Space & Astronomy/Space and Astronomy (October 1993).iso/mac/TEXT/SPACEDIG/V10_1/V10_100.TXT

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Subject: SPACE Digest V10 #100

SPACE Digest                                     Volume 10 : Issue 100

Today's Topics:
         NASA Headline News for 09/26/89 (Forwarded)
      Re: Plutonium in space (was Risk of NOT launching Galileo)
          Re: Risk of NOT launching Galileo
            Orbital Sciences stock
        More about NASA Spaceflight Handbooks
     Re: Galileo Jovian atmospheric probe -- is it sterilized???
               Re: Pluto meets Neptune
           Re: First group of prospective astronau
           Re: First group of prospective astronau
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: 26 Sep 89 19:55:07 GMT
From: ames.arc.nasa.gov![e-mail]  (Peter E. Yee)
Subject: NASA Headline News for 09/26/89 (Forwarded)

-----------------------------------------------------------------
                         NASA Headline News
Tuesday, September 26, 1989                    Audio:202/755-1788
-----------------------------------------------------------------

This is NASA Headline News for Tuesday, September 26.....


Tom Utzman, Kennedy Space Center's Deputy Director, says it's too
early to assess the full extent of damage to the Space Shuttle
Columbia after the fire sprinkler system was accidentally turned
on in the Orbiter Processing Facility Sunday.  Utzman told United
Press yesterday that water did get into some parts of the
orbiter, but it's "too soon to give up on plans" to launch the
Columbia on schedule December 18.

The launch date for the Atlantis remains on schedule for October
12 at 1:29 P.M., Eastern time.  An official launch date will be
set at the conclusion of the flight readiness review scheduled
for October 2 and 3 at Kennedy Space Center.


The Washington Post says the development of the Space Station
Freedom..."has become a case study...in the difficulties the
government faces in making a plan and carrying it out in the era
of a deficit economy".  In light of this, NASA managers have been
given a variety of options in an effort to cut the cost of space
station construction by $1 billion over the next five years,
according to the post.  The story also quotes a congressional
source as saying, "we seem to have lost our ability to put
something on paper and make it happen".

Meanwhile, NASA Administrator Truly will testify on Capitol Hill
this afternoon.  The subject...building of a moon base and an
eventual manned mission to Mars after the turn of the century.


The apogee kick motor aboard the FltSatCom launched early Monday
is scheduled to be fired later today to circularize the
spacecraft orbit.  The launch was the final NASA managed
Atlas-Centaur flight.  It was also the last of the present series
of FltSatComs.


Virginia environmental officials will ask a circuit court judge
in Richmond tomorrow to close down the Avtex Fibers plant in
Front Royal, Virginia.  The plant, which is the sole producer of
high quality rayon yarn used in NASA and DoD solid rockets, is
accused of allowing toxic chemicals from the plant to flow into
the Shenandoah River.


                    *           *              *



-----------------------------------------------------------------
Here's the broadcast schedule for public affairs events on NASA
Select TV.   All times are Eastern.


Thursday, September 28....

    11:30 A.M.       NASA Update will be transmitted.

     1:00 P.M.       Galileo mission probe briefing from the
                     Ames Research Center.

     3:30 P.M.       Coverage begins of Amroc launch of Air
                     Force/MIT experiments from Vandenberg
                     Air Force Base. Launch window opens at
                     4:30 P.M.


Friday, September 29.....

      7:00 P.M.      Premiere of the musical composition "Return
                     to Flight" by members of the Brevard,
                     Florida, Symphony at KSC's Spaceport USA.


All events and times are subject to change without notice.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
These reports are filed daily, Monday through Friday, at 12 noon,
Eastern time.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
A service of the Internal Communications Branch (LPC), NASA
Headquarters, Washington, D.C.

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

Date: 26 Sep 89 22:49:21 GMT
From: mailrus!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!utgpu!utzoo![e-mail]  (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: Plutonium in space (was Risk of NOT launching Galileo)

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Steve) writes:
>... little known fact is that the military sat
>whch was on challenger was nuclear powered.

Uh, if you're talking about the bird that was in Challenger's payload bay
on January 28 1986, somebody has misinformed you.  It wasn't nuclear
powered and it wasn't military.  It was the second Tracking and Data Relay
Satellite, an entirely unclassified solar-array-powered NASA comsat.
--
"Where is D.D. Harriman now,   |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
when we really *need* him?"    | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry [e-mail]

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

Date: 26 Sep 89 19:14:57 GMT
From: bfmny0![e-mail]  (Tom Neff)
Subject: Re: Risk of NOT launching Galileo

It's a nice point that scratching Galileo could cost us weather
knowledge, but Mission To Earth will do it better.
--
"Take off your engineering hat   | "The filter has      | Tom Neff
and put on your management hat." | discreting sources." | [e-mail]

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

Date: 26 Sep 89 15:21:04 GMT
From: skipper![e-mail]  (Mary Shafer)
Subject: Orbital Sciences stock

I have heard a rumor that Orbital Sciences is going to take its stock
public.  You may wish to speak with a broker and subscribe to this
initial offering.

Here's your chance to put your money where your mouth is!  :-)

Needless to say, I have absolutely no financial interest in Orbital
Sciences, never have, and never will (unless I leave government
service).  I don't have any financial interest in any aerospace
company, for that matter, because of the conflict of interest laws.
Which are a Good Thing in my opinion.

--
Mary Shafer   [e-mail]  ames!elxsi.dfrf.nasa.gov!shafer
         NASA Ames-Dryden Flight Research Facility, Edwards, CA
                    Of course I don't speak for NASA

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

Date:     Tue, 26 Sep 89 10:38 CDT
From: Bill Higgins-- Beam Jockey <[e-mail]>
Subject:  More about NASA Spaceflight Handbooks
Original_To:  SPACE

I asked Barry Pederson for more information on the NASA Spaceflight Handbooks,
and he replied.  Since he is having some trouble posting to Space Digest, he
asked me to pass this along:
===================================================================
Bill:

...As I said in the posting, I found the books in our university library
(University of North Dakota, Chester Fritz Library, Grand Forks N.D. 58203)
The library is some kind of federal document depository, I'm sure there must
be something like it near where you live.  The collection is divided by which
agency each document comes from, so all the NASA publications are together.

One person wrote to me asking what the SP numbers on the books were,  I guess
they might be the numbers used to order the books.

The numbers are:   Orbital Flight Handbook parts 1, 2, and 3  SP-33
                   Lunar Flight Handbook   parts 1, 2, and 3  SP-34
                   Planetary Flight Handbook (9 parts)        SP-35

I don't have the books with me as I'm typing this, but I'm pretty sure the
publishing date for the first volume was 1963, the last was 1968 and the others
were somewhere inbetween.  As for authors, I think the first was the
Martin-Marietta corporation and the last was Lockheed.

I wish I could tell you how to get a copy yourself, but I don't know the
procedure.  You'll probably have to call around to your local libraries
to find them, but if you need any specific information from the books such
as serial numbers or whatever, let me know and I'll look it up for you.

If you end up ordering copies for yourself from the Government Printing
Office or wherever, I'd be interested in hearing where you order from
and how much it cost...

Barry Pederson    [e-mail]   or   [e-mail]
       (I think vm1.nodak.edu works better)
===============================================================

                      ______meson   Bill Higgins
                   _-~
     ____________-~______neutrino   Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
   -   -         ~-_
 /       \          ~----- proton   Bitnet: [e-mail]
 |       |
 \       /                          SPAN/Hepnet/Physnet: 43011::HIGGINS
   -   -
     ~                              Internet: [e-mail]

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

Date: 26 Sep 89 17:44:46 GMT
From: bfmny0![e-mail]  (Tom Neff)
Subject: Re: Galileo Jovian atmospheric probe -- is it sterilized???

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Nick Szabo) writes:
>>I think it's true that
>>if we screw up the pristine surfaces of other planets with biological
>>infections or massive "industrial" projects
>
>There has been a lot of loaded terminology thrown around this newsgroup
>lately.  The planets are Pristine, and human presence (or the presence of
>any other kind of Earth life) is Contamination.  I happen to think this is
>100% backwards.   Earth life (the only kind we know) is what we must work
>on preserving.   Thousands of species ares dyings every year in our rain
>forests.  Nuclear weapons threaten our own form of life, humans.  And we're
>worried about trillions-to-one odds (to be liberal) of "contaminating" Jupter
>life with Earth life?  Come on.

 1. It is the above quoted poster who is loading the terms. Other planets'
    surfaces and atmospheres are indeed essentially "pristine" (not
    Pristine; here we ago again with the Creeping Capitalization Disease.
    Until Dr. Johnson is resurrected to post to the net -- a welcome
    development to be sure -- overcapitalization should be given a decent
    burial) with respect to "contamination" by Earth organisms, just as
    the Earth's surface is, we think, "pristine" from "contamination" by
    organisms from other planets.  There is room for reasonable doubt on
    this last point when you consider the areo-meteorites, but that's not
    license to go hog wild ourselves in the other direction.

 2. Concern for vanishing Earth species is orthogonal to concern for not
    trashing the Moon or Mars with grotesque strip-mines or pollution
    or giant Coca-Cola signs for that matter.  The latter isn't going to
    help the former.  We have to solve our problems down here regardless.
    The question is whether we create new problems elsewhere.

>Do we really think planets are Pristine and Earth life is Contamination?
>If so, we shouldn't be going into space at all.  Logically, we should kill
>ourselves now and let the Earth go back to its original Pristine state.

No, it should be possible to go into space and do useful things without
doing violence to other planets' possibly delicate systems.  One of the
quite nice things about asteroids and orbital projects is that you don't
have to trash planets.  Even the moon, which we'll go to eventually in
force, I'm sure, offers a nice lack of systems to interfere with; it
would just be nice if park bench lovers centuries hence don't have to
look up at something resembling an aerial view of Slag Dump Five, Penna.

[ remaining digressions into Christic(!) deleted ]
--
Knowing *when* to optimize is just   >>>/     Tom Neff
  as important as knowing *how*.       /<<<   [e-mail]

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

Date: 26 Sep 89 18:26:30 GMT
From: opus![e-mail]  (Ted Dunning)
Subject: Re: Pluto meets Neptune


In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Greg Scott Hennessy) writes:

   In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (David Smith) writes:
   #The simulations (which someone reported on in this forum recently) show
   #that the orbits Neptune and Pluto are resonant, so that they will never
   #come close.

   While other similations show the orbit of Pluto to be chaotic, meaning
   that we can't predict how close they do come.


actually if it actually _is_ chaotic, then we _can_ predict how close
they will come.

a chaotic system exhibits sensitive dependence, periodic trajectories,
as well as dense trajectories.  dense trajectories are such that their
limit set is the entire domain.

a chaotic trajectory is considered to be one of the dense trajectories
in chaotic system.  if pluto's orbit is chaotic, then it will pass
arbitrarily close to any point in the domain, and thus the least upper
bound on the distance between neptune and pluto is the smallest
separation between the strange attractors that characterize their
orbits.  this is zero if the attractors intersect.

what we can't determine is the future position of pluto (beyond
certain computational and error limits), or the time at which pluto
will be at a certain point (assuming that the orbit really is a
chaotic system).


of course the problem of determining whether a particular system is
chaotic or not based on empirical observations is impossible, even in
theory
--
[e-mail]
            remember, when extensions and subsets are outlawed,
            only outlaws will have extensions or subsets

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

Date: 27 Sep 89 01:49:56 GMT
From: jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!utgpu!utzoo![e-mail]  (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: First group of prospective astronau

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] writes:
>...5 NASA employees, 11 armed forces, and 4 others.
>The 4 others all hold doctorates.  Although only 80% of those in the first
>group work for NASA or the military, I'll lay odds that at least 90% of the
>ones eventually selected to be astronaut candidates will come from this
>category.

The way to bet, I'd say, is that either none or one of the non-NASA/military
candidates will be selected.  And if one gets selected, it will be mostly
a token "see, we don't *always* pick one of our own people" choice.  NASA
caught some flak from Congress for this a couple of years ago.  There have
been exactly two non-NASA/military astronauts picked in recent years, one
of them a JPL consultant and son of an ex-NASA-bigwig, the other the first
black female astronaut.  NASA openly admits to a select-from-within bias.
--
"Where is D.D. Harriman now,   |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
when we really *need* him?"    | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry [e-mail]

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

Date: 15 Sep 89 15:00:00 GMT
From: m.cs.uiuc.edu!s.cs.uiuc.edu![e-mail]
Subject: Re: First group of prospective astronau


For those who are counting, that first group of potential astronaut candidates
being interviewed comes out to 5 NASA employees, 11 armed forces, and 4 others.
The 4 others all hold doctorates.  Although only 80% of those in the first
group work for NASA or the military, I'll lay odds that at least 90% of the
ones eventually selected to be astronaut candidates will come from this
category.

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

End of SPACE Digest V10 #100
*******************