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Aviation History
1970
1970 - 0323.PDF
at the Kennedy Space Centre, and the parallel military effort at the USAF Eastern Test Range. Mr George M. Low, NASA's Deputy Administrator, recently stated that plans to operate the shuttle will not be finalised until next year, when tlhe design studies will have been com pleted. Test flights, he said, may begin in 1976, and the shuttle might be operationally ready by 1978. The budget at present proposed by NASA was enough, he said, to get preliminary design work under way. BIS AWARDS On February 10 the president of the British Interplanetary Society, Dr W. R. Maxwell, made a presentation of a silver replica of the lunar excursion module which was accepted on behalf of NASA by Dr Thomas O. Paine, the Administrator. In accepting the three gold medals, marking the individual contributions of astronauts Armstrong. Aldrin and Collins, Dr Paine apologised for the tight schedule which had prevented the astronauts from collecting them personally during their brief stay in London on their whirlwind post-Apollo world tour. He said that NASA had great respect for the courage and vision of the BIS over many decades—the vision of the pioneer members being fully realised with the Apollo 11 mission. During the illustrated talk which followed the presentation. Dr Paine described various aspects of the Apollo programme and went on to outline NASA's plans for the future, remarking that, despite the 12 per cent cut-back in their budget, the remaining 88 per cent still represented a considerable sum which permitted the ambitious programme he had described. Commenting upon the proposed 1981 Mars landing mission profile, he confessed that he rather doubted whether they would be ready to go by then, and felt that 1983 or 1986 were more likely dates. JAPAN'S FIRST SATELLITE LAUNCHED With the successful launch of a satellite into Earth orbit on February II, Japan became the fourth country in the world (after Russia, America and France) to fly a domestic spacecraft with a national launch vehicle. It was the fifth attempt by Japan since 1966 to launch a satellite. The launch had been scheduled for February 8, but was cancelled on February 2 owing to unfavourable weather forecast for the launch site at Ouchinoura in southern Japan. The 511b satellite, designed and built by a team at Tokyo University, carries a scientific payload and was launched by means of a four-stage Lambda rocket. The rocket and Out in the cold, physically and (seemingly) industrially, Grumman has yet to find its way into a shuttle consortium, although (like the other major aerospace firms) it has not been short of ideas on shuttle design. One of these is illustrated here. It follows typical booster- orbiter design. Rockets would be used for launch, orbit injection and de-orbit, while air-breathing engines would be employed for approach and landing satellite are understood to have cost only about £160,000. For Japan this is a moment of triumph. It comes after several years of unsuccessful results, and right on the eve of the Expo '70 Exhibition which opens in Osaka next month. SOYUZ 4 AND 5 AT EXPO '70 Representations of the Soviet three-man spacecraft Soyuz 4 and 5 will be seen by the public, for the first time, at the Expo '70 World Fair at Osaka which opens next month. It seems certain, although no confirmation is available at the present time, that these will be full-scale mock-ups. rather than scale models. The two spacecraft, each flown by a two-man crew comprising respectively Shatolov, Volynov, Khrunov and Yeliseyev, made Earth-orbital flights of about 71 hr each, begin ning on January 14 and 15 respectively last year. The decision to display examples of these third-generation spacecraft (eight of which have now flown) was possibly taken in the light of the extremely critical comments made by the world's Press during the Paris Air Show last year, where an unimpressive Soviet space exhibition was totally overwhelmed by America's Apollo presentation. • NASA's ELECTRIC ROCKET FLIES The SERT 2 satellite, containing two experimental electric- propulsion thrusters, was launched into Earth orbit by a Thor- Agena vehicle from the Western Test Range in California on February 4. It was placed in a 623- by 619-mile orbit inclined at 99.1° to the equator. SERT is an acronym for space electric rocket test, and a sub-orbital flight (SERT 1) was made as long ago as July 1964. The purpose of the SERT 2 satellite is to test, under space conditions, two electron-bombardment ion engines. These units generate very low thrust levels in comparison with the mass of the satellites in which they are installed, but are much more efficient than conventional chemical (or nuclear) rockets. The thrust' of the Lewis Research Centre engine, for example, is only 0.0061b. 0.026N but can be maintained for very long periods; the product of thrust and time of operation is very much greater than for a conventional engine, and so the velocity imparted to the satellite can be very much greater than otherwise possible.
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