Return-path: X-Andrew-Authenticated-as: 7997;andrew.cmu.edu;Ted Anderson Received: from holmes.andrew.cmu.edu via trymail for +dist+/afs/andrew.cmu.edu/usr1/ota/space/space.dl@andrew.cmu.edu (->+dist+/afs/andrew.cmu.edu/usr1/ota/space/space.dl) (->ota+space.digests) ID ; Thu, 30 Mar 89 03:16:54 -0500 (EST) Message-ID: Reply-To: space+@Andrew.CMU.EDU From: space-request+@Andrew.CMU.EDU To: space+@Andrew.CMU.EDU Date: Thu, 30 Mar 89 03:16:45 -0500 (EST) Subject: SPACE Digest V9 #323 SPACE Digest Volume 9 : Issue 323 Today's Topics: space news from Jan 23 AW&ST Fusion --- What's going on? Re: Room Temperature fusion - possible indications? Planning a trip to Proxima Centauri Re: far side of the Moon photo mission (ussr's) Re: Success with cold fusion reported India, Brazil, China, etc. space progs Re: Tilenius paper ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 30 Mar 89 03:54:36 GMT From: mailrus!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!utgpu!utzoo!henry@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu (Henry Spencer) Subject: space news from Jan 23 AW&ST NOAA is now "in the doghouse" for talking to France about a Landsat-Spot merger without informing the State Dept., etc. etc., that it was talking to a foreign government. However, obviously its biggest botch was never mentioning this to Eosat, which is supposed to be running Landsat. "We didn't know about it until we read it in Aviation Week", says Eosat's president. NOAA says it was inappropriate for Eosat to be involved, and denies that Spot Image was involved on the French side. Spot Image, however, says it was kept fully informed and provided input. France thinks any merged scheme should be based on the French organization, with data sales separate from -- and not expected to repay -- the space segment's funding. Spot is calling the proposed system "Super Spot". Meanwhile, Eosat asks for emergency funding to keep Landsats 4 and 5 running, with NOAA saying "it's your problem", and threatening to turn the satellites off if no money is found. [It was found, in the end, although not by Eosat.] British Aerospace completes new solar arrays for the Hubble telescope, with about 10% more output than the original ones, easing simultaneous use of multiple instruments. Formation of the National Space Council gets off to a bureaucratic start, with some of Quayle's staff, who know little about space, in charge of interviewing potential Council staff. Sen. Barbara Mikulski, new chairman of NASA's Senate Appropriations subcommittee, declares strong support for space but warns NASA that the budget situation is bad and the space station needs better reporting of life-cycle costs and better justification. USAF cannot meet its 1989 launch targets: 70% will be good performance. Titan 4 and Delta 2 have both slipped due to hardware problems associated with re-starting closed facilities. Among other complications, storage space at the Cape is so short that the USAF is asking the USN for the loan of some warehouse space belonging to the Trident program. Slight slip in Discovery's launch schedule, and the discovery of the bearing crack that ended up causing a much larger slip. Atlantis's tiles are not as badly damaged as first thought. Insulation falling from both the external tank and the nose of the right SRB is believed to have been to blame for the damage. Controversy over space reactors grows. Scientists say that the new Soviet Topaz reactors have been emitting enough gamma rays to shut down Solar Max's gamma-ray spectrometer about half the time, and Japan's Ginga X-ray satellite has also been affected. There is concern about effects on the Gamma Ray Observatory, slated for launch next year. Unfortunately, politics have gotten mixed in, with SDIO alleging (correctly) that some of the anti-orbital-reactor people are motivated more by SDI's dependence on nuclear power sources than by concern over scientific impact of reactors. USAF and SDIO plan $8G order in 1990 for the Boost Surveillance and Tracking System, which will double as the first operational part of SDI and a maneuverable, hardened early-warning system to replace the current Defense Satellite Program satellites. Critics say that DoD has at least eight DSPs in inventory at the moment, enough to last until the year 2000, and there is no need for a replacement. NASA FY90 budget requests full funding for the space station plus new starts for a pair of planetary missions: Cassini (essentially a Galileo mission to Saturn) and CRAF (Comet Rendezvous, Asteroid Flyby). CRAF would launch in 1995 on a Titan-4-Centaur, for a 1998 flyby of asteroid Hamburga [really] and rendezvous with comet Kopff in Aug 2000. Cassini would leave for Saturn in Aug 1996, on a similar booster, with arrival in 2002 after one or two asteroid flybys. The planetary missions are probably safe, but the station funding is anyone's guess. Pentagon asks 50% budget hike for SDI in FY90; absolutely nobody seriously expects them to get it. Critics say many of the tests SDI is planning in the next two years are on the edge of violating the ABM Treaty. Also, that 50% includes the thin edge of the wedge labelled "Phase 1 Deployment", and Congress will *not* like that. Galileo's thrusters are fixed and re-acceptance tests are about to start. This is on the critical path for launching on time in October. About three weeks of margin remain if nothing goes wrong. The changes will reduce thruster efficiency about 5%, and may require eliminating one of the two asteroid flybys or one of the Jovian-satellite encounters, although there is hope for the full mission. JPL is very grateful that they didn't launch in 1986; a workaround for the thruster problems would probably not have been possible. The problem was discovered during experiments with TVSat 1, Germany's TV-broadcast satellite that was written off after one solar array failed to deploy: it was being used as an operational testbed when its thrusters failed. When run nonstop, the thrusters tend to overheat and destroy themselves. Worse, there is a "hot start" problem when pulsing the thrusters, which can ruin the thrusters in seconds. MBB is investigating why these problems weren't found during development. Minor design differences between Galileo and TVSat 1 may account for the hot-start problem not showing up on TVSat 1 (or on the French TDF-1, which has the same thrusters, now being operated in pulsed mode to avoid the overheating problem). Small plumbing changes remove the hot-start problem, and changes in mixture ratio and flow rate remove the overheating problem. However, the latter set of changes reduce specific impulse from 280 to 270 s, cutting about 10 kg off Galileo's fuel reserve. This is of some concern because the fuel reserve for Galileo's full mission varied from 50 kg to zero, depending on what assumptions were made about things like navigational error and launch date. If Galileo gets off on time (Oct 12) and errors are at the 50% level, reserve should be 30-40 kg. Eliminating the second asteroid flyby would save about 40 kg, and eliminating one satellite encounter would save about 15. Soviets plan to fly their MMU tethered to Mir, even though it is capable of independent flight. They say "maybe later -- not needed right now". Aerospatiale ERA deployable structure failed to deploy from Mir on command, and efforts to open it using ERA's vibration system failed. Soviet controllers conferred over options and French mission personnel tried to figure out why it had jammed, while Mir went out of tracking- station range for a few minutes. When contact was reestablished, the cosmonauts reported that ERA was deployed. Video images transmitted later show Volkov kicking the ERA canister; he says it deployed a few centimeters per kick. Cause of the deployment problem is not fully understood, but moisture inside the unsealed canister may have frozen. The problem lengthened the Volkov/Chretien EVA from 5 hours to 6. -- Welcome to Mars! Your | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology passport and visa, comrade? | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu ------------------------------ From: ota Date: Tue, 28 Mar 89 13:43:09 MST Subject: Fusion --- What's going on? Does anyone know actually when the article will come out in Nature? Science? Enquirer? If the reports are true, then this appears to be the answer to all of mankind's problems. Once again, technology has come to the rescue rather then require us to solve our problems the hard way.... David Birnbaum New Mexico State University Small Systems +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Find me at: dbirnbau@nmsu.edu VTIS001@NMSUVM1.bitnet /dev/null | | | | "It shouldn't be a suprise to anyone when the network screws up; | | the suprise should be that the dang thing works at all!" | +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ ------------------------------ Date: 28 Mar 89 17:45:38 GMT From: mailrus!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!utgpu!utzoo!henry@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu (Henry Spencer) Subject: Re: Room Temperature fusion - possible indications? In article <369@hydra.gatech.EDU> dsm@prism.gatech.EDU (Daniel McGurl) writes: >Ah, but you miss a critical point, the only fuel required is to get out to the >Asteroid belt. Getting the asteriods back involves just giving them a push >of sorts (unless you are in a hurry... Pushing even a small asteroid -- say a mere million tons -- into an orbit that crosses Earth's is going to require more than a little bit of fuel. >... Also, the space ship could probably slow in a >way similar to the shuttles when it returns to Earth, just use the atmosphere >as a speed brake. At the kinds of velocities we've been talking about, no it can't. Aerobraking works fine at a few kilometers per second. At thousands of kps, it doesn't work at all: you have your choice of vaporizing, slamming into the ground and making a large crater, or zipping off into space after losing only a small fraction of your speed. There is no way you are going to lose hundreds or thousands of kps of speed in a distance of a few thousand kilometers without vaporizing. (Not to mention the small problem that this involves decelerations of many thousands of Gs.) -- Welcome to Mars! Your | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology passport and visa, comrade? | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu ------------------------------ Date: 27 Mar 89 20:26:49 GMT From: oliveb!amdahl!drivax!macleod@ames.arc.nasa.gov (MacLeod) Subject: Planning a trip to Proxima Centauri Henry Spencer posts: :Let us all be very cautious about this; while it sounds promising, there :have been major scientific false alarms before. (For example, there were :a number of high-temperature-superconductor false alarms before Bednorz :and Muller hit the jackpot -- this was one reason why their report was :slow to be accepted.) Caution is fine, but I'm too excited to keep still. Given the energy density figures from preliminary reports, how much of a scale-up will it take for a constant-boost ship capable of going to Proxima Centauri? Assume refueling there. Yeah, yeah, I know, I'm guilty of the cardinal sin of THINKING BIG again... I vote for calling it PROMETHEUS. Michael Sloan MacLeod (amdahl!drivax!macleod) ------------------------------ Date: 28 Mar 89 23:48:35 GMT From: cfa!mink@husc6.harvard.edu (Doug Mink) Subject: Re: far side of the Moon photo mission (ussr's) In article <47974@philabs.Philips.Com>, rfc@briar.philips.com (Robert Casey) writes: > I seem to remember that the Russians flew a photo mission in '59 to take a > picture of the farside of the Moon, and that the picture came out very fuzzy. > I don't know of any immediate retries of this mission to get better pictures. > Anyone know why? Maybe they didn't have more launch vehicles to use for such > a mission? Or the results they did get were the best they could do back in > '59? (maybe they couldn't aim the camera too accurately back then, so they > took a picture of a large field of view, which the Moon occupies a small area > of, to be sure of getting the Moon at all. Then the picture we did get to > see was edited to throw out the large area of black sky? This would make for > poor resolution of the Moon.)? There were attempts at followup missions, a list of which follows. There weren't any successes by either the US or the USSR for years, however. I tabulated known attempts by both countries from the "TRW Space Log 1957-1987" "*" indicates a successful mission. "?" means it didn't look like a success to me. I've never seen a table like this, and it is interesting to note parallels and differences between the two programs. It sure looks like Luna 3 was a lucky fluke in the failure-prone first five years of lunar probes. The next glimpses of the far side didn't occur for almost seven years. After compiling these tables, I have more appreciation of the Soviet Union's serious competition in the race for the moon, and note the fact that there has yet to be a complete, multi-spectral survey of the moon by either country. Table I. USSR Unmanned Lunar Probes Luna 1 Jan. 2, 1959 Missed moon by 3728 miles Luna 2 Sep. 12, 1959 Impacted on moon *Luna 3 Oct. 4, 1959 Photographed lunar far side for 40 minutes None Jan. 4, 1963 Never left parking orbit; decayed Jan. 5, 1963 Luna 4 Apr. 2, 1963 Failed soft lander; missed moon by 5282 miles Luna 5 May 9, 1965 Impacted on moon; soft landing failed Luna 6 June 8, 1965 Failed soft lander; missed moon by 100,000 miles Luna 7 Oct. 4, 1965 Impacted on moon; soft landing failed Luna 8 Dec. 3, 1965 Impacted on moon; soft landing failed *Luna 9 Jan. 31, 1966 Soft-landed on moon; returned photos for 3 days Kosmos 111 Mar. 1, 1966 Suspected lunar probe failure; decayed *Luna 10 Mar. 31, 1966 Lunar orbiter; returned data for 54 days *Luna 11 Aug. 24, 1966 Lunar orbiter; returned data for 38 days *Luna 12 Oct. 22, 1966 Lunar orbiter; photographed moon from stable orbit *Luna 13 Dec. 21, 1966 Soft-landed on moon; returned photos and soil data Zond 4 Mar. 2, 1968 Failed lunar mission? ?Luna 14 Dec. 21, 1966 Lunar orbiter; passive gravity experiments *Zond 5 Sep. 15, 1968 Lunar fly-around with return to earth; ocean recovery *Zond 6 Nov. 10, 1968 Lunar fly-around with return to earth; land recovery *Luna 15 Jul. 13, 1969 Lunar orbiter; orbit altered twice *Zond 7 Aug. 8, 1969 Lunar fly-around with return to earth; land recovery *Luna 16 Sep. 12, 1970 Lunar sample return Zond 8 Oct. 20, 1970 Missed moon *Luna 17 Nov. 10, 1970 Unmanned lunar rover ?Luna 18 Sep. 2, 1971 Orbited moon for 54 orbits *Luna 19 Sep. 28, 1971 Lunar orbiter; photographed moon *Luna 20 Feb. 14, 1972 Lunar sample return *Luna 21 Jan. 8, 1973 Unmanned lunar rover *Luna 22 May 29, 1974 Lunar orbiter Luna 23 Oct. 28, 1974 Crashed on moon None Oct. 16, 1975 Lunar probe; failed to orbit *Luna 24 Aug. 9, 1976 Lunar sample return Table II. USA Unmanned Lunar Probes None Aug. 17, 1958 Lunar probe; first stage failed Pioneer 1 Oct. 11, 1958 Failed to reach moon; decayed Oct. 12, 1958 Pioneer 2 Nov. 8, 1958 Lunar probe; third stage ignition unsuccessful Pioneer 3 Dec. 6, 1958 Failed to reach moon; decayed Dec. 7, 1958 Pioneer 4 Dec. 6, 1958 Lunar probe; missed moon by 37,300 miles Ranger 1 Aug. 23, 1961 Never left earth orbit; decayed Aug. 30, 1961 Ranger 2 Nov. 18, 1961 Never left earth orbit; decayed Nov. 20, 1961 Ranger 3 Jan. 26, 1962 Lunar probe; missed moon by 22,862 miles Ranger 4 Apr. 23, 1962 Impacted on moon; experiments failed to work Ranger 5 Oct. 18, 1962 Lunar probe; missed moon by 450 miles Ranger 6 Jan. 30, 1964 Impacted on Moon; television system malfunctioned *Ranger 7 Jan. 30, 1964 Impacted on Moon; returned 4308 photos *Ranger 8 Feb. 17, 1965 Impacted on Moon; returned 7137 photos *Ranger 9 Mar. 21, 1965 Impacted on Moon; returned 5814 photos *Surveyor 1 May 30, 1966 Soft-landed on moon; returned photos for 44 days *Lunar Orbiter 1 Aug. 10, 1966 Lunar orbiter; returned data for 19 days Surveyor 2 Sep. 20, 1966 Crashed on moon *Lunar Orbiter 2 Nov. 6, 1966 Lunar orbiter; returned 205 frames *Lunar Orbiter 3 Feb. 4, 1967 Lunar orbiter; returned 182 frames *Surveyor 3 Apr. 17, 1967 Soft-landed on moon; returned photos and soil data *Lunar Orbiter 4 May 4, 1967 Lunar orbiter; returned 163 frames *Lunar Orbiter 5 Aug. 1, 1967 Lunar orbiter; orbited for 6 months *Surveyor 4 Apr. 17, 1967 Soft-landed on moon; returned photos and soil data *Surveyor 5 Sep. 8, 1967 Soft-landed on moon; returned photos and soil data *Surveyor 6 Nov. 7, 1967 Soft-landed on moon; first rocket takeoff from moon *Surveyor 7 Jan. 7, 1968 Soft-landed on moon; returned photos and soil data (and just for some comparison dates: *Apollo 11 Jul. 16, 1969 First manned landing on moon and return . . . *Apollo 17 Dec. 7, 1972 Last manned landing on moon and return) Doug Mink Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics Cambridge, Massachusetts Internet: mink@cfa.harvard.edu Bitnet: mink@cfa SPAN: cfa::mink Phone: (617)495-7408 ------------------------------ Date: 28 Mar 89 10:34:34 GMT From: mailrus!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!utgpu!kocic@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu (Miroslav Kocic) Subject: Re: Success with cold fusion reported The discussion in this newsgroup has so far been about the authenticity of the Utah breakthrough, but I have two different concerns. First, what if fusion turns out to create problems we don't foresee? We didn't foresee radioactive waste or meltdowns back when fission was at this stage, and, if history teaches anything, it teaches that every benefit has a proportional price. Second, what if cold fusion becomes the crack-cocaine of energy production? I can imagine a thousand fanatics in 750 terrorist cells making an H-bomb in their kitchen. ------------------------------ Date: 28 Mar 89 09:02:44 GMT From: barilvm.bitnet!f44169@cunyvm.cuny.edu (Gerald Steinberg) Subject: India, Brazil, China, etc. space progs I am trying to collect information of the space efforts of Third World countrie s (not US, Ussr, W. Europe). I am intrested in military and civil applications , actual launches and planned programs, etc. Bibliographic information (good articles and books) would also help. (I have been throught Aviation Week since 1985 - not much there.) Any help would be appreciated. Please send replies directly to me as i do not always have access to the net. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 28 Mar 1989 12:49-EST From: Dale.Amon@H.GP.CS.CMU.EDU Subject: Re: Tilenius paper I found Eric's paper quite interesting. I would also refer people interested in this area to: The Private Solution to the Space Transpotation Crisis James Bennet & Phil Salin (Spacepac occassional paper 87-3. Try Scott Pace) Economics on the Space Frontier: Can We Afford It Gordon Woodcock (try asking through the NSS office if they can get copies of it. My copy is a prepublication draft Gordon gave me and I don't remember where it was eventually published) ------------------------------ End of SPACE Digest V9 #323 *******************