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Subject: SPACE Digest V11 #169

SPACE Digest                                     Volume 11 : Issue 169

Today's Topics:
           Payload Status for 03/19/90 (Forwarded)
        Re: What was Challenger really up to?
             Re: SR-71 and dates
     Re: Coilgun on a 747 - supplies to orbit at $20/lb?
           Re: Coilgun on a 747 - supplies to orbi
             Re: Shuttle Escapes
     Re: Coilgun on a 747 - supplies to orbit at $20/lb?
         Re: Another SR-71 comes to NASA Ames-Dryden
        NASA Finds Major Flaw in Space Station Design
             Geostationary orbit
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: 19 Mar 90 16:57:32 GMT
From: trident.arc.nasa.gov![e-mail]  (Peter E. Yee)
Subject: Payload Status for 03/19/90 (Forwarded)


    Daily Status/KSC Payload Management and Operations 03-19-90.


    -STS-31R HST (at VPF) -

    HST final closeouts ops and PDT testing along with west cell
    VPHD alignment were worked Friday.  Today HST closeouts and
    VPHD alignment will continue.  Also today, payload support
    will be provided for the terminal countdown demonstration
    test.

    -STS-32R SYNCOM/LDEF (at SAEF-2) -

    LDEF deintegration continues.


    -STS-35 ASTRO-1/BBXRT (at O&C) -

    The payload was transferred into the canister Friday and
    will be transferred to the OPF second shift today.

    -STS-40 SLS-1 (at O&C) -

    The systems test and ECS systems test, along with experiment
    train disconnects and preps for transfer to level III/II,
    were worked Friday and will continue today.  Also, fire
    suppression bottle installations will be worked second shift
    today.

    -STS-42 IML (at O&C) -

    Staging activities on racks 7, 10, and 12 were worked
    Friday.  Racks 3, 5, 7, and 11 staging activities are
    scheduled for today.


    -STS-45 Atlas-1 (at O&C) -

    Installation of the pallet joint kit on frame 4 was active
    Friday.  Pallet joint kit installation on frame 1 will be
    worked today.


    -STS-55 SL-D2 (at O&C) -

    Single rack unloading will be worked today.


    -HST M&R (at O&C) -

    Jiffy junction and ORUC cable system installations will be
    active today.

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

Date: 19 Mar 90 17:38:35 GMT
From: usc!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!math.lsa.umich.edu!sharkey!itivax!vax3![e-mail]  (Allen W. Sherzer)
Subject: Re: What was Challenger really up to?

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Henry Spencer) writes:

>That aside, it seems enormously unlikely.  The biggest argument against
>it is, why bother disguising a military launch as a civilian one?

For security reasons. See below.

>would have been much simpler to just make the thing a classified military
>launch with a plausible "leaked" cover story about it being a spy satellite.

Too risky. The real story might leak.

>>... there was a military laser expert on board the shuttle...
>
>I don't know who this would be, and it would prove nothing unless he also
>*wasn't* an expert on anything else.  The Challenger crew all had good,
>solid, aboveboard reasons to be aboard.  Then too, it seems very strange
>that they would pick a hush-hush disguised military launch for the Teacher
>In Space project.

It was right under your nose and you missed it! The *TEACHER* was the
military laser expert. She was recruited by the CIA for this mission
when she was in 6th grade.

That was the great part. Nobody would suspect a secret illegal laser
test wiht a teacher on board.

   Allen

PS. Needless to say, lots of :-) on this.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Allen W. Sherzer |Archie: These guys are terrorists. Know what that means?|
|   [e-mail]    |Lorenzo: No prisoners!                                  |
|                  |Recce: You say that like there was some other way.      |

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

Date: 19 Mar 90 19:55:44 GMT
From: skipper![e-mail]  (Al Bowers)
Subject: Re: SR-71 and dates

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Tom [Chris] Murphy) writes:

>In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Commander Krugannal) writes:
>>
>>
>>>Someone mentioned attaching the Pegasus vehicle to the SR-71.

>>   Someone (from Orbital Service I believe) replied that there
>>   was no place to do it. Actually that is wrong. Soon after the
>>   SR-71 was built, a drone was built based on the J-58. This was
>>   called the D-21. It used the same engine (the J-58) and same

>I believe this project was halted for safty reasons after
>an accident that killed the rear-seat officer in an SR-71.  So it
>might not be a great idea.

The incident in question occurred on July 3, 1966.  The GTD-21 was
built by Lockheed and Marquardt built the engines.  BTW, Marquardt has
extensive experience with _ram_jet engines and the D-21 uses a ramjet.
This was the reason for the required supersonic launch.  Once the
A-12's were no longer capable of being used they were launched off of
B-52's and boosted to supersonic speed with rockets.  Few launches
were made this way.  SR's were not used to launch these birds and the
two A-12's that were modified to launch D-21's were the only two seat
(one cockpit) A-12's made (serial numbers 60-6940 and 60-6941).  No
performance figures are available for the D-21's.

--
Albion H. Bowers  [e-mail]  ames!elxsi.dfrf.nasa.gov!bowers
         NASA Ames-Dryden Flight Research Facility, Edwards, CA
                  Aerodynamics: The ONLY way to fly!

                     Live to ski, ski to live...

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

Date: 20 Mar 90 15:25:19 GMT
From: brutus.cs.uiuc.edu!usc!cs.utexas.edu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!utgpu!watserv1!watdragon!watyew![e-mail]  (Brian or James)
Subject: Re: Coilgun on a 747 - supplies to orbit at $20/lb?


 If you don't find the balloon assisted coilgun launch system imaginative
enough in the early seventies, when the SST was first being flown, someone
pointed out that there was a design for supersonic aircraft that did
not produce sonic booms as a side effect. The only problem was that
this design also provided no lift, a serious flaw in an airplane. The
obvious solution was to make the vehicle lighter than air, although I
don't believe they ever overcame the small problem of drag. Lamilar flow,
anyone? I wonder if you can use LTA reentry vehicles :).
                            JDN

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

Date: 19 Mar 90 00:55:16 GMT
From: cs.utexas.edu!uwm.edu!lakesys![e-mail]  (Joseph T. Klein)
Subject: Re: Coilgun on a 747 - supplies to orbi

In article <60300001@suna5> [e-mail] writes:
>
>/* Written  5:12 pm  Mar 16, 1990 by [e-mail] in suna5:sci.space */
>In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Vincent Cate) writes:
>>Sounds like a coilgun on a high flying 747 should be a cheap way to
>...
>>What are the hard parts of this type of approach?
>
>I do know that the energy storage problem has a solution.  A group
>at Texas A&M (if memory serves) has a railgun power supply "the
>size of a garbage can", using some kind of magnetic/electromechanical

Gosh, I would think low temperature superconductors would be just the ticket.
The weight cost of cooled nitrogen and insulation may be balanced with a
storage coil and the increased boost provided by superconducting coils.
The mass driver designed and demoed at MIT by Dr. G. K. O'Neill & Co.
used lead coils dipped in liquid H. Building a storage coil for the electric
charge is dependent on the weight trade-off. As I understand it, a safe
superconducting storage coil needs to be sheilded with aluminium bricks, it also
has a tendancy to rip itself appart due to the property of superconductors
repelling magnetic fields.
--
 "The place of the deity seems to be           Joseph T. Klein
  taken by the wholeness of man." -- Jung      [e-mail]
Riverwest Milwaukee  {uunet!marque,uwvax!uwm}  !lakesys!rwmke!jtk

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

Date: 19 Mar 90 18:51:09 GMT
From: clyde.concordia.ca!news-server.csri.toronto.edu![e-mail]  (John Hogg)
Subject: Re: Shuttle Escapes

In article <19.Mar.90.13:22:[e-mail]> [e-mail] writes:
>Just how difficult is it to get a reasonably well protected human from
>low earth orbit to the ground alive and without a space craft?  Is it possible
>to lose velocity slow enough that heat shields are not required?

The answer to the second question is, ``No.''  A human body will heat
up in just the same way as a Shuttle when it dumps its orbital energy
into the surrounding atmosphere.  This *could* in principle be avoided
by using an immense retrorocket which would kill all orbital motion
while still holding the body being deorbited above the atmosphere.  The
reentry would then be straight down.  Obviously, aerobraking using a heat
shield is more efficient by a few orders of magnitude.

However, a ``reasonably well protected human'' needn't wear a spacecraft.
Station crew-escape systems have been proposed which amount to a
spacesuit, a retrorocket pack, a heatshield, and a parachute.  The
advantages of such a system include simplicity and light weight.
Unfortunately, an astronaut needing an escape system is quite likely
to be ill or injured, and a stripped-down suit-shield-chute package
is not an ideal ambulance.  It still sounds worth developing.

---
John Hogg                | As engineering projects go,
[e-mail]            | this one has a certain snigger
Department of Computer Science        | factor.
University of Toronto            |         -- Don Lindsay, CMU

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

Date: 19 Mar 90 21:38:14 GMT
From: sam.cs.cmu.edu![e-mail]  (Vincent Cate)
Subject: Re: Coilgun on a 747 - supplies to orbit at $20/lb?


Donald Lindsay:
>... hang the gun (vertically, of course) from a suitable suite of
>balloons.
>
>This has the nice advantage that the power comes from any cost-
>effective ground station, ...

You really want it nearly horizontal.  Less than 5 degrees above the
horizon if you can get to over 40,000 feet.

Not wanting the "not imaginative enough" go unchallenged, let me say
that I though of it. :-)  Really, when I read saturday's (3/17) New York Times
where it mentioned that the Air Force will be providing Voice of America with
a tethered balloon at 10,000 feet for transmitting Television Marti to Cuba.
I just think we can do the 747 much sooner than a balloon based approach,
unless weight turns out to be more of a problem than I think it is.

Mike Williams:
>Anyway, I read an old
>AIAA Journal that had a paper about a gigantic dirigible. This thing was *huge*
>and it was designed to carry 25 Peacekeeper missiles, or the entire flight
>compliment for an aircraft carrier (70+ planes), or the equivalent weight in
>cargo (~3000 metric tons). From what I read, we would not be technologically
>straining ourselves to build such a thing. Power was supplied by a nuclear
>reactor, the lift by hydrogen, and it had a ceiling somewhere around 15,000 ft
>(I'm quoting from memory-- this may be off). Admittedly, it does not have the
>advantage of the same upper altitude as the 747, but in this same journal, I
>read of some designs that were being looked into that would have maximum ceil-
>ings around 100,000 ft. Now, going that high and taking 3000 tons of cargo with
>you is probably Buck Rogers stuff, but I thought the idea was interesting
>enough to present.

I like the balloon ideas but I think it is much farther off than putting a
gun on a 747.  In the long run it does have the potential off being an
even cheaper method than firing from a 747.  The problem is that a blimp
has lots of air resistance so making it stay in place will take some energy.
I seem to recall that the 100 MPH winds do not go up past something like 50,000
feet, so maybe this is not much of a problem.  Anyone know what the
weather is like at 100,000 feet?

At 100,000 feet (20 miles) I don't think even a kevlar cable could hold its
own weight and the stress from the winds.  It would be nice to have a
cable to bring up power, people, and projectiles.  And with lifting
blimps along the way this should work fine.

One idea for really high altitude balloons is to combine the ideas of
hot air balloons and helium/hydrogen balloons and make a hot helium
balloon.  I'll bet that 100,000 feet would not be too hard with such
a toy.  If we have a power cord we can get energy for heating the balloon
as well.  Hot-hydrogen is probably not a good idea for obvious reasons.

However, in the long run a large high flying sram-jet may be even
better.  A space-plane type device can get to orbital height so the
projectiles would not need to have rockets on them.  Also, the speed
of the plane would make the gun's job much easier.  If the plane did
30% of orbital speed the gun would only need to put half the amount of
energy into the projectile.

But the balloon and large space-plane would take some real time and money.
It still looks like the gun on a 747 is almost easy and cheap.

With the 747 we should be able to do about $20/lb.  At this price people
could afford to live there.  Food at $20/lb is far more affordable than
food at $750/lb.

   -- Vince

PS  How well would Cambels soup handle 10,000 Gs? (assume we put it in a
    very strong can before launch).

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

Date: 20 Mar 90 01:40:00 GMT
From: shelby!portia![e-mail]  (Matt Bartley)
Subject: Re: Another SR-71 comes to NASA Ames-Dryden

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Al Bowers) writes:

>Overheard as the SR takes a bead on the building.
>Okay, you can pull up now...
>Okay, you can pull up now...
>Okay, now pull up...
>Okay, pull UP...
>PULL UP...
>PULL UP!!! PULL UP!!!
>RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!!!!!!!!


That reminds me of a great story I heard.  A friend of a friend flys 737's
for America West.  He said that just before a routine inspection on one
plane, some guys hacked in and modified the little voice tape which goes off
when in proximity to the ground ("pull up   pull up   pull up..")  When the
company inspectors activated that system to test it, it said "Pull up.
Pull up.  Pull up.  Too late."

Must have been an interesting inspection. :-)

--
Internet: [e-mail]                   Matt Bartley
Bitnet: [e-mail]
    Kirk:  "Spock!  Where the hell's that power you promised?"
    Spock: "One damn minute, Admiral."    -- Star Trek IV : The Voyage Home

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

Date: 20 Mar 90 14:12:24 GMT
From: rochester![e-mail]  (Paul Dietz)
Subject: NASA Finds Major Flaw in Space Station Design

Yesterday's (3/19) NY Times reports that a NASA special
investigation team has concluded that the space station, as
currently designed, would require 2,200 hours of EVA per year
for repairs and preventive maintenance.  This figure, which amounts
to about 2 EVAs per week, is described as "alarmingly high";
an acceptable rate would be one per month.

The maintenance findings have prompted a discussion within NASA
on whether the station in unbuildable.  Greatly increased reliability
of external parts or teleoperated repair robots were found to
be inadequate to solve the problem.

    Paul F. Dietz
    [e-mail]

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

Date: 20 Mar 90 19:27:54 GMT
From: sppy00![e-mail]  (Christopher Schaller)
Subject: Geostationary orbit

Quick question!
How high does a satellite have to be to atain  geostationary orbit,
geosynchrous orbit?
                  Thanks
                   Chris.

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

End of SPACE Digest V11 #169
*******************