🚀 go-pugleaf

[A light news week, for no particularly obvious reason.]

Japan is considering transferring its comsat programs to commercial
hands in a few years.

Satellite launch-insurance rates are falling, as successful launches
continue.

Rockwell proposes building another set of shuttle structural spares for
NASA.  The original structural-spares set is being used to build the
new orbiter.

Japan flies another quarter-scale model of the H-2 booster, successfully.

NASA's general counsel advises that the legal requirement that NASA's
top two officials come from "civilian life" precludes hiring James
Abrahamson (ex-head of SDI) as head of NASA, despite frequent mention
of his name in that connection.  He is a retired military officer,
receiving a military pension and subject to the military code of justice.

Recent Office of Mismanagement and Beancounting decision requires private
funding for several NASA projects, notably the Flight Telerobotic Servicer
for space station assembly.  NASA plans a May contract to build the
servicer and related equipment for shuttle tests, but OMB refused funding
for it.  General opinion is that this is crazy, since the government is
probably the only customer.  Worse, this was in the middle of the contract
competition, which made no provision for private funding.  Industry says
it will not pay for the development work without strong guarantees of
recovering their investment.  This probably will not kill the servicer,
but it will delay it, and NASA is caught in between, because Congress
ordered that the servicer be tested and deployed before similar Canadian
hardware could be ready.  [Congress, of course, is also the bunch that
is constantly harping on how expensive the space station is getting.
Parochial pork-barrel projects like this are a significant reason.]
-- 
Welcome to Mars!  Your         |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
passport and visa, comrade?    | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu