Return-path: X-Andrew-Authenticated-as: 7997;andrew.cmu.edu;Ted Anderson Received: from beak.andrew.cmu.edu via trymail for +dist+/afs/andrew.cmu.edu/usr11/tm2b/space/space.dl@andrew.cmu.edu (->+dist+/afs/andrew.cmu.edu/usr11/tm2b/space/space.dl) (->ota+space.digests) ID ; Sat, 27 Oct 1990 02:29:35 -0400 (EDT) Message-ID: Precedence: junk Reply-To: space+@Andrew.CMU.EDU From: space-request+@Andrew.CMU.EDU To: space+@Andrew.CMU.EDU 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 space+@andrew.cmu.edu. Other mail, esp. [un]subscription notices, should be sent to space-request+@andrew.cmu.edu, or, if urgent, to tm2b+@andrew.cmu.edu ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 26 Oct 90 22:41:08 GMT From: trident.arc.nasa.gov!yee@ames.arc.nasa.gov (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!lwall@ucsd.edu (Larry Wall) Subject: Re: Magellan Update - 10/26/90 In article <1990Oct26.214342.18973@cbnewsl.att.com> sw@cbnewsl.att.com (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 lwall@jpl-devvax.jpl.nasa.gov ------------------------------ Date: 26 Oct 90 23:11:10 GMT From: usc!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!jpl-devvax!lwall@ucsd.edu (Larry Wall) Subject: Re: Magellan Update - 10/26/90 In article <1990Oct26.214342.18973@cbnewsl.att.com> sw@cbnewsl.att.com (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 lwall@jpl-devvax.jpl.nasa.gov ------------------------------ Date: 26 Oct 90 16:02:12 GMT From: usc!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!jato!mars.jpl.nasa.gov!baalke@ucsd.edu (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 | baalke@mars.jpl.nasa.gov ___| | | | |__) |/ | | |___ Jet Propulsion Lab | baalke@jems.jpl.nasa.gov /___| | | | ___/ | |/__ /| M/S 301-355 | |_____|/ |_|/ |_____|/ Pasadena, CA 91109 | ------------------------------ Date: 27 Oct 90 00:11:15 GMT From: hub.ucsb.edu!ucsbuxa!3001crad@ucsd.edu (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!news@rutgers.edu (Patrick J Draper) Subject: Re: A great idea on how to fund NASA! In article <1990Oct26.204353.4847@vicorp.com> ron@vicorp.com (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! > > ron@vicorp.com 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!rwmurphr@apple.com (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 *******************