Space & Astronomy/Space and Astronomy (October 1993).iso/pc/text/spacedig/v11_2/v11_210.txt

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Subject: SPACE Digest V11 #210

SPACE Digest                                     Volume 11 : Issue 210

Today's Topics:
          Space Pioneer Gerry Bull Murdered
               * SpaceNews 02-Apr-90 *
             Re: Shuttle landings
      Re: Fun Space Fact #1: Launcher Development Costs
                 Gif pictures
        CALL FOR DISCUSSION -- talk.education
                Hubble Window
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: 31 Mar 90 19:22:44 GMT
From: snorkelwacker!usc!cs.utexas.edu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!utgpu!utzoo![e-mail]  (Kieran A. Carroll)
Subject: Space Pioneer Gerry Bull Murdered

Southam News reported today (p. A13 of the 31/3/90 Toronto Star) that
Canadian Gerald Bull was murdered last week. Bull, who has been involved
in international arms dealing in recent years, was shot dead in his Brussels
apartment. "The killing -- two bullets to the neck from a silenced 7.65
millimetre pistol -- appears to have been the work of a professional."
The Toronto Star story suggests that the intelligence services of both
Isreal and Iran  might have had a motive for the killing, as Bull was
involved in a venture that could have developed sufficient weapons
technology in Iraq to allow that country to "achieve strategic
superiority in the Middle East."

Gerald Bull was an engineering professor at Montreal's McGill University
in the 1960's (prior to that, I believe that he was a student at the
University of Toronto's Institute for Aerospace Studies, in whose library
a number of his technical papers are lodged). While there, he began
a series of rocketry experiments involving the use of large military
cannons to act as a "first stage" booster. In these experiments, small
(about 100 kg) rockets were launched from old Navy guns; the rockets
fired their own motors after leaving the gun barrel. The gun-launch
allowed these small rockets to reach altitudes much higher than they
could have achieved on their own. Bull suggested that this method could
be used to reduce the cost of some satellite launches, as -- unlike the
expendable first stages of "standard" satellite-launching rockets -- the
gun hardware could easily be re-used, and the rockets being launched were
relatively inexpensive, being small.

As Bull's experiments proceeded, he transferred them to the Carribean
(while at McGill, his rocket launches took place in the Gaspe Peninsula,
directed southwards -- Americans to the south were understandably nervous
about large guns being fired in their direction!). With funding from the
US Navy, his Project HARP (High Altitude Research Project) saw many high-
altitude launches take place. However, he never realized his ambition of
gun-launching a satellite into orbit, mainly because the guns he used
couldn't provide enough of a velocity increment to his rockets.
Typically, a muzzle velocity of 1 to 2 kilometres per second was achieved
in the launches; orbial velocity, on the other hand, is in excess of 7
kilometres per second.

After Project HARP was wound down, Bull appears to have taken his gun-
design experience "on the road", designing an advanced 155 millimetre
howitzer for South Africa. Last year, his design team offered a 50-km
range, 203-millimetre field gun for sale at a military trade fair in Baghdad.
Christopher Foss, editor of the magazine Jane's Defence Weekly, described
Bull as "perhaps the greatest gun designer of the century." Bull's arms-
dealing had landed him in trouble in the past -- the US government
sentenced him to a term in prison for selling some of his surplus Project
Harp equipment (radars, I believe) to South Africa.

Bull appears to have kept working on his idea of gun-launching satellites
into orbit right until his death; a London-based magazine, "The Middle
East", reported in its March edition that Iraq had developed an interest
in "firing satellittes or weapons into low earth orbit." I can't help but
feel that Bull was not an arms dealer entirely by choice. I can easily
imagine him as a space enthusiast with a vision for a revolutionary
technology, one that could greatly benefit the development of space (by
bringing about lowered launch costs), who turned to arms trading as a
means of bringing in money to keep his research going. Perhaps if Canada
and the United States had not given up on developing new space launch
technologies in the late 1960's, Gerry Bull would be alive today (or
perhaps not...)

On a final note, Bull's early research may eventually bear fruit. A later
generation of space enthusiasts has continued development of the
satellite gun-launching concept, using electromegnetic mass-drivers
rather than chemical guns. Work by Henry Kolm of MIT, and the Space
Studies Institute of Princeton, NJ into lunar mass-drivers in the late
1970's has led to a recent Sandia Labs proposal for a Hawaii-based mass-
driver rocket-launcher, or "coil-gun". With a muzzle velocity of about 6
kilometres per second, such a device would overcome the main limitation
of Bull's experimental apparatus. Coil-guns face severe problems in the design
of their projectiles; many of those problems were addressed and solved by
Bull in the 1960's during Project HARP. Whatever his activities as a arms
dealer, Bull's most lasting legacy may yet be the work that he did as a
rocket engineer.
--

     Kieran A. Carroll @ U of Toronto Aerospace Institute
     uunet!attcan!utzoo!kcarroll [e-mail]

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

Date: 31 Mar 90 02:50:16 GMT
From: att!tsdiag!ka2qhd![e-mail]  (John Magliacane)
Subject: * SpaceNews 02-Apr-90 *


Bulletin ID: SPC0402

                              =========
                              SpaceNews
                              =========

                         MONDAY APRIL 2, 1990

SpaceNews originates at KD2BD in Wall Township, NJ, and is distributed weekly
around the world on USENET and Amateur Packet Radio.  It is available for
UNLIMITED worldwide distribution.


* DOVE NEWS *
=============
Following the CPU crash on-board DO-17 which left the 2m transmitter ON,
command stations were unable to access the satellite receiver due to blocking.

On 170390, the AMSAT Engineering Team successfully reset the CPU on DO-17 and
commanded the 2M transmitter off.  Dave Blaschke (W5UN), the owner of the
world's largest privately owned 2 meter antenna, worked with Harold Price
(NK6K) to overcome the desense problem (DO-17's command receiver is also in
the 2M band).  Even with 32.5 dBi gain, and nearly 2 megawatts of EIRP, it
took several days of transmitting the reset sequence before they were
successful.

Alberto Zagni (I2KBD) reported that the transmitter power was dropping
significantly at the end of the eclipse portion of the orbit which indicated
that the batteries were flattening out.  Bob McGwier (N4HY) then strategized
with W5UN as to the two best times to reset the spacecraft CPU and turn the
transmitter off.  The first was at the end of the eclipse period, when
transmitter power would be at its lowest point.  However, if it turned out
that the battery voltage was too low to maintain the GASFET preamp in the
receiver, then the next time to try was just as the transmitter power was
falling off (soon after it left the sun and started the voltage descent in
eclipse).  The latter was the time which turned out to be successful.

The AMSAT Team is reviewing the events of the last week to determine the
failure mode.  Once they have completed their investigation, they will upload
the operating system for DO-17 and continue commissioning.  DO-17 is not
expected to be fully commissioned until sometime in April.

[From: AMSAT via OSCAR-11]


* UoSAT-OSCAR-14 NEWS *
=======================
The gravity boom on UoSAT-3 was deployed successfully under on-board computer
(OBC) control on Thursday morning (220390), following attitude control
manoeuvres to 'lock' the spacecraft to the Earth's magnetic field.  The
attitude manoeuvres have been complicated by offsets experienced in the on-
board magnetometer (which is used for attitude determination), requiring
additional software filters to be included into the attitude control
algorithms running on the OBC.

Following deployment of the boom and its 3.5 kg tip-mass to about 6 metres
from the top of the spacecraft, delibration algorithms have been activated on
the OBC to point the spacecraft towards Earth.

[From: G3YJO via OSCAR-11]


* SHUTTLE NEWS *
================
The Hubble Space Telescope was installed in Discovery's payload bay last week
after "midges" (mosquitoe-like insects) were removed from the Payload
Changeout Room.


* UoSAT-OSCAR-15 NEWS *
=======================
The team at Stanford, having succeeded in detecting local oscillator (LO)
leakage from the UO-15 command receiver, are now listening when the satellite
is in eclipse - to determine whether the on-board NiCd battery is functioning.

[From: G3YJO via OSCAR-11]


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* FEEDBACK WELCOMED *
=====================
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of the following paths:

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         Department of Electronics Technology
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<eof>

--
AMPR : KD2BD @ NN2Z (Neptune, NJ)
UUCP : ucbvax!rutgers!petsd!tsdiag!ka2qhd!kd2bd
       "For every problem, there is one solution which is simple,
       neat and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken

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

Date: 31 Mar 90 22:57:52 GMT
From: snorkelwacker!usc!cs.utexas.edu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!utgpu!utzoo![e-mail]  (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: Shuttle landings

In article <Added.ga4qq=[e-mail]> [e-mail] (SIMMONS DONALD F) writes:
>Why exactly did the shuttle make only a few landings at its special runway
>outside the Kennedy Space Center, and then they switched back to Edwards?
>I remember hearing somewhere that its brakes had something to do with it.

The shuttle's landing gear is now considered a somewhat marginal design,
and there is work underway to improve it with better brakes, a better
steering system, and a braking parachute.  The significance of this is
that Edwards has longer runways, and I believe the lakebed runway in
particular is easier on landing gear.  Another major factor is that
weather forecasting at KSC is very difficult, with surprise thunderstorms
common, while the weather at Edwards is generally better and much more
predictable.  Landing at KSC tightens up schedules, because moving the
orbiters back from Edwards eats up a fair bit of time.  Post-Challenger
safety reviews decided that the extra safety of landings at Edwards
outweighed the greater convenience of landings at KSC.
--
Apollo @ 8yrs: one small step.|     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
Space station @ 8yrs:        .| uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry [e-mail]

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

Date: Mon, 2 Apr 90 13:41:21 CDT
From: [e-mail]
Subject: Re: Fun Space Fact #1: Launcher Development Costs

> [e-mail] (Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology)

> Upgrade the Cessna to match the 747 specs (scaled down in size but
> keeping the stringency), and you will find it gets a lot more complex
> too.  Much of that complexity is things like fussier standards and
> greater demands in fairly size-independent ways.  There are things
> like hydraulic boost for controls that the Cessna doesn't need, but
> we *are* talking about two orders of magnitude of size difference in
> this example.

Much, but not all.  I would say not even most.

All that you say is quite true, Henry, but does it really have a
bearing on the point of the discussion?  The fact that what you say
is true doesn't seem to me to be a reasonable rebuttal of what I
said, although the presentation makes it sound as if it is meant to
be.


==============================================================================
| Fred McCall  ([e-mail]) | My boss doesn't agree with anything  |
| Military Computer Systems           | I say, so I don't think the company  |
| Defense Systems & Electronics Group | does, either.  That must mean I'm    |
| Texas Instruments, Inc.             | stuck with any opinions stated here. |
==============================================================================

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

Date: Mon, 2 Apr 90 17:03 GMT
From: "Joe Desbonnet, UCG Ireland." <[e-mail]>
Subject: Gif pictures

Could anyone point me to a source where I can get some impressive
space pictures preferably in Gif format? I recently saw a posting about
some pictures stored somewhere in Finland but I unfortunatly I can
only access US servers. As a Bitnet user I must use [e-mail] which
does not support Finish nodes. BTW are there other Bitnet FTP connections out
there?).
Thanks in advance for any help,
Joe.
+----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Joe Desbonnet,      |  Bitnet/EARN/HEANET  [e-mail]        |
| Computer Society,   |  ARPANET             phydesbonnet%vax1.ucg.ie        |
| University College  |  PSI          PSI%[phone]::PHYDESBONNET      |
| Galway, Ireland     |  Disclaimer: "I no nathin'" Ph.+353-91-24411 ex 2775 |
+----------------------------------------------------------------------------+

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

Date: 29 Mar 90 18:16:48 GMT
From: cs.utexas.edu!uwm.edu!bionet!turbo.bio.net![e-mail]  (Ian James Hawthorn)
Subject: CALL FOR DISCUSSION -- talk.education

I would like to start a new group - talk.education - with the
following mandate.

  -  an unmoderated group devoted to a discussion of exactly what, if anything,
  is wrong with the education system, and how it might be fixed.

It is actually surprising that there is not a group devoted to this
topic already. Many members of the net are directly involved in the
education system.  Even those who are not, are very concerned about
educational standards - especially in mathematics and the sciences. I
am sure that many of you have intelligent and original perspectives on
this problem, and on possible solutions - I would like to be able to
read them.

It seems to me that, with so many net members influential in education
circles, a talk.education group might actually generate a little light
along with the heat more usual for a talk.group . While there seems to
be a broad consensus that something is seriously amiss in the
education system, there is no consensus at all as to the direction
that should be taken to find solutions.  I think this is an issue
where the kind of freeranging and innovative ideas that arise in a
newsgroup discussion could prove to be very valuable. By providing a
forum in which these ideas could be aired, and a consensus forged, the
group talk.education could actually prove to be an immensely useful
undertaking.

At present there is no single group which carries a discussion of this
nature.  I have seen sporadic articles scattered amongst the various
talk.politics groups, however it is hard to extract the signal from
the noise (as it were).  The group sci.edu seems to be barely alive,
and certainly does not carry any discussion of this kind. I suspect
that the `sci' prefix leads to a perception that the group is for
`education specialists', something that very few people consider
themselves to be.

Discussion on this proposal will last for two weeks, after which there
will be a call for votes. Note that Follow-up to this proposal will be
directed to news.groups .

Ian Hawthorn
[e-mail]

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

Date: Mon, 2 Apr 90 16:37 CST
From: [e-mail]
Subject: Hubble Window

I read somewhere that the launch of the HST had been moved UP two days?
Whyfor?  Does anyone know how big the launch window is? When it opens etc?
I know some people who want to catch the launch and they think I have a
private pipeline to the NASA management :)

George K. Ott University of Wisconsin High Energy Physics Department

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

End of SPACE Digest V11 #210
*******************