Space & Astronomy/Space and Astronomy (October 1993).iso/mac/TEXT/SPACEDIG/V08/V8_273.TXT

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Date: Thu, 14 Jul 88 19:06:50 PDT
From: Ted Anderson <[e-mail]>
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Subject: SPACE Digest V8 #273

SPACE Digest                                      Volume 8 : Issue 273

Today's Topics:
               News on Shuttle oxidizer
               Re: Mir elements
       Re: Hawaiian spaceport? (Was: Re: SPACE Digest V8 #221)
                 data
               Re: Cometesimals
              Ariane 4 successfully flys
    Soyuz TM-5 update, future missions & new info about Soyuz T-14
               recent gender discussion
            Pandora's case is still open.
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Tue, 14 Jun 88 16:32:01 PST
From: Peter Scott <[e-mail]>
Subject: News on Shuttle oxidizer
X-Vms-Mail-To: EXOS%"[e-mail]"

From the JPL UNIVERSE, June 10:

"Shuttle's oxidizer supply assured despite explosion"

The explosion of the Pacific Engineering and Production Co. plant at
Henderson, Nev., May 4, destroyed one of the two facilities capable of
producing ammonium perchlorate, the oxidizer used in all solid-propellant
rocket motors.

The only other manufacturer of ammonium perchlorate is Kerr-McGee Corp.
NASA said there is sufficient ammonium perchlorate on hand for the first
four shuttle missions beginning with STS 26, now scheduled for late August.

The oxidizer for the fifth mission (Magellan) is nearly ready at Kerr-McGee.

NASA has indicated that two key JPL projects, Magellan and Galileo, have a
high priority.

JPL director Lew Allen has been in consultation with NASA Headquarters about
the status of the problem.

The Kerr-McGee plant at Henderson was closed following the explosion on the
recommendation of a six-member safety panel.

The firm was scheduled to resume production this week and has said it could
produce up to 40 million pounds per year of the chemical.

That is still less than the combined pre-explosion production capacity of
Kerr-McGee and Pacific Engineering of 62 million pounds per year.

The production amount of 40 million pounds per year is still less than is
needed by all users, including NASA, Department of Defense, and commercial.

There will be an allocation process developed among the DoD, NASA and the
commercial users.

It takes 1.7 million pounds of the oxidizer to launch one shuttle.

The U.S. Air Force and NASA are considering alternatives for construction
of a new plant for the production of ammonium perchlorate.  Such a facility
may take as much as two years to build and begin full production.

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

I want you to know it took a heroic effort to avoid snide editorial comments
during the above...


Peter Scott ([e-mail])

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

Date: 14 Jun 88 03:31:00 GMT
From: [e-mail]
Subject: Re: Mir elements


I recommend against using Goddard's latest set of Mir elements (epoch
date 88158.85227235) -- they give a poorer fit than the set that they
gave for Progress 36 late last week.

Using the P36 elements, I observed Mir tonight over Champaign, IL; it
appeared roughly seven seconds early, for those that are into tweaking
the B* term.

NOTE: P36 has been de-orbited; these elements date from a point at
  which it was still docked to the Mir/Kvant complex.

For those that missed them the first time, the P36 element set I used
was:

Satellite: Progress 36
Catalog id 19117
Element set  26
Epoch: 88156.88193794
Inclination:  51.6138 degrees
RA of node: 130.3633 degrees
Eccentricity:  0.0004000
Argument of perigee:  18.9284 degrees
Mean anomaly: 341.1013 degrees
Mean motion: 15.72231650 revs/day
Mean motion acceleration: 0.00015998 * 2 revs/day/day
Epoch Revolution:   361

Semimajor axis:    6730.62 km
Apogee height*:     355.15 km
Perigee height*:     349.76 km


        Source: NASA Goddard via T.S.Kelso's `Celestial RCP/M'

* Apogee and perigee altitudes are referred to the mean equatorial
  radius of the Earth (6378.15 km), and not to the local radius of the
  geoid.  They are only approximate, and should not be used for orbit
  prediction.

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

Date: 13 Jun 88 18:54:54 GMT
From: mnetor!utzoo![e-mail]  (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: Hawaiian spaceport? (Was: Re: SPACE Digest V8 #221)

> Let's look a little more before we leap.  Maybe there are better, or
> at least more reliable, sites for something like this...

Yeah, Cape York!  The biggest thing wrong with Hawaii is that it's in the
wrong country.  The ideal site for a commercial launch facility would have
(a) sane liability laws, (b) sane technology-transfer rules, and (c) no
existing government-run space program to lobby and intrigue against
commercial competition.  The US flunks all three criteria.  (If you think
I'm kidding about (c), note that most of the Reagan administration's moves
to encourage free-enterprise spaceflight have been met with grumbling from
the USAF and screams of outrage from NASA.  If Bush loses the election,
the next few years may be rough for commercial spaceflight.  [Things may
not be great even if he wins -- they haven't been great under Reagan -- but
the odds are better.])
--
"For perfect safety... sit on a fence|  Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
and watch the birds." --Wilbur Wright| {ihnp4,decvax,uunet!mnetor}!utzoo!henry

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

Date: 15 Jun 88 02:23:47 GMT
From: uop![e-mail]  (uop!todd)
Subject: data

How available is data from say, JPL to do some research with?

Would they require you have lots of number crunching capability at
your disposal?

For instance, if imaging data from a voyager, or IR data from IR
satellite  (IRIS or IRAS? I forgot) available?

And what about MAGSAT?

Thanks for any help you can provide.


          How do you prepare for Atmospheric Microphysics,
Astronomical Technique, and Topics in Partial Differential Equations?

       Have a Thomases' English Muffin!      (yeah right)   ;-)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
+ uop![e-mail]                                               +
+                 cogent!uop![e-mail]                     +
+                                 {backbone}!ucbvax!ucdavis!uop!todd  +
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------------------------------

Date: 15 Jun 88 00:23:33 GMT
From: [e-mail]  (David Palmer)
Subject: Re: Cometesimals

In article <[e-mail]> dietz@loki (Paul F. Dietz) writes:
>In article <[e-mail]> dietz@loki (Paul F. Dietz) writes:
>
>> Frank et. al. estimate a density of about 3e-12 cometesimals per
>> cubic kilometer.  Travelling at 20 km/sec, the flux of comets
>> near the earth would be something like 6e-11 per square kilometer
>> per second.  A ten square kilometer powersat would be hit once
>> every fifty years, on average.
>
>Correction:  3e-11 per km^3, and 10 km/sec, not 20.  So the powersat
>is hit once every ten years, on average, if the cometesimals exist.
>
>    Paul F. Dietz
>    [e-mail]

Comet strikes need not be fatal if the powersat is designed reasonably.
A 10 meter snowball would merely make a 10 meter hole in whatever it hit,
plus whatever damage the fragments do, if the structure is sufficiently
flimsy.  There is no reason to make the structure rigid enough that the
comet delivers the bulk of its energy to the rest of the structure.
        David Palmer
        [e-mail]
        ...rutgers!cit-vax!tybalt.caltech.edu!palmer
    "In retrospect, no one should have been surprised by the discovery
     that Harvard Business School was being supported by a consortium
     of large Japanese companies."  -- 1993, The Year In Review

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

Date: Wed, 15 Jun 88 10:00:25 EDT
From: Glenn Chapman <[e-mail]>
Subject: Ariane 4 successfully flys

    The European Space Agency successfully launched their new Ariane 4
rocket today (June 15) from the French Guiane launch site.  The Ariane 4 is
designed to lift a range of cargoes depending on the types of strapon first
stages.  This goes from 2 solids up to 4 solids, and 2 liquids to 4 liquids
(plus one intermediate combination of solid/liquid).  This is an important
flight as the Ariane 4 is expected to be the main ESA booster for the next 8
years or so.  50 boosters of this class are currently on order.  Maximum
lift to geo transfer orbit is about 4.2 Tonnes.
    Until the Titan 4 or Shuttle flies this gives the ESA the same (or more)
heavy lift capacity as the USA has.  Unless changes are made this country is
definitely moving into third place in space.

                                                     Glenn Chapman
                                                     MIT Lincoln Lab

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

Date: Wed, 15 Jun 88 14:01:45 EDT
From: Glenn Chapman <[e-mail]>
Subject: Soyuz TM-5 update, future missions & new info about Soyuz T-14

   The Soyuz TM-5 flight is now at its mid point.  The crew of Anatoly Solovyov,
Viktor Savinykh and Alexander Alexandrov, along with the long duration Mir crew
of Vladimir Titov and Musahi Manarov held a telanews conference on June 13th
with reporters on the ground.  The current mission will leave the station on
June 17th, probably using the Soyuz TM-4 capsule (which was launched on Dec. 21,
1987) and leaving the fresh TM-5.  The Russians prefer to keep Soyuz's to less
than 7 months in orbit time connected to their space stations.  By the way this
current flight was moved up to June 7th from its original scheduled start of
June 21 to avoid the full moon.  The Bulgarian cosmonaut is doing some
observations with the Kvant astrophyics instruments which would conflict with
the higher light level from the moon at the end of June (the moon was dark
on June 14th).
    Some more information is available about the upcoming missions.  The
August flight will have Col. Mohammad Dauran or Capt. Abdol Ahad as the
cosmonaut from Afghanistan.  This mission was originally scheduled for next
year but moved up due to the current withdrawal of Soviet troops from that
country.  The November French flight will see Alexander Volkov as the mission
commander (Soyuz T-14, 64 day mission in Sept 17, '85 to Salyut 7) with
Jean-Loup Cretein as the guest (the flight engineer has not been named as of
yet).
    An interview with Volkov was recently published in the June Spaceflight
issue where he reveals that on the T-14 mission the flight was originally to
last until Mar 16, '86, long after Mir was launched (Feb 20, '86).  Soyuz T-14
you may recall did a semi crew switchoff with Dzhanibekov from Soyuz T-13
coming down with Georgi Grechko (T-14 crew) while Viktor Savinykh (who is the
flight engineer on the current Soyuz TM-5 mission) stayed on board.
Savinykh was part of the original crew of Volkov and Valdimir Vasyutin
meant for a Salyut 7 mission in the summer of '85 when the station problems
required that a repair crew (Soyuz T-13) be sent up.  Note that the Soyuz T-15
crew flew on Mar. 13, '86 to Mir.  This suggests that original intention was
for the Soyuz T-14 crew to occupy Sayut 7 and not come down until the T-15
crew had docked with the new Mir station.  This was prevented due to the
illness of Vasyutin, which forced them to come down on Nov 23.  That suggests
two interesting things were in the Soviet plans at that time, though neither
was achieved.  First they probably planed permanent manned habitation to
begin with Salyut 7 in June '85 and for Mir to be manned continuously from
its initial occupation (the Soyuz T-15 mission to Mir appeared to end suddenly,
probably due to the delays in the Kvant expansion module's launching).  Secondly
if Savinykh had completed the original planed mission he would have been up
there for 284 days, exceeding the 237 day flight of the Soyuz T-10b crew
from '84.  This would explain the long delay until last year in breaking
that previous record of time in orbit.  Thus if their problems had not occurred
on Soyuz T-14 we might now be looking at 3 years of permanent Soviet space
manned presence, rather than 1.3 years, and more time in orbit records.
    Obviously the Russians have not had things go according to their plans over
the past few years.  Yet they have continued to build up a huge lead in manned
experience in space.  Here we have NASA closing down the whole manned activity
for about 2.5 years with a problem on the shuttle.  That is not the way to
show "leadership" in the space field.

                                                    Glenn Chapman
                                                    MIT Lincoln Lab

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

Date:         Wed, 15 Jun 88 10:33:14 CDT
From: "k.c. powell" <[e-mail]>
Subject:      recent gender discussion

I have seen some of the recent network discussion of gender, etc. in sci-
fi and fantasy.  I would like to respond to a few things.  The first was
the suggestion that Heinlein's proposition that men somehow bear children
bespoke some feminism on his part.  I would ask you to read Frankenstein
if you want to see the process of creation in the hands of men.  One can
argue that the desire to reproduce is the ultimate autoerotic, misogynist
fantasy.  Remove women from the process altogether.  I grant that this is
a radical interpretation and one with which I do not agree but it shows
that there truly are several sides to any story.
My second comment is to Henry Spencer who dismisses, in a fashion typical
of those who have nothing to gain by a change and possibly some ego to lose,
 the need to address the sexism inherent in language.  Henry, there is no
more immediate, profound or basic concern than the structure of communication
especially when it's structure has a built-in repression.
     I only ask that men like yourself read a few things in which the generic
she is used and see if indeed it does not require a bit of double identifica-
tion.  This is the gripe, and I believe a legitimate one.  The use of "he"
to refer to both men and women is confusing to the subconscious. The female
must say oh, okay that means me too but her subconscious knows it is not.
Beyond the issue of double identification, the generic "he" tells little girls
and big that all doctors, lawyers, candlestick makers, astronauts, etc. are
male.  We grow up reading that all representatives of humanity are male.  It
is a subtle innuendo that perhaps we do not quite qualify as humans.  Anyway,
Mr. Spencer, I only ask that you reconsider your cavalier view of language and
its role in our lives, evolution, aspirations, and fundamental relation one to
another.  Sincerely,
K.C. Powell

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

Reply-To: mordor!rutgers!trout.nosc.mil!pnet01!jim
Date: Mon, 13 Jun 88 22:22:53 PDT
From: mordor!rutgers!pnet01.cts.com!jim (Jim Bowery)
To: crash![e-mail]
Subject: Pandora's case is still open.

Dale Amon writes:

> Several individuals have been slandered who are not present to defend
> themselves.

Dale, you falsely accuse me of slander (although you mean libel) which is
a crime and are, therefore, engaging in libel.  Either substantiate or
retract your accusation against me.  Do so in a timely manner.

I can claim that members of the National Space Society's Legislative
Committee are engaging in unethical conduct all I want.  Even Edwin
Meese states that while unethical conduct is not a crime, people should
still not engage in it.  If someone in Meese's position can make such
statements, certainly I can, and I should not be libeled for doing so.

Dale flatters himself by association with Scott Pace et al.  He isn't
in the same league as the members of the Legislative Committee who are
paid to work in government funded aerospace.  These "citizen space
activists" claiming to be the political representatives of thousands of
naive space enthusiasts are far more unethical than Dale.  Dale is just a
nice guy who wants to get along with everyone by going with the flow.
Too bad the flow happens to be so destructive to Dale's goals.

> Since our organizational watch word is "I WANT TO GO!!!!!" I would
> suggest that most of our more energetic members will eventually work
> professionally in some facit of space.
>                         ... I want to go, and I work with other people
> who also want to go. Anyone who doesn't had better get out of my way.

Where does it say in any NSS document "I WANT TO GO!!!!!!", Dale?
The world does have priorities other than letting you and your
friends go to space regardless of what gets in your way.  Your adolescent
urges will not receive the funding you seek.  Why not face reality?  Work
for real advance in space instead of making unsuccessful attempts at
propping up NASA's suppression of public science and private development.
Sure you will lose a few friends but you don't have to be friends with
people who are getting in the way of your only real hope of going to space.

> I will also note that "aerospace" money does not dominate the
> organization. Such monies are received through the AIAC (Aerospace
> Industries Association Council), but are used only for special
> projects, NOT for operating expenses.

According to the financial report presented at the space development
conference, AIAC funding is used for OPERATING EXPENSES.  Perhaps Dale
contradicts the facts here because the NSS Board of Directors was denied
access to NSS financial statements that were, instead, given to the AIAC.
Both of these facts prove Dale's claim that the AIAC is "at a safe arms
length" to be ridiculous on the face of it.

> I will also state (having been one of the people who voluntarily worked for
> severals days to encode last fall's survey) that a vast majority of the
> membership places strong support of the space station in the context of
> going for a lunar base and then to Mars. The policy stands of the
> organization follow this.  I'm personally in favor of Space
> Industries/WESPACE, External Tank Company, etc INSTEAD of the station.
> But so long as I am a representative of a membership that
> feels otherwise, I will bow to their wishes while occasionally pointing
> out the alternatives and working to insure they are noticed.

Dale defends the existence of aerospace leaders in positions of trust
and authority in NSS.  Yet these leaders, by Dale's own statement, have
not led the membership to a rational view of space activities, choosing
instead to promote large government development projects which pay their
salaries.  The membership of NSS wants valuable things to happen in space.
They have been duped, with the help of the NSS leadership, into thinking
that Space Station and other bogus projects are the only way this will
happen.  It is hardly surprising that, in such an environment, the NSS
membership would answer a biased survey in a way that follows the
leadership's greed.

> I will also note the copy of the Space Cause voters guide in front of
> me has Dukakis as the first entry and gives him nearly a full page.

In the previous voters guide, which had been circulated for months,
Scott Pace rather transparently tried to get away with saying that
Dukakis had no space policy even though it had been announced in
advance of other policies published in the same guide.  This changed
only after I caught him in the act and confronted him on this net (just
as he supported a rather uncontroversial commercial space measure
after I confronted him on the net about his failure to act decisively
in favor of commercial space).  I wonder which part of Dukakis's policy
Scott disagreed with?  Was it the termination of NASP?  Termination of the
current space station program?  The way Scott changes his story at
his convenience, we'll certainly never know.

UUCP: {cbosgd, hplabs!hp-sdd, sdcsvax, nosc}!crash!pnet01!jim
ARPA: crash!pnet01!jived +
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