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Date: Thu,  4 Jan 90 19:32:47 -0500 (EST)
Subject: SPACE Digest V10 #364

SPACE Digest                                     Volume 10 : Issue 364

Today's Topics:
             space news from Nov 13 AW&ST
            Re: Big Bang:  Did it happen?
              Re: Techno-welfare
         NASA Headline News for 12/26/89 (Forwarded)
       Chris Robertson's "Henry bio" (was Re: who's out there?)
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: 1 Jan 90 04:06:23 GMT
From: cs.utexas.edu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!utgpu!utzoo![e-mail]  (Henry Spencer)
Subject: space news from Nov 13 AW&ST

OSC and Hercules reach tentative agreement on joint work on the Taurus
booster (in the works at OSC's subsidiary Space Data), details similar
to the deal for Pegasus.

Hubble telescope placed in a multilayer plastic bag [!] to provide extra
protection from airborne contamination.  The bag will stay on until the
telescope is loaded into the orbiter.  As an extra precaution, to minimize
airborne particles, burning of swamp areas at KSC has been halted until
after the HST launch.

State of South Australia studies reviving the abandoned Woomera rocket
range as a commercial facility for aerospace hardware testing.

[marginally space related]  SR-71 operations terminated due to high cost
and continued USAF confusion about reconnaissance plans.

Some Congressmen say government support of private space activity remains
lukewarm at best, with DoT taking its time about launch regulations and
government agencies not exactly bending over backward to buy private
launches rather than running their own.

Interest in small military satellites continues to grow.  USAF Space
Command produces tentative set of requirements for a tactical satellite
system.  Congress boosts DARPA funding for rapid-replenishment ideas,
strongly approves of Taurus, and orders Secretary of Defense to remove
the no-technology-demos-in-space restriction from the Lightsat program.
One major challenge is getting customer support from lower-level military
commanders; smallsat demos during military exercises are being talked
about, with emphasis on giving field commanders control of the birds.

Ariane manifest in chaos again as launch V35 (Japan's Superbird B and
BS-2X) slips due to payload problems.  Spacecraft checks after the San
Francisco earthquake raised some doubts about reliability of Superbird's
main amplifier (the problem is not quake-related).  NHK, which owns
BS-2X, is unhappy:  BS-2X is meant to replace a comsat that is having
trouble in orbit, and they want it up ASAP.  [The latest word is that
the next launch will be Spot 2 and its amateur-radio piggyback birds,
with the rest of the 1990 manifest blank pending rescheduling.]

ESA puts Phase B work on the Soho solar/heliospheric satellite on hold
until the US approves the ESA/US memorandum of understanding for the
project.  ESA approved it 11 months ago; since then it's been sitting
in the US State Dept, held up by quibbling over minor wording problems.
Roger Bonnet, ESA science director, says "I can't understand this whole
situation -- it is so irrational it surpasses my comprehension."  Phase
B was meant to start Oct 1.  The MOU covers Soho and Cluster, both parts
of the International Solar-Terrestrial Science Program.  Phase B work
on Cluster is underway despite the MOU problems, basically because the
US role in Cluster is much less crucial and ESA can do Cluster alone
if necessary.  Soho depends on a US launch and a US operations package,
and going it alone would add $150M to ESA's budget for Soho.  Soho is
already several months behind schedule and several million dollars
over budget because of NASA hardware-delivery delays.

Bonnet says ESA will not sign the MOU for Cassini/Huygens -- ESA is
to supply the Titan probe for the Saturn mission -- until the Soho/Cluster
mess is resolved.  Time is getting tight; major work on Cassini/Huygens
is to start Jan 1991 and the ESA approval process does take several
months.  "I cannot go to our [management] seeking approval for another
MOU while everyone knows that we are still awaiting US approval of the
earlier agreement..."

Hardware/software integration problems with the microwave instrument on
ESA's ERS-1 remote sensing satellite delay its launch several months.
It was originally to go up Oct 1990, and slip to 1991 is now likely.

Dassault shows a design study for a two-stage spaceplane, with a large
hypersonic aircraft carrying an expendable second stage topped with a
Hermes derivative.

First Pegasus captive-carry test flown Nov 9.

ESA [Roger Bonnet again] says Hipparcos may achieve nearly all of its
original mission.  No degradation due to the Van Allen belts has yet
been seen, and this augurs well for a mission lasting the original
2.5 years.  ESA is negotiating with NASA for use of ground-station
facilities at Goldstone, which would raise tracking coverage to about
90% in conjunction with the main Hipparcos station at Odenwald and
the hastily-added stations at Perth and Kourou.  The big concern now
is the eclipse period in spring; the eclipses will last quite a bit
longer than the ones in Clarke orbit, where Hipparcos was meant to go.
However, the engineers think things should be all right, and there
may be just enough power to continue operations through the eclipse
period instead of having to shut down for a couple of weeks.  After
the eclipse period, Hipparcos's health will be re-assessed and ESA
will decide whether it is necessary to shut it down and start building
Hipparcos 2 instead.

Pictures of Soviet spaceplane models and prototypes, including a
subscale Buran flown to Mach 16 for design verification.

[Latest entry in the Why-Wasn't-This-In-Aviation-Week contest, from
the 15 Nov issue of Flight International:]

NASA releases details of the plans for scaling down user support aboard
the space station.  NASA will provide less equipment, partly on grounds
that NASA historically has not been good at guessing what experimenters
will need (example: the complex freezer microscope on Skylab, never used).
The US lab module no longer has windows, and the "sewer" -- a venting
system for waste gases -- is gone too.  There will be no animals in
cages (partly as a result of the bad experiences on Spacelab 3).
There will be one airlock rather than two, and various gadgets like
the acceleration-mapping system are gone.  "Main facilities will
have to be paid for by the user."  User power will be 37.5kW, supplied
as DC at 160V and 120V.  The active cooling system is gone in favor
of passive cooling.  The [stupid] idea of private funding for the
Flight Telerobotic Servicer has been dropped, although NASA money may
come from outside the station budget.  [For those not aware of it,
the FTS is basically Congress's pork-barrel project for the US robotics
industry.  It doesn't seem to do anything that the Canadian arm
system won't.]  There will be no exterior-mounted instrument-pointing
systems provided, so users who want them will have to bring their own.
The station spacesuit is gone, and shuttle suits will be used for EVA.

[From 3 Nov issue of Science]

First results are in from the protein-crystal-growth experiment on
STS-26.  Three of the eleven materials produced crystals "far superior"
to any seen before.  Most of the remainder produced "showers of little
tiny crystals", thought to indicate a vibration problem.  Improved
versions of the experiment are under development; the payoff of space
experiments is much higher than comparable ones on Earth.  "We can
work for a long time on the ground here to get an improvement much
less dramatic..."

[And some oddments from the 21 Oct Flight]

McDonnell Douglas plans to build another Delta pad at the Cape,
including facilities for liquid-hydrogen loading for a planned new
upper stage using an RL10 [Centaur] engine.

General Dynamics studies another Atlas variant, with solid strap-ons
but without a Centaur upper stage.

NASA finally releases RFP for studies on the station lifeboat, stressing
use of "existing technologies" for a simple and reliable vehicle.  Full
scale development would start in 1992.
--
1972: Saturn V #15 flight-ready|     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
1989: birds nesting in engines | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry [e-mail]

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

Date: 19 Dec 89 15:28:52 GMT
From: frooz![e-mail]  (Bill Wyatt)
Subject: Re: Big Bang:  Did it happen?

From article <[e-mail]>, by [e-mail]:
> In article <[e-mail]>, [e-mail] (James P. Galasyn) writes:
>>I just heard from a fairly reliable source that CalTech has demonstrated
>>the Big Bang never happened. [...]

> [...]  I really don't know how you could *disprove* the BB; it's
> been pretty well accepted since the '60s.  There's a lot of data that it
> explains real well that you'd have to come up with a better explanation
> for... 3 degree background, expansion, primordial nucleosynthesis, etc.
> The BB theory, combined with Guth's inflation, does a fine job at the
> moment... [...]

Well, the BB in general is separate from inflation theory. And no,
inflation theory certainly does not do `a fine job': it is a pretty
theory completely at odds with observations. Most theorists really
*want* the Universe to be closed (i.e. Omega >= 1.0), so much so that
they call these the `standard' theories. People ignore the fact that
the standard theories currently require exotic (i.e. unknown) physics.

The inflation theory predicts Omega is exactly 1.0000... , but
every piece of observational evidence says Omega is between 0.1 and
0.3, so the Universe is open. There are lots of truly creative  ways of
reconciling the discrepancies; shadow matter, tailored particles,
etc., etc. None of them has any observational basis; their sole
reason for being is to close the Universe.

Bill Wyatt, Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory  (Cambridge, MA, USA)
    UUCP :  {husc6,cmcl2,mit-eddie}!harvard!cfa!wyatt
 Internet:   [e-mail]
     SPAN:   cfa::wyatt                 BITNET: wyatt@cfa

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

Date: 21 Dec 89 04:34:43 GMT
From: shelby![e-mail]  (Michael B. Brooks)
Subject: Re: Techno-welfare

>From: [e-mail] (Paul Dietz)
>Subject: Re: Techno-welfare
>Message-ID: <[e-mail]>

>Industry has a strong incentive to do R&D in areas that will lead to
>valuable products and services that can be sold for a profit.  NASA
>does not.

Agreed Paul, and therein lies the heart of the problem. Most Industrial
R&D is for short term needs and short term profits (especially
these days, in this country).  In the bygone days of Apollo, relatively
longterm investments were made without overriding attention to
"business necessities".

>Transistors were invented in 1948.  ICs were invented in the late
>1950's.  Early IC development was nurtured by military and NASA
>spending, but it isn't clear to me that without NASA ICs wouldn't have
>come along anyway at about the same rate -- especially if the
>engineering talent that went into NASA had gone into other fields.

The collection of many engineers, in many companies, working on micro-
minaturization of ICs for space applications, funded by NASA for Apollo,
freed this pool of talent from the constraints of "business necessities".
My suspicion is that the pace of the IC industry growth benefited
enormously from this  freedom, and that if IR&D had to fund the 4Mb DRAM
antecedents and associated technology (rather than NASA & USGov.), we
would not see these at this time.  Apollo created a large body of
of engineers, (and the public), aware of what microminiturized technology
could do. "It put a man on the Moon" etc. The technical success of Apollo
and micro-tech was demonstrated for all of the Corporate Boards of
the world, and many of these decided to give more money to their IR&D
people.  After all, you might be able to make some interesting products
from these smaller ICs, especially since NASA paid many basic research
costs.

In effect, Semitech, Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC),
MITI, and DARPAs continued semiconductor research support, all mimic what
NASA did at this time.  It`s unlikely that IR&D would have carried us
to this point, this fast, by itself if not for the politics of the space
program, and its high visibility. Put another way, ICs were proved
and sold by Apollo, in the biggest way possible.  Great advertising!

Mike Brooks/Stanford Electronics Labs (solid state)/SU

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

Date: 26 Dec 89 18:38:00 GMT
From: trident.arc.nasa.gov![e-mail]  (Peter E. Yee)
Subject: NASA Headline News for 12/26/89 (Forwarded)

-----------------------------------------------------------------
Tuesday, December 26, 1989                    Audio: 202/755-1788
-----------------------------------------------------------------

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


There is very little activity at Space Shuttle Launch Pad 39A at
Kennedy Space Center.  The orbiter remains powered down.  Heaters
remain on in the orbiter's OMS pods, the solid rocket booster's
aft skirts and the forward reaction control system.  Some
maintenance work is underway on the launch processing system in
the launch control center.


United Press International reports that astronaut Mission
Specialist David Low will carry a pair of very old tan silk socks
into space on the next space shuttle mission. The heirloom
hosiery was worn by Cornell University founder Ezra Cornell on
his wedding day in 1831.  Johnson Space Center spokesman Jeff
Carr says the pair of socks "doesn't sound unusual" to NASA.
Astronauts usually carry small, lightweight mementoes from their
alma maters.  The socks weigh less than an ounce.


Aerospace Daily says a revised space shuttle manifest will not
come out before mid-January.   Mission managers will wait until
after the STS-32 mission to assess what effect the launch delay
will have on the other nine missions scheduled for 1990.


The Australian government has approved plans for a commercial
spaceport.  Space Daily says the facility on the Cape York
peninsula will exclusively use the Soviet Union's Zenit boosters
for commercial satellite launches.  The initial launches from the
proposed $450 million spaceport are scheduled for 1995.  The
publication says the decision to use the Soviet built rockets was
based on much lower costs and proven reliability.  The proposed
Cape York site is located 14 degrees below the equator.  An
environmental impact study is scheduled to begin in March.  A
search for customers and private funding is also underway.


White House Science Adviser D. Allan Bromley says the pre-college
educational system in the United States is a "disgrace and a
scandal."  The Yale University scientist-educator told the
Washington Post that many U.S. university graduate departments
for science and engineering are entirely populated by foreign
students.  Bromley  says the White House is "working agressively"
on a program to set national education goals for science studies.

            *          *           *           *



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


The next scheduled event is on Thursday, January 4 at 11:30 A.M.
when NASA Update will be transmitted.

-----------------------------------------------------------------
These reports are filed daily, Monday through Friday, at 12 noon
Eastern time.
-----------------------------------------------------------------

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

Date: 26 Dec 89 21:37:54 GMT
From: dsac.dla.mil!dsacg2![e-mail]  (Tom Ohmer)
Subject: Chris Robertson's "Henry bio" (was Re: who's out there?)

From article <[e-mail]>, by [e-mail] (Chris Robertson):
<                                                   Efforts to talk
< to the teachers there have unfortunately been unsuccessful, as the school
< doesn't seem to exist any more.  (When I mentioned this to Henry, he
  ^^^^^^^         ^^^^^
< At the University of Saskatchewan he was active in both chemistry and
< computer science, but again the details are hazy as the chemistry lab
< he was in doesn't seem to exist now either.  I'm not sure whether he was
            ^^^^^^^         ^^^^^
< He moved to Toronto for the Master's program in computer science, but the
< building where he was first based doesn't seem to exist any more --
                                    ^^^^^^^         ^^^^^
< the Dean said a fire started mysteriously in the middle of the night.

<                            (Now, of course, that we realize Henry's
< significance, I curse myself for my lack of persistence, especially
< since that building doesn't really exist any more -- it's been totally
                      ^^^^^^^        ^^^^^
< He is currently based in the Zoology Department at the Univ. of Toronto
< (a solid, fire-proof building with an extensive networked computer
< facility).  We have all wondered at the significance of this, but those
< zoologists are keeping pretty quiet about it, and there are lots of
< locked doors.  Henry has the reputation of being difficult to find;


Whew!!!  And, to think, I would have invited him to stay at MY home if he
were ever in the neighborhood.  My smoke detector's battery is dead.

:-) :-) :-) :-) :-) :-) :-) :-) :-) :-) :-) :-) :-) :-) :-) :-) :-) :-)
--
Tom Ohmer @ Defense Logistics Agency Systems Automation Center,
            DSAC-AMB, Bldg. 27-6, P.O. Box 1605, Columbus, OH  43216-5002
UUCP: osu-cis!dsac!tohmer   INTERNET: [e-mail]
Phone: [phone]   AUTOVON:  850-9210   Disclaimer claimed

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

End of SPACE Digest V10 #364
*******************