Aucbvax.4648 fa.space utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!space Sat Oct 24 06:24:16 1981 SPACE Digest V2 #19 >From OTA@S1-A Sat Oct 24 05:42:21 1981 SPACE Digest Volume 2 : Issue 19 Today's Topics: ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 23 Oct 1981 1321-PDT From: Stuart McLure Cracraft To: space at MIT-MC !a081 0758 23 Oct 81 BC-The Space Age I, Adv 28,990 $Adv 28 For Release Wed Oct 28 and thereafter For use in connection with the space shuttle Space Age I: Space Spinoffs. By HOWARD BENEDICT AP Aerospace Writer WASHINGTON (AP) - The nation's space age is nearly a quarter century - and $125 billion - old. What return has there been from that investment? Plenty. From its breathtaking beginning, space technology quickly mushroomed from a Cold War prestige contest into an ever-growing multi-billion-dollar market for hardware and services. It has spurred several new industries, and, in the process, hundreds of thousands of jobs and skilled people. The technology of Apollo and other programs - computers, electronics, metals - has found its way into medicine, communications, transportation, industrial processes, public safety, construction, home appliances, recreation and food products. Americans, 73 of them, have logged a total of more than 2 1/2 years in space, and they have walked on the moon. Unmanned marvels have landed on Mars, penetrated the clouds of Venus, dashed through the rings of Saturn and are probing the outer reaches of the solar system. Military strategies have changed dramatically, and there has been vast enrichment of scientific knowledge. Space exploration has revolutionized many things, ''but it has not, so far, revolutionized our lives,'' says Alex Roland, a historian with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. ''To date, the space age has had a less profound impact than the atomic age that preceded it,'' he said. ''If tomorrow a green elephant steps in front of the Viking lander on Mars, or if orbiting solar installations take up some of the energy burden of the 21st century, then perhaps the present era may one day be viewed as revolutionary.'' Nevertheless, Roland said, the legacy from space has been substantial, and in the last decade the benefits have showered down on almost every nation. Space spinoffs are too numerous to list here, but the story of Echo is a good example of how this research filters into the commercial world. Echo was America's first experimental communications satellite, a large balloon, 100 feet in diameter. In developing Echo, NASA needed a special material for the balloon's skin. It had to be highly reflective to ''bounce'' radio signals and it had to be lightweight and extremely thin so it could be folded into a beachball-sized container for delivery to orbit, where it would automatically inflate. The material selected was mylar polyester coated with a reflective layer of thin aluminum particles so fine that Echo's skin had a thickness about half that of the cellophane on a cigarette package. This process of coating the polyester with a super-fine mist of vacuum-vaporized aluminum was called metallization - and Echo became the catalyst that transformed a small-scale operation into a flourishing industry. Echo's requirements triggered extensive research and development of metallization techniques for many space uses, mostly to insulate spacecraft, manned and unmanned, from heat and radiation. The research resulted in a still-growing line of commercial metallized products - insulated outdoor garments, packaging materials for frozen foods, wall coverings, aircraft covers, bedwarmers, window shades, labels, candy wrappers, reflective blankets and photographic reflectors. Of all the promises of the early space era, the communications satellite is the most fully realized. In 1963, private stockholders and companies like AT&T, ITT and GTE joined to form Comsat, the Communications Satellite Corporation. A year later, Intelsat, the International Telecommunications Satellite Organization, was created, with Comsat as a major partner. Intelsat has grown from 19 to 106 member nations, with more than 200 ground stations around d3 e. Private firms and foreign governments also have commissioned launches of their own communications satellites, which are drawing the world closer together. Telephones and television sets are sprouting where they've never been seen before - from the Arctic Circle to remote jungle islands. Hundreds of millions of people can simultaneously watch live a single event, such as the Olympics, a royal wedding or men walking on the moon. Innovative companies are merging computer and satellite technologies to transmit financial, medical and other data across continents and oceans in seconds, significantly altering the way the world does business. For about $15,000 anyone can purchase the equipment needed to receive pictures and data from a fleet of U.S. weather satellites - and more than 800 users spread over every nation have made the investment. While the goal of accurate two-week weather forecasts is still years away, these orbiting weather eyes have greatly improved short-range predictions and they have saved countless lives by warning of approaching hurricanes and other storms and of flood threats from rains and melting snow. The next likely candidates for commerical operation are America's Earth resources satellites, whose sensors and pictures are used as an aid to oil and mineral exploration, crop forecasting, forest inventories, and choosing where to build new factories to avoid geologic faults. They guide boats to good fishing, environmentalists to pollution sources and prospectors to uranium deposits. NASA sells the pictures to anyone who wants them at a nominal price, and $6 million worth were sold to non-government users last year, with the biggest customers being mineral and petroleum companies. The images, for example, are presently being used by U.S. companies searching for oil in China. The government and Congress are looking into how to transfer this technology into the private sector. Medicine also has benefitted greatly from space technology. Pacemakers and other implantable heart aids are spinoffs from miniaturized space circuitry. So are fast, accurate diagnostic machines for many diseases. Because of small sensors developed to monitor astronauts' physical condition in space, a single nurse seated at a console can remotely check the conditions of several hospital patients simultaneously. And an emergency ward can get vital information such as pulse and heart rate from a hospital-bound ambulance because of space-developed monitoring equipment squeezed into a kit the size of a briefcase. Miniaturized space electronics also produced digital watches and pocket calculators and made the United States the world leader in computers. End Adv ap-ny-10-23 1054EST ********** !a082 0807 23 Oct 81 BC-The Space Age II, Adv 28,460 $Adv 28 For Release Wed Oct 28 and thereafter For use in connection with the space shuttle Space Age II: Updating the History of the Universe With Laserphotos By HOWARD BENEDICT AP Aerospace Writer WASHINGTON (AP) - Dr. James A. Van Allen was on a Navy icebreaker bound for Antarctica to study cosmic rays when Russia launched Sputnik 1 in 1957. He received a cable urging him to hurry home to prepare instruments for an American orbital attempt. He could not return immmediately, but wired instructions on how to hook up a cosmic ray geiger counter he had devised. On Jan. 31, 1958, America's first artificial satellite, Explorer 1, rocketed into orbit. Van Allen, a State University of Iowa physicist, was astounded by the first data radioed to Earth: a record of high radiation counts alternating with periods of long silence. He got the same results from Explorer 3, launched three months later. He concluded the geiger counters were not broken, nor were they silent for lack of radiation. At times, they simply were being bombarded with such high doses they could not register it. Surrounding the Earth, Van Allen announced, is a huge band of high-energy radiation composed of particles trapped in our planet's magnetic field. This Van Allen Belt stretched from about 400 to more than 40,000 miles into space, extending the boundary of the atmosphere influencing Earth. The discovery stunned the scientific world, which generally believed the Earth's upper air merged into the density of interplanetary gas at an altitude of about 600 miles. The findings also created a revolution in the space sciences by demonstrating the ability of satellites to gather information from above the distorting influence of the lower levels of the atmosphere. For centuries, telescopes were the main data-collecting tools on the universe. But they were limited because of the atmospheric blanket which makes viewing space akin to looking at a fish through 35 feet of water. Scientists began devising ever-more-sophisticated instruments, and investigations by hundreds of satellites have drawn this basic picture on interplanetary space between the Earth and its sun: Great flare eruptions on the seething surface of the sun send huge tongues of radiation, the solar wind, streaming through space at speeds of more than 1 million miles an hour. The Earth's magnetic field acts like a protective umbrella, trapping the radiation particles and forming the Van Allen belt. Without this protection, life as we know it on Earth could not survive. During periods of heavy flare activity on the sun, great amounts of radiation are dumped into the Van Allen belt, causing magnetic storms, disturbing radio communications and influencing weather. Particles flowing through magnetic field openings at the North and South Poles cause auroral displays like the fabled Northern Lights. End Adv ap-ny-10-23 1103EST ********** !a088 0841 23 Oct 81 BC-The Space Age IV, Adv 28,930 $Adv 28 For Release Wed Oct 28 and thereafter For use in connection with the space shuttle Space Age IV: The Military, Seizing the High Ground By HOWARD BENEDICT AP Aerospace Writer WASHINGTON (AP) - American space reconnaissance photos are already so good that they can tell whether a soldier has shaved - from more than 100 miles up. That's today. What about the future? Laser battle stations armed with ''death rays' and protected by dart-like spaceships. Orbiting command posts directing ground, sea and air forces. Killer satellites stalking the skies. The United States and the Soviet Union have these capabilities under way or on the drawing boards. Should an all-out arms race occur in this decade, these space-age military concepts could transform global military strategies. The reflyable space shuttle gives the United States an edge - for now. The Soviets - with nothing similar - have denounced the shuttle as a weapon system in disguise, claiming its sole purpose is to help America dominate the Earth. They don't mention that the Soviet Union itself possesses the only operational space weapon system - a satellite killer capable of blowing U.S. payloads out of the sky. Pentagon officials say that in the last decade the Soviets have invested about twice as much money as the United State in military research and development, creating a growing risk of technological surprise. American observers say that that 75 percent of the more than 100 satellites the Soviets launch each year have military assignments and that their active Salyut space station project is aimed primarily at perfecting a manned military capability in orbit. The military will fly nearly 100 shuttle missions in the next decade. But the Pentagon says these so-called ''blue shuttle'' missions are defensive in nature, using man to more efficiently and cheaply do the jobs now being done by expendable rockets - principally placing military payloads in orbit, with the added dimension of being able to service them periodically. More ap-ny-10-23 1138EST ********** !a090 0859 23 Oct 81 BC-The Space Age IV, Adv 28, 1st Add, a088,620 WASHINGTON: them periodically. On the more exotic and ominous side, the shuttle within a few years will be a testbed for laser beam weapons that could, if perfected, attack hostile satellites and destroy enemy missiles as they rise above the atmosphere. And shuttles could ferry up men and equipment for the construction of those battle stations if they become necessary. From the very beginning of the space age, the military leaders of the United States and the Soviet Unoin saw the benefits of using this new ''high ground.'' The first military satellite was America's Discoverer 1, launched in 1959, to take photographs and return the film to Earth in a capsule that was snared over the Pacific by an Air Force plane. Technology has taken great strides since then, and now the security of both nations is increasingly dependent upon orbiting satellites. U.S. and Soviet payloads dispatch military messages around the world; send navigation signals to ships, planes, submarines and troops in the field; are alert to warn instantly of a missile attack, and spy on each other and other nations with high-resolution cameras. U.S. space cameras for months have taken special notice of Soviet troop movements in and around Afghanistan and Poland. President Johnson once said that the reconnaissance photos were worth many times the entire U.S. investment in all space technology. And last year, President Carter said: ''Photo reconnaissance satellites have become an important stabilizing factor in world affairs in the monitoring of arms agreements.'' There is growing concern at the Pentagon because the Soviets have introduced a new destabilizing element with their development of a killer satellite: a satellite that can track down its orbiting target, maneuver near it, and explode, destroying both. Pentagon observers say the hunter satellite is capable of striking targets out to 600 miles, which makes America's navigation and reconnaissance satellites vulnerable. Communications and missile-warning satellites are stationed 22,300 miles up, but within a few years they too may come within range of advanced killers or laser beams. The United States has sought for more than two years to negotiate a ban on killer satellites, but talks with the Soviets have been unsuccessful. So, the Defense Department is developing its own satellite destroyer, to be operational in about two years. Defense planners also are considering several methods for protecting military payloads from ambush. Included are satellites hardened against radiation damage, and others that could evade an attacker, eject decoys to confuse it, or fire a laser blast at it. They believe the Soviets have an edge in laser weaponry, and some experts estimate that the Soviet Union could orbit a system of small laser battle stations by 1986 - three to four years before the United States would have that capability. A laser beam weapon would generate a ray that travels in a straight, intense, single wave path. It could, at high power, cut through thick steel. Several shuttle flights are earmarked to prove out laser weapon technology. Another, more potent, space weapon being researched by both nations is the charged-particle beam, believed to be several years away. In such a beam, streams of highly-concentrated, high-velociy sub-atomic particles would strike with such enormous energy that they would burn or melt their targets. The shuttle will carry its first military payloads next year, and by 1985 the Air Force plans to make heavy use of at least two of the five shuttles. The military is building its own shuttle launch base at Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., and a secure control center at Peterson Air Force Base, Colo. Until these are ready, the ''blue shuttles'' will take off from the space agency's facility at Cape Canaveral, Fla. End Adv for Release Wed Oct 28 and thereafter ap-ny-10-23 1155EST ********** ------- ------------------------------ End of SPACE Digest ******************* ----------------------------------------------------------------- gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen of http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/ This Usenet Oldnews Archive article may be copied and distributed freely, provided: 1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles. 2. The following notice remains appended to each copy: The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.