. One of the satellite's solar panels was damaged during the launch phase and the satellite was not brought under control until July 5. The ALEXIS team is still learning how to compensate for the damage to the satellite in advancing to full-scale operations. Los Alamos National Laboratory is a multidisciplinary research organization that applies science and technology to problems of national security ranging from defense to energy research. It is operated by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy. -30- ------------------------------ Date: 27 Jul 1993 21:23:03 -0400 From: Pat Subject: Buran Hype Newsgroups: sci.space | |Good question, this should be in the FAQ if its not already... | Jon. |FBIS is the Foreign Broadcast Information Service which is |done by the CIA, gets all kinds of foreign radio, television, |etc. broadcasts which is of an informational nature and translates it. |They've been doing it since just after WWII according to a book |I read recently. Apparently JPRS does the same thing with print |media. Together they put it all in either daily or periodic reports. |The Dept. of Commerce, National Technical Information Service sells |them to anyone. They cover many countries and many topics mostly |of political and technological nature. NTIS has a nice catalog of |these products. See below for excerpt from their catalog. | |For about $75 a year you can subscribe to the "JPRS Report: Science & |Technology: Central Eurasia: Space" and get most of the significant articles |on space subjects published in the CIS from newspaper and TV news |to technical journals. Its published about every 2-3 months according to |when they can fill up 50 or so pages. | |I kind of wish they would do the same for the USA... BTW: NTIS says |they are funded only by the sales of the reports but I doubt that includes |the cost of gathering or translating... | Nexis provides some similiar services. According to Sandra the tiger, Dialog, DOw Jones, BRS, NewsNet, and UMI , are also good services. They are expensive, but many university libraries provide these. pat -- God put me on this Earth to accomplish certain things. Right now, I am so far behind, I will never die. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 28 Jul 1993 01:52:40 GMT From: Dave Michelson Subject: Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 at Jupiter Newsgroups: sci.space,sci.astro Maclean's (Canada's weekly newsmagazine) ran a piece on Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 in the August 2, 1993 issue (p. 43). Highlights: * "the impact [of the comet at Jupiter] will create a force as much as two billion times as powerful as the bomb that devastated HIroshima.." * "an American spacecraft, the Galileo, that is due to reach Jupiter in 1995, will be in a position from which it can record the event next July." (comment apparently (but not explicitly) attributed to Jim Wilson, a JPL spokesman) * photo and mini-bio of Montreal-born David Levy So, Dave, tell us about the camera that you're holding in the photo.... -- Dave Michelson -- davem@ee.ubc.ca -- University of British Columbia ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 28 Jul 1993 06:52:03 GMT From: Dave Tholen Subject: Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 at Jupiter Newsgroups: sci.space,sci.astro Dave Michelson writes: > Maclean's (Canada's weekly newsmagazine) ran a piece on > Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 in the August 2, 1993 issue (p. 43). > > Highlights: > > * "an American spacecraft, the Galileo, that is due to reach Jupiter in > 1995, will be in a position from which it can record the event next > July." Atmospheric entry is almost precisely on the limb of Jupiter as seen from Galileo, though the uncertainty in the position is still a few degrees. Voyager 2 will have a direct view nearly centered, while Voyager 1 will be able to view it near the limb. Jupiter currently subtends only two pixels, however. I understand that they are looking into the possibility of reactivating the Voyager cameras for this event, but the main difficulty is in reassembling the team of people who knew how to run those systems. Jupiter will be in conjunction with the Sun as viewed from Mars Observer. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 27 Jul 93 04:40:00 BST From: h.hillbrath@genie.geis.com Subject: Cryogenic Rockets > Date: 24 Jul 93 21:11:55 GMT > Dave Michelson Writes: > The term "cryogenic motor" is usually reserved for engines > which use both a cryogenic fuel *and* a cryogenic oxidizer. I had been in the business about 30 years before I ever heard the term, at all, and it was used to apply exclusively to LH2 engines, in order to make, what I considered the utterly stupid point that "cryogenic engines" have lower reliability than non cryogenic ones, though it was, at that time, never hydrogen systems that were involved in the failures. I protest every time the term is used, and I find it is almost always by non propulsion types. One thing I do know, liquid rockets do not have "MOTORS." They are always called "engines." No reason, but if you call them motors, they know you are not a propulsion guy, on the spot. It use to be that LOX/LO2 was like that, in some places you could just about get your self punched out for using the "wrong one." > They have never been used in ICBMs (or, for that matter, IRBM's). True fact. >The US maintained the Titan missiles up until maybe the > mid-80s when the last one was taken out of service somewhere > in the South (Alabama?) There was never any operational ICBM in Alabama, Titan or otherwise. There were some in Arkansas, but what the heck, they are pretty much the same dull, dreary sorts of places. > Not quite. The Titan II used "room temperature" hypergolic fuels that could be stored for months. I was a junior engineer at General Dynamics when the Titan II competition too place. I am not sure of the exact sequence, but GD actually proposed a very minimal modification to the Atlas F series to store LO2 in it full time. The Air Force had its mind made up, but I am totally convinced that GD was correct, and that storing the LO2 in the missile would have caused almost no problems, where as the storables caused enormous problems, and expense. It never pays to be right when your customer is wrong. (The LO2, after all, is stored in a tank only a few feet away, for the same length of time, anyway. It turns out that there are more problems with storing the RP-1 in the tank for a year at a time than LO2, by far.) >>With solid motors, all you have to do is > >worry about the guidance and other avionics boxes from going >> down - they're far better as strategic forces. The bonds cracking, and the grain slumping, etc. etc. I have worked both liquids and solids, the best one is the one on the other side of the fence. > Date: Sun, 25 Jul 1993 00:12:31 GMT > Henry Spencer writes: > To minimize confusion, it is important to understand that Titan I and Titan II were *completely* different missiles, with only the name in common. I agree with that, and it is probably the right advice for "non experts." yet, I think there may be more similarity, under the skin than that statement suggests. I am more familiar with the engines in this case than the vehicles, but from time to time, I have discussed this with the engine supplier (Aerojet), especially, what would be required to convert the Titan II engines to LO2/RP-1 and the usual answer they give is "not very much" as many of the pieces are the same as the Titan I engines. For the most part, it was stuff that was removed that would have to be reinvented and put back on, like the ignition system for the main chamber and the gas generator. There was a change in the second stage diameter, which makes them pretty easy to tell apart. One can also point out that there have been three really fundamentally different Atlas configurations, the A, which was only a "demonstrator" with no sustainer, and no staging, the B, C, D, up through what ever they call them now, Atlas I, Atlas II, etc. and the E and F series, which were the "real" operational missiles and which are at least as different as the T-I and T-II, except they both use the same propellant. There are family resemblances, of course, but there aren't any pieces that match. There have been something a bit over 600 Atlas launches, and at least a third of them were Es and Fs (which only a experienced egg candler can tell apart without a printed program.) ------------------------------ Date: 27 Jul 1993 21:05:40 -0400 From: Pat Subject: Good news on Delta Clipper confirmed Newsgroups: sci.space,talk.politics.space Well, they certainly like thank you calls far more then calls asking for support. pat -- God put me on this Earth to accomplish certain things. Right now, I am so far behind, I will never die. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 26 Jul 1993 08:05:56 GMT From: Pete Phillips Subject: Karla: can anyone give me some information on a new object called Karla ? Newsgroups: sci.space Hi, I have heard about a new body in space called Karla, but couldn't see anything about it in New Scientist. Could someone please mail me a bries summary and a reference ? I don't read this newsgroup, so mail would be appreciated. thanks in advance, Pete -- Pete Phillips, Deputy Director, Surgical Materials Testing Lab, Bridgend General Hospital, S. Wales. 0656-652166 pete@smtl.demon.co.uk -- "The Four Horse Oppressors of the Apocalypse were Nutritional Deprivation, State of Belligerency, Widespread Transmittable Condition and Terminal Inconvenience" - Official Politically Correct Dictionary -- Pete Phillips, Deputy Director, Surgical Materials Testing Lab, Bridgend General Hospital, S. Wales. 0656-652166 pete@smtl.demon.co.uk -- "The Four Horse Oppressors of the Apocalypse were Nutritional ------------------------------ Date: 28 Jul 1993 00:30:51 GMT From: George William Herbert Subject: Low Tech Alternatives, Info Post it here! Newsgroups: sci.space In article jim@pnet01.cts.com (Jim Bowery) writes: >George William Herbert writes: > >I was being reasonably conservative, and assuming that there would be >a variety of businesses (ie: several SMALL businesses) around to ensure >that one of them would actually achieve something like their projected >price reductions (in addition to being pressured into actually reducing > price by competition rather than having one of try to pull an OSC on > the rest via political connections & "strategic partnerships"). I was sort of hoping Delta Clipper would be such competition, regardless of where it's coming from. If you insist on more competition, go ahead and start some. >>and won't go much lower. I'm not sure there will be >>enough market demand to push that lower until 2005-2010. > >You sound like the mainframe or mini manufacturers of the early 70's >talking about the demand for computers. The market is a lot more >flexible than anyone now imagines -- given a reasonably free market. Space access has never been, and is not likely to soon be, as cheap as computers ever have been expensive. Damn right that the market is flexible, but _how_ flexible, how quickly, and who's going to be flexing? If everything goes as well as I'm hoping, and Retro's commercial operations are flying in late 95 or early 96, how long does it take for either new people to enter the business or old customers to change the way they do business and start building cheaper sattelites? 5 years, the historical time line? 10, due to the massive restructuring of the whole industry this will require? 2 years due to some nutcase entrepreneur who will make good? I refuse to try and predict this, and basing a business plan on such a prediction would be doubly foolish. >>[Side note to the uninitiated: Peter Diamandis, one of ISU's >>founders, is currently on his second launch services company >>and does a graphic "this is what starting a business is like" >>lecture. 8-) -gwh ISU '92] > >Any reasonable venture capitalist would look at Diamandis's FIRST launch >launch services company more closely than his business plan for his second -- >and he wouldn't take Diamandis's version of the story as his primary source >of info. Personally, I would never invest in anything associated with >ISU due to my opinion, formed when I met him in Washington D.C. around 1984 >and repeatedly confirmed since then, of Todd Hawley. Your company "Retro" >included. I don't need to look at your business plan to see it isn't worth >my time to bother. All I need is to see you were at ISU and that you didn't >come away with a negative opinion of the place. Gee, and one of the first five employees of OSC was telling me the exact same suggestions Diamandis had, too. I guess you're the last word, Jim. >>The only problem with this is that Space isn't inherently a small-business >>environment. > >No, but high technology startups ARE inherently small-business environments. And high-technology startups that succeed rapidly grow. I'm not planning on having anywhere near 50 employees when flights begin. Is this small enough? >>The business plan for Retro for example, at the _lowest_ >>expected flight rate, is making ten million dollars a year in 1995 or 96, >>and the high end of the possible growth curve has us in the half-billion >>range by 1998. So do I become a bad guy once I start making serious >>money? > >No, you become a bad guy once you achieve the ISU dream of creating the >"new generation" of space bureaucracy -- even if in the private sector, >which, I'll admit, wouldn't be as bad as stealing taxpayer money to do so. > >Basically, however, your definition of "small business" is flawed in >such a way as to expose your ideology: Dollar volume => number of >employees. This is one step away from the idea that "the ultimate > basis of value is the man-hour" which is the basic error of Marx. > >A "small business" has few employees, regardless of its volume of >business or level of profitability. > >When you get over the ISU-promoted dream of becoming the new GM of space >you'll recognize that about the time you successfully develop your technology >your best tactic is to license it to someone who can actually manage large >production bureaucracies well, like our friends in the orient, and then >use your royalty stream to move on to the next technical frontier (as well > as lobbying the State Dept. to get off their duffs and start enforcing > U.S. intellectual property rights abroad rather than giving them away > in bogus patent treaties). Basically, accept your unique place in the >world as an American -- you're a "looney inventor" who belongs NO WHERE >on ANY organizational chart, but who deserves lots of royalties (when > you turn out to have been more lonely than looney). I'm amazed at how much you can divine from my posts, Jim. Nearly all of it wrong. My eventual plan is to form a number of related small companies to handle various business areas I want to get in to; launch services, orbital operations, science, commsats, etc. These are not planned as big companies, personel-wise. Launch Services should be a 35 tech person company when operations start up for real about 2 years in, 15 engineers, 20 techs and operations folks. Plus a couple of marketing, couple of accounting, and some secretaries and office assistants. Counting them, should be under 50 total. If I sell 12 launches a year instead of 2, I need twice that many ops employees, perhaps 3 times as many. As I develop larger, more capable launchers, I may need to increase the number of engineers, but that's the only reason I would do so. I suspect that 25 engineers will be enough to develop my second-generation vehicles about two or three years after the first, so that's not a lot of growth. I'd like to keep the engineering and ops teams at 20 people each, but both will probably end up bigger due to market force demands. I don't think I can fly 12 missions with 20 people, nor develop a HLV with 15 engineers. And I want to do both. OSC ended up with 200 employees in 3 years. That's not a risk here, unless I have a hundred launch customers.... Really. The other areas I want to work in, I also want to keep the teams small (20ish people in eng and prod each, max) unless market demand is really high. I would like to know how you expect the companies to stay small, Jim; if say 3 companies end up sharing the current world market, that's 10 launches each, and I can't imagine doing that with less than 50 production and operations staff. If you're right and market volume grows a lot, that's a whole lot more. I don't want to sell out to someone who can "manage a production stream" because they'll then become a monolith who are unlikely to approve of further radical changes in the launch services market, which I would eventually like to see happen in a second wave past what I want to do. I'm willing to _be_ that next wave, if I can be, since greed isn't #1 on my motivations for doing all of this. Daewoo Launch isn't likely to be so willing, at least not at first. Who knows, though. I may eventually end up making that move. But I'll do it for my reasons, at my time, not because you think I'm structurally incapable of making a tight and light company appropriately sized for the environment. I may be a "Loony Inventor", but I have enough social and management skills to see a project through all the way to long-term production, and if I have my say about it the company will damn well be structured to let me keep on inventing and innovating as well. If that doesn't work, we'll see what happens then. -george william herbert Retro Aerospace ------------------------------ Date: 28 Jul 1993 00:52:43 GMT From: George William Herbert Subject: Low Tech Alternatives, Info Post it here! Newsgroups: sci.space In article <1993Jul27.232323.4594@aio.jsc.nasa.gov> mancus@pat.mdc.com (Keith Mancus) writes: > Personally, I define a small business in terms of number of people >employed rather than $$$ earned. The reason for this is that bureaucracy, >the enemy of creativity, correlates well with the number of employees. >So no, earn as much as you can, just don't turn into an empire. Have no fear. Is a 15 person engineering staff (first generation of vehicles) growing to 25 (second generation, 1998ish) small enough? Production and ops staff should be scaleable with volume of flights if I fly 4 or more flights a year, and believe me, I'm gonna try and keep the number low. [See my more volumnous post replying to Jim Bowery for more info] >| "Black powder and alcohol, when your states and cities fall, | >| when your back's against the wall...." -Leslie Fish | Totally off the subject, but _where_ has Leslie Fish dissapeared to? -george william herbert Retro Aerospace ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 28 Jul 1993 05:48:22 GMT From: stephen voss Subject: Mir-shuttle hook up Newsgroups: sci.space I read this one in the Miami Herald. I believe it is scheduled for 1997 ------------------------------ Date: 28 Jul 1993 01:39:26 GMT From: "Robert A. Lentz" Subject: NASA, Space Advertising! PR Work is needed. Newsgroups: sci.space In article <1993Jul25.160959.22558@ke4zv.uucp> gary@ke4zv.UUCP (Gary Coffman) writes: >In article <1993Jul21.003245.1@aurora.alaska.edu> nsmca@aurora.alaska.edu writes: >>NASA and other space realted companies/organizations need to do more >>advertising, and PR work.. Also open up to the 20th Century.. > >Sadly, because I too would like to see massive space colonization in >my lifetime, PR is not a viable approach. Space already has a massive >PR presence for free thanks to science fiction and Startrek and activist >groups like this one. It's very unlikely that people who would be attracted >by space PR aren't already on board. What's needed for space exploitation >to succeed is simple to define and difficult to do; show a profit. And then there was this NASA center higher-up (memory really foggy on his exact position by now) back at the '89 ISDC here in Chicago who while showing us his wonderful view-graphs, was bragging about the three people with Mac II's he had outside his office who produced these things. I certainly hope they were all volunteers and donated equipment... (And people wonder where NASA gets something of a bad reputation from...) -Robert Lentz ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 28 Jul 1993 00:08:38 GMT From: Keith Mancus Subject: Satellite Assembly/Factory in Space! Newsgroups: sci.space I worked on OMV for about 6 months (in a very junior role) right before it was cancelled; my work involved combining Shuttle-C (remember that?) with OMV to get payloads to SSF, plus some work on rendezvous final approach. This was very roughly the second half of 1989, through about March 1990. testa@woody.jsc.nasa.gov (Andy Testa) writes: >The OMV was unmanned and remotely piloted. Trouble was, everyone wanted to >use it, and many of the uses conflicted. The program became overburdened >with requirements and the sales pitch didn't live up to the expanding cost >and capability (sound familiar?). The program underwent several redesigns >to bring it back into line with the budget (familiar again?) and was >eventually cancelled. This eliminated one of the big original selling points >for Freedom: satellite retrieval and servicing. By cancelling OMV, the >servicing mission was cancelled. The original pre-descoped OMV was a pretty good vehicle. The major limitation was the 40 hour battery lifetime (plus 25% reserve). There was plenty of fuel on board, almost TOO much fuel, because you had to use lots of extra delta-V in order to perform the mission within the battery limits. There was a GPS receiver, lights for docking, cameras in several places, etc. I feel sure the battery problem could have been corrected in a "Block II" version after the first one was flying. Then the program went over budget by, oh, $15M or so. I can't remember the actual number. The result was a major "de-scope", which removed all kinds of capabilities that greatly limited the uses to which the finished vehicle could be put. The killer was the removal of GPS (estimated savings of $6.6M; don't ask me why a GPS receiver has to cost that much!). This would have forced ground tracking to track the OMV for a couple of orbits between burns, whereas GPS would have given the new orbital elements almost instantaneously. The already-too-short mission lifetime (due to the battery limit) was compressed further, with the result that the vehicle was almost useless. A major study concluded just that, and the program was killed. A few months later, the same groups that had wanted the original OMV (not the de-scoped version!) started agitating for a new satellite servicing vehicle. The requirement for one had *not* gone away, but somehow that was lost in the confusion. OMV cost us approximately $750M, and yielded nothing that I am aware of that's still used in any program. >OMV had some good capabilities. At one point it was tasked to bring a dual >armed dexterous robot (FTS- Flight Telerobotic Servicer. Another doomed >station component, but one that still lives in the world of Shuttle tests: >look for a flight with an experimental dexterous arm in the payload bay >in the future. It's FTS) along with it to do on site telerobotic repairs. >I believe HST was built with OMV interfaces on its bottom in anticipation >of future servicing flights. Well, actually, we looked extensively at SSF construction using FTS. (I moved to SSF assembly ops after OMV was cancelled.) It had some uses, but the Canadian SPDM (Special Purpose Dextrous Manipulator) appeared to be better, so FTS was canned. So we didn't really lose much there. SPDM work is continuing as we speak; I was in a meeting just today that involved some SPDM analysis. -- Keith Mancus N5WVR "Black powder and alcohol, when your states and cities fall, when your back's against the wall...." -Leslie Fish ------------------------------ Date: 27 Jul 1993 21:36:20 -0400 From: Pat Subject: Satellite Assembly/Factory in Space! Newsgroups: sci.space THe original Un trimmed OMV. How much was it looking to Weigh. How much would one cost? what were the program DDTE costs running? What was it's rough dimensions? pat -- God put me on this Earth to accomplish certain things. Right now, I am so far behind, I will never die. ------------------------------ Date: 27 Jul 93 16:37:35 -0600 From: elliottb@cnsvax.uwec.edu Subject: SPACE TRIVIA LIST Newsgroups: sci.space Regarding lunar orbit or not for Apollo 13 I remember well waiting _ with the rest of the world _ for the moment that the signal from the Apollo spacecraft was detected after Apollo went behind the moon. If the spacecraft did not slow behind the moon with a LOI burn the signal would be picked up sooner that it would be if the burn had been effective in slowing the spacecraft and placing it in a lunar orbit. Any mid course correction would not be enough to keep the moons gravity from accelerating apollo to better than escape velocity. The energy must be extracted at perilune to be most effective. Apollo 13 did not go into lunar orbit but just looped around the moon as Chris Jones said. Bob Elliott Hobbs Observatory Fall Creek, Wisconsin (elliottb@cnsvax.uwec.edu) ------------------------------ End of Space Digest Volume 16 : Issue 935 ------------------------------