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Date: Sat, 27 Oct 1990 02:28:59 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: SPACE Digest V12 #499

SPACE Digest                                     Volume 12 : Issue 499

Today's Topics:
         NASA Headline News for 10/26/90 (Forwarded)
            Re: Magellan Update - 10/26/90
            Re: Magellan Update - 10/26/90
             Pioneer 11 Update - 10/26/90
            Double spaced messages
        Re: A great idea on how to fund NASA!
           Space Politics and Institutions

Administrivia:

    Submissions to the SPACE Digest/sci.space should be mailed to
  [e-mail].  Other mail, esp. [un]subscription notices,
  should be sent to [e-mail], or, if urgent, to
             [e-mail]

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

Date: 26 Oct 90 22:41:08 GMT
From: trident.arc.nasa.gov![e-mail]  (Peter E. Yee)
Subject: NASA Headline News for 10/26/90 (Forwarded)


             Headline News
Internal Communications Branch (P-2) NASA
Headquarters

  Friday, October 26, 1990    Audio Service: 202 / 755-1788

This is NASA Headline News for Friday, October 26, 1990

Following a more detailed analysis of the Atlantis tanking
test, Kennedy Space Center test engineers have reported that
the hydrogen leak detectors showed minimal leakage in
the area of the 17-inch disconnect and in the aft compartment.
A main engine flight readiness test will occur on Sunday.  The
Flight Readiness Review is set for Monday and Tuesday, Oct. 29
and 30.

Foaming operations on Columbia continue in preparation for
its tanking test, now scheduled for Tuesday, Oct. 30.  Special
lighting, to support the cameras located in the aft compartment,
will be installed today.  The external tank will be purged
tomorrow.

Discovery's reconfiguration is still underway in the Orbiter
Processing Facility.  The forward reaction control system is
scheduled to be removed over the weekend.

  * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

The Committee on the Future of the U.S. Space Program
is meeting today in the Dirksen Senate Building.  The
Committee heard yesterday, and again today, from former
NASA Administrators.  The Committee will continue their
meetings, in a closed session, tomorrow and Sunday.

  * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

NASA will hold a press briefing on Technology 2000 on
Tuesday, Oct. 30, at 2:00 pm at the NASA Auditorium.
Participants will include James Rose and Leonard Ault.  This is
the first industrial exposition and conference which will
showcase the transfer of NASA technology to American
business.  The briefing will be carried live on NASA Select TV.

  * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Magellan is doing well in Venus orbit and has completed its
295th mapping orbit.  The Sun-Earth-Venus angle is now down
to 2.3 degrees as Superior Conjunction approaches on Nov. 1.
The flight team decided to continue with the mapping
functions, despite degraded communications caused by the
proximity of the sun, because S-band communications have been
better than predicted.


NASA yesterday announced the selection of 280 research
proposals in the 1990 Small Business Innovation Research
program.  The selected proposals were submitted by 229 small,
high technology firms located in 30 states.  Over 2,148 proposals
were received in response to the solicitation.  Those selected will
be working under six-month fixed-price contracts to determine
the feasibility of innovative research concepts.  California was
the state with the most awards, 72, followed by Massachusetts
with 47 and then New York with 13.  Alabama, Colorado,
Maryland and Texas all received about ten each.  NASA centers
with the most associated firms receiving awards were Goddard,
Lewis, Marshall and Johnson with 40 or more awards each.

Here's the broadcast schedule for Public Affairs events on NASA
Select TV.  All times are Eastern.  **indicates a live program.

Friday, 10/26/90
    9:30 am    **Committee on the Future of the U.S. Space
Program hearings from Dirksen Senate Office Building.

    about 12:30 pm    During the Committee's lunch break,
NASA Update will be transmitted, as will several programs in
the NASA Productions series.

    about 2:00 pm    **Committee on the Future of the U.S. Space
Program hearings continue through conclusion.



All events and times may change without notice.  This report is
filed daily, Monday through Friday, at 12:00 pm, EDT.  It is a
service of Internal Communications Branch at NASA
Headquarters.  Contact:  CREDMOND on NASAmail or at
202/453-8425.


NASA Select TV:  Satcom F2R, Transponder 13, C-Band, 72
degrees West Longitude, Audio 6.8, Frequency 3960 MHz.

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

Date: 26 Oct 90 23:09:33 GMT
From: usc!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!jpl-devvax![e-mail]  (Larry Wall)
Subject: Re: Magellan Update - 10/26/90

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Stuart Warmink) writes:
: As the Sun lies pretty much in between Magellan and Earth, won't the
: dish antenna be rather effective at focussing the Sun's light and heat
: at the secondary reflector and perhaps even the receiver/transmitter?
: I guess it all depends on how good the dish's surface is at reflecting
: those wavelenghts without scattering. Is the surface shiny?

I don't know.  But I wondered the same thing.  In fact, I wondered the
same thing about the mock-up they set out in the plaza here at JPL, just
before the summer solstice.  The sun was almost directly overhead (10 deg.),
and the mockup was pointing straight up.  You could see that the fake
receiver had a LOT of light on it.  But it never melted.  I was terribly
disappointed...

Larry Wall
[e-mail]

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

Date: 26 Oct 90 23:11:10 GMT
From: usc!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!jpl-devvax![e-mail]  (Larry Wall)
Subject: Re: Magellan Update - 10/26/90

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Stuart Warmink) writes:
: As the Sun lies pretty much in between Magellan and Earth, won't the
: dish antenna be rather effective at focussing the Sun's light and heat
: at the secondary reflector and perhaps even the receiver/transmitter?
: I guess it all depends on how good the dish's surface is at reflecting
: those wavelenghts without scattering. Is the surface shiny?

I don't know.  But I wondered the same thing.  In fact, I wondered the
same thing about the mock-up they set out in the plaza here at JPL, just
before the summer solstice.  The sun was almost directly overhead (10 deg.),
and the mockup was pointing straight up.  You could see that the fake
receiver had a LOT of light on it.  But it never melted.  I was terribly
disappointed...

Larry Wall
[e-mail]

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

Date: 26 Oct 90 16:02:12 GMT
From: usc!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!jato!mars.jpl.nasa.gov![e-mail]  (Ron Baalke)
Subject: Pioneer 11 Update - 10/26/90


                             Pioneer 11 Update
                             October 26, 1990

     The Pioneer 11 emergency support continues.   Last night, Ames
Research Center requested an increase in the uplink power to 200 kw at
the Goldstone 70 meter station, as the previous uplink with the 70 meter
station in Australia did not acquire the spacecraft using 150 kw.  Ames
reported that the commands transmitted during the previous uplink were
not critical.  Five commands were transmitted during the Goldstone pass.
Ames reported receiving 2299 blocks of telemetry with 1 frame deleted and
1 sequence error with the Goldstone antenna.
      ___    _____     ___
     /_ /|  /____/ \  /_ /|
     | | | |  __ \ /| | | |      Ron Baalke         | [e-mail]
  ___| | | | |__) |/  | | |___   Jet Propulsion Lab | [e-mail]
 /___| | | |  ___/    | |/__ /|  M/S 301-355        |
 |_____|/  |_|/       |_____|/   Pasadena, CA 91109 |

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

Date: 27 Oct 90 00:11:15 GMT
From: hub.ucsb.edu!ucsbuxa![e-mail]  (Charles Frank Radley)
Subject: Double spaced messages


My apologies to everybody who sent me e-mail about posting
double spaced messages.
I think I have fixed the problem.
No need to send me any more e-mail !
Thanks for pointing out the problem,
it is nice to know so many people read the posts.

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

Date: 27 Oct 90 00:39:09 GMT
From: netnews.upenn.edu!msuinfo![e-mail]  (Patrick J Draper)
Subject: Re: A great idea on how to fund NASA!

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Ron Peterson) writes:
>I have an idea that I think could fund a major portion of NASA's budget
>and am posting it here in the hopes that someone at NASA sees it and
>implements it.  The idea is this:
>
>     On one of the shuttle missions, send up thousands of tiny glass
>spheres with small holes in them.  Once in space, expose the spheres to
>the vacuum of space and then seal them.  Bring them back to earth
>and sell them to people.  Everyone can own their own piece of space!
>
>This could be hotter than pet rocks!
>
>                     [e-mail]

No need to go to all that trouble. I'd bet that you could sell solid
marbles that've been in space.

Or cheaper yet, sell marbles that have been melted into blobs by the
heat of the shuttle main engines. This need not be done at an actual
launch, but a special dedicated engine (maybe an old one not spaceworthy
anymore) could be set up to mass produce the goods. :^)

I'd buy that for a dollar.


Patrick Draper ----  Michigan State University

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

Date: 27 Oct 90 03:58:28 GMT
From: uokmax![e-mail]  (Robert W Murphree)
Subject: Space Politics and Institutions


 From the Economist September 29, l990 pp 95-98

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

STAR IN THE DESCENDANT

Nasa's problems are not all of its own making

( the first part of the article details NASA's current political woes.
It details the struggle between a space friendly George Bush and a budget
cutting congress warring over the NASA budget)

(beginning somewhere on page 96)

NASA for NASA's sake

If NASA had a flawless record it would still need strong allies to weather
the budget storm.  The real, accident-prone NASA has very few.  During its
entrenchment in the 1970's and 1980's NASA became it own reason for being-
a self-fulfilling agency.  Government agencies always have a tendancy to get
too cosy with clients outside governent.  NASA has avoided this, to some
extent, by becoming its own client.

     Consider the space shuttle.  When it was originally proposed, part of its
attraction was that it would be able to do almost everything that America
needed to do in space.  The idea was that a third of its flights would be
commercial, a third military, and a third pure NASA.  That dream is long gone.
After the loss of the Challenger it was decided that risking astronauts for the
launch of a commercial cargo was out.  The Air Force has developed a large
unmanned rocket, the Titan IV, to launch its spy satellites; the shuttle launch-
pad at Vandenburg Air Force Base in California, the only launch site from which
the shuttle can reach the polar orbits preferred for most spy satellites, was
mothballed before being used, and will probably be dismantled.  From now on,
there is unlikely to be more than one defence-department shuttle-flight a year.

     So NASA now flies the shuttle for itself-providing space for laboratory
experiments, a platform for astronomers and launch services for planetary probes
Although scientific research directly accounts for only a fifth or so of NASA's
budget, according to Dr. Lennard Fisk who runs NASA's officd of space
science and applications, it accounts for around three-fifths if the indirect
costs of the shuttle services are included.  Most of NASA's space-science
probes, including those which journey to planets and those which sit close to
the earth watching galaxies and stars, have produced exciting results.  Few
if any, though, have really needed the shuttle.  If everything had had to be
launched on expendable rockets instead, many programmes would have achieved as
much for less money and much more quickly.

      If all goes according to plan, from 1995 the shuttle will have something
new to busy itself with:  28 flights to ferry the components of the space
station up to orbit, and a few more to take up crews and experimental material.
The station, too, is really of minimal concern to anyone in America other than
NASA.  There is little commercial interest in using it (there has been little
industrial interest in experiments on the space shuttle, either).  The military
is constrained by agreements with NASA's partners in the undertaking, Western
Europe and Japan.  So NASA is building a station for NASA to use.  Dr Fisk's
part of the organisation will be spending $200m a year on research that takes
place on the station-which will have cost almost 200 times that amount.

     Much of that money will be spent on microgravity reasearch, looking at
the properties of materials unwarped by the incessant pull of the earth.
At present, this discipline has little to show for itself.  NASA is more or
less creating it to fill up the station.  That sounds bad, but NASA has not
done badly in its creation of new sciences.  There were not many people
interested
in planets (pretty dull through earth-based telescopes) or what stars look like
viewed in gamma rays (unknowable from the earth) before NASA, in search of
smart things to do, revealed the new vistas of planetary science and high-energy
astrophysics to them.


THE POLITICS OF FREEDOM

The fact that people outside NASA have scant use for the station suggests that
it is eminently cuttable.  But although there is little outside interest,
NASA has made sure that plenty of people are involved.  The development and
construction have been cut into four "work packages", each run by one of NASA's
large regional centres. Each centre has chosen a different company
as the prime contractor for its package.  Thus the bits of the station that
people will live
in are being designed by Boeing and the Marshall Space Flight Centre in Alabama,
while the Truss that the crew modules are attached to is looked after by
Johnson Space Centre in Houston and McDonnell Douglas.

       Dr James Beggs, the NASA chief who sold the station to President Reagan,
recently told a newsletter, Space Station News, that he spread the work around
specifically for the political benefits it might bring.  Similar reasoning
might explain the fact that the station is being build in concert with Japan,
Europe and Canada, international obligation can keep budget-cutters at bay,
though they also mean that NASA has to work in partnership, something
for which it has recently shown little flair.

     Dr Begg's political wiliness may well have helped the space station get
going, but its legacy has hindered the station's progress. Two years ago the
programme was in bad shape, in large part because the Washington headquarters
did not have enough control over the regional centres.

PAGE 98 (last page)

Sorting that out was the biggest challenge that faced Admiral Richard Truly,
former shuttle pilot and commander, when he took over NASA a year and a half
ago.  The managment team he has assembled, all old NASA hands, commands
respect for its competence, if not for its vision.  It realises that the
station's problems are managerial more than technological; NASA has not
developed much large-scale, new technology since the space shuttle's engines.

     Under their stern supervision, Freedom has become more ship-shape.
Problems have been found, but the station is at just the right stage of its
development-moving from paper to metal, which acounts for NASA's increased
budget requests-for them to be dealt with.  Problems like too much weight,
and too much power needed for housekeeping, are scarcely new.  Most space
projects are at first too heavy to fly.  Solutions for such problems are
arrived at by looking at the designs with a clear head and a sharp red pencil-
just what is happening.

STARDUST MEMORIES

There are also less tractable snags.  The most pervasive criticism of NASA
is that it just ain't what it used to be; that compared with the NASA of the
Apollo years, it is a stodgy bureacracy.  The charges, which almost everyone
thinks contain some truth, stem from changes forced on NASA.

     Problems with Apollo-of which there were many, including the loss of
three astronauts in a launch-pad fire-ere solved not by ingenuity alone but
by ingenuity coupled with a lot of money and a lot of eager young engineers.
In the 1970's NASA lost its budgets and some of its staff, and those among the
staff who stayed lost their youth.  Unsurprisingly, some the the eagerness went
by the wayside too.  Throughout the 1970's, with nobody hired, the agency's
average age wqent up by a year every year.  It is now beginning to fall-
as Admiral Truly is keen to point out-but age remains a problem.  Threequarters
of NASA's middle and senior managers are within five years of possible
retirement.  Almost everyone in a senior position has been in NASA for 20 years
or so.  The infrastructure at NASA's centres is also aging.

     Age and continuity bring a settled way of doing things, expecially in a
rather isolated bureaucracy.  They naturally lead to a "not-invented-here"
dismissiveness of new ideas, as well as problems like sloppiness in overseeing
work done by contractors.  Consider the space agency's response to President
Bush's call for new explorations, which was widely seen as unimaginative.
There are lots of novel ideas outside NASA about how to get to Mars-
cobbled-together space ships, hibernating crews, inflatable crew capsules.
Some may deserve all the derision they get, but others may be good.

     NASA's own response showed that it had not been spending much time
exploring new technologies, which is sad since its charter enjoins it
primarily to research and to explore.  Developing and operating the shuttle,
and now the station, has meant that research into future technologies has been
elbowed aside.  Nuclear propulsion, which may not be needed for the first
mission to Mars, but would make it much easier, and seems unavoidable if
travel beyond the moon becomes routine, has not advanced much since pilot
studies of it in the 1960's.

     The corporate culture of NASA will change as the Apollo generation
retires, and the bureaucracy regains some of its lost youth.  but there are
doubts about the quality of NASA's recruits.  Admiral Truly claims that
NASA is getting the best of the bunch; if so, it is getting them at less
than the going rate.  Gifted yound engineers who want to design space craft
can go to an aerospace company and be paid much more than NASA can offer.
As the Space Council reaches out towards the aerospace industry, they might
even be able to have some influence over the design of missions, too.

     If they choose NASA instead, and expecially if they pick space-station
work, they will find themselves among frustrated colleagues.  When the
space-station budget for next year is fixed, the programme will more or less
halt to spend a few months trimming, chopping, changing, dropping, delaying,
and all the time knowing that they same may happen again next year.  It is a
dispiriting way to work.

THE WORST OF ALL WORLDS

With the new recruits and new purpose, as one part of a coherent exploration
policy, NASA might quite quickly recover its former glories.  It would require
shaking up, as all institutions do from time to time.  it might also need some
restructuring-scientific research could be further removed from the development
of flight technologies-and some new partners, including foreign ones.  But
although there is a clear need for innovation, there is also a need for
expertise and experience.  To abolish NASA and replace it, rather than open it
up, would be wastful.

     That is not a cheap fix.  If NASA is to stay healthy, it must keep moving.
That requires a goal to move towards and money to move with.  Without
that money things will get worse-unless parts of NASA are amputated.  If the
space station were cancelled, the shuttle programme cut back, and some of the
regional centres closed, NASA would still be able to do a useful job, provided
it survived the shock of such surgery.



     The centrepiece of such a NASA would be the earth-observing system (EOS)
now under development, a series of six satellites that would, as part of an
even larger international venture, study the workings of the earth in
unprecedented detail.  EOS is expensive ($40 billion, spend over most of three
decades), but the idea of using space to analyse, if not solve, the world's
evironmental problems is extremely popular.  With EOS and a plethora of
smaller earth-oriented missions-19 are on the drawing board at the moment-
NASA could take the lead in monitoring global change. At the same time, it
could slowly continue its exploration of the planets and carry on scrutinising
the cosmos.  It would be a different agency, and a lesser one, but not a
useless one.  Indeed, such a space programme could provide better value for
money than do today's expensively underfunded ambitions.

     It would also signal retreat.  NASA, more than anything, once proclaimed
America's technological lead to the world.  To more or less close down its
manned programme would look like a renunciation of that lead, though the
manned programme is not really at the forefront of technology.  That is not a
renunciation that President Bush or Congress are keen to make.  So NASA is
unlikely to die, or to be transformed radically.  It is likely to stuggle on,
unable to do what is being asked of it with the money granted it, unable
to shed its burdens, even if willing, and blamed by everyone for manifesting
an indecision beyond its control.  If that is the way it goes, today's bruised
NASA will surely turn rotten.

END OF ARTICLE

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

End of SPACE Digest V12 #499
*******************