3/07/94:  DATE SET FOR SECOND FLIGHT OF TETHER EXPERIMENT

Jim Cast
Headquarters, Washington, D.C.                                             
March 7, 1994

Jerry Berg/Dave Drachlis
Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Ala.

RELEASE:  94-35

        The second mission of NASA's Small Expendable-tether Deployer System
(SEDS-2) is scheduled to be launched no earlier than 10:32 p.m.  EST March 9
from Space Launch Complex 17 at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla. It
will be a secondary payload on a U.S. Air Force Delta II rocket carrying a
NAVSTAR Global Positioning System Satellite.

        Deployment of the SEDS-2 payload is planned to begin approximately 66
minutes after the Delta liftoff.  The instrumented package is to unreel for an
additional 109 minutes, reaching a maximum planned distance of 12.4 miles (20
km) from the deployer, in a downward (toward Earth) direction.

        The SEDS project is intended to demonstrate a versatile and economical
way of delivering smaller payloads, such as micro-satellites, to higher orbits
or downward toward Earth's atmosphere.  The second mission will investigate how
well SEDS permits controlling the dynamics of payload deployment.

        The SEDS project is sponsored by NASA's Office of Space Systems
Development in Washington, D.C., and is managed by the Marshall Center in
Huntsville, Ala. The payload is managed and developed by the Langley Research
Center in Hampton, Va. The Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., is
responsible for integrating SEDS with the launch vehicle.  Tether Applications
in Chula Vista, Calif., is the inventor and developer of SEDS.
---
  Via FTL BBS (404-292-8761) and NASA Spacelink (205-895-0028)
