🚀 go-pugleaf

USAF team tours Kourou to study Ariane launch facilities, notably the
site design that permits payload/vehicle stacking to be done away from
the launch pad, permitting one booster to be stacking while another
is readied for launch.  The USAF team is overseeing design of a new
Titan 4 launch site at Vandenberg.

US scientists examining protein crystals recovered from a Chinese
satellite observe that many were broken by reentry and landing forces.
Complete crystals are important for protein-structure determination.

Glavkosmos examines use of Proton to launch payloads to the US space
station.  Proton from Baikonur could take about 5.5 tons to the station,
a fair load despite the dogleg trajectory needed to reach the station's
orbit (which never gets as far north as Baikonur).

Phobos 2 contact lost March 27 after the spacecraft is ordered to turn to
photograph Phobos and then turn back, and doesn't turn back.  Similar
maneuvers earlier had no problems.  The ESA people (who had an experiment
on Phobos 2) say that the flight was not a total loss, since some of the
experiments had already returned quite a bit of data.

SDI's Delta Star plume-observation satellite launched (by Delta, obviously)
March 24.  A plan to have the satellite watch the second-stage de-orbit burn
was partly spoiled when a sensor door failed to open quickly enough, but
otherwise everything is working.  Delta Star's fuel is expected to last
about nine months, with primary objectives probably taken care of in the
first three.  It will watch a number of launches, including several
shuttles, some Deltas, some Titans, some underwater Trident 2 firings,
and several specially-instrumented Black Brant sounding rockets.

Delta Star was dubbed "Wooden Stake Spacecraft" [really -- you can see
that name painted on the side of the booster in the photos!] after a
crazy SDI scheme to have a joint US/Soviet team recover a package from
it and deliver it to Mir (!) was rejected last year with the comment
(from a White House official) "the concept's got a wooden stake driven
through its heart now, but you never know what's going to come out of
the SDI during the next full Moon".  [AW&ST notes that Delta Star was
launched three days after a full Moon!]

NASA's Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel recommends dropping the Advanced
Solid Rocket Motor project, on the grounds that ASRM safety will be
inferior to existing SRBs until considerable experience is built up,
and that the money would be better spent on other safety improvements.
The panel also observed that many of the manufacturing changes proposed
for ASRM could be applied to the existing SRBs.  NASA management agrees
that the existing SRBs could be improved, but wants ASRM partly so that
there is a second source for shuttle boosters.  Truly also observes that
money cut from ASRM probably wouldn't go into other safety work.  The
response from Congress is also a bit chilly:  the implication that the
shuttle still needs major safety improvements doesn't go over well after
all the money that's already been spent on safety, and the fact that
the panel didn't speak up earlier in ASRM's two-year history isn't well
liked either.  The betting is that NASA will basically ignore the panel,
which is widely considered ineffective and alarmist:  "The safety panel's
basic position has been to point with alarm to anything that could
happen... they have very little credibility as a result..."

The panel also urged more work on liquid boosters, observing that the
$4M NASA has spent on liquid-booster studies in the last two years has
lead to a clear conclusion that they have many advantages.  General
Dynamics, one of the study contractors, says liquid boosters could be
operational by 1996, only about two years behind ASRM.  They would
permit a boost-phase abort, could (if designed with engine clusters as
GD has proposed) operate despite a single engine failure, and would
give a much bigger performance improvement than the ASRM.  NASA
predictably says it would take longer and cost more.

Fire at Hercules Inc. destroys solid-booster-production equipment being
used to make Delta SRBs.  Hercules is unhappy but says that it's not a
disaster, since a second mixer facility was not damaged and a third is
already under construction.

Tokyo Broadcasting System signs with Glavkosmos to fly a Japanese journalist
to Mir for a week in 1991.  He would transmit daily TV and radio reports.
Price tag, about $11M.  Some Soviet commentators have protested that a
Soviet journalist should fly first!

More on Brilliant Pebbles.  Supporters observe that some of the money now
being spent on finding ways to attack mobile missiles might be more
productively spent on attacking them after launch -- they are much easier
to locate then!  Lowell Wood argues that B.P. could also be useful to the
reconnaissance community -- they would have a lot of sensing and computing
on board.  Wood is careful to say that if they were built, "they certainly
will be produced in the traditional fashion by one or more aerospace
companies".  [That is, aerospace contractors should not lobby against them
due to fears of lost business.  On the other hand, it's hard to reconcile
this business-as-usual view with Wood's expressed conviction that major
reductions in cost are possible -- not with business as usual, they're not!]

Japanese refine plans for their HOPE unmanned spaceplane, now aimed at
launch on an H-2 in 1996.  It looks rather like a shuttle orbiter
with a somewhat fatter fuselage and with the tailfin deleted and
replaced by wingtip fins.  It's much smaller, 8.8 tons total with a
6m wingspan.  The cargo bay is sized to hold three standard space station
equipment racks.  The Japanese are looking at high-temperature metal-skin
concepts, believing that tiles have durability and repair problems.

Japan investigates Liquid Air Cycle Engines (which liquify atmospheric
oxygen on the way up rather than carrying it all with them) for both
aerospace planes and conventional boosters.  The engine proper would
resemble the LE-7 oxyhydrogen rocket motor of the H-2.  One concept is
to replace each of the H-2's SRBs with a liquid booster using three
LACE engines, which would have almost double the performance despite
the weight penalty of air intakes and the liquifaction system.  The
engines would run as LACE up to about Mach 5 and 40 km, after which
it would run as a pure rocket.  Much existing cryogenic-rocket technology
would be directly applicable.  Mitsubishi has been working on LACE
heat exchangers for some time, and is testing small ones.

Final testing of the first Milstar comsat to start next year.  This
is the Pentagon's next-generation strategic-forces comsat.  Of note
is that Milstar will use satellite-to-satellite links to give global
coverage without ground relay stations.  The cross-links will run at
60 GHz, a frequency that is heavily absorbed by the atmosphere and
hence is hard to eavesdrop on from the ground.
-- 
Mars in 1980s:  USSR, 2 tries, |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
2 failures; USA, 0 tries.      | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu