Vice President Al Gore will announce the selection of the company to build the X-33, a prototype of a reusable single-stage launch vehicle, on July 2 at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Gore will make the announcement at a press conference at JPL at 12:15pm PDT (3:15pm EDT). He will be joined by NASA administrator Dan Goldin and the Gary Payton, director of NASA's Reusable Launch Vehicle program.
Three aerospace companies -- Lockheed Martin, McDonnell Douglas, and Rockwell -- are competing for the X-33 contract. The proposed vehicles range from a modified single-stage version of the space shuttle to a scaled-up version of the Clipper Graham (formerly Delta Clipper) test vehicle.
Current plans call for the first X-33 test flight in March 1999, with a rigorous series of test flights through December of that year.
The Galileo spacecraft zipped by Ganymede, the largest moon in the solar system, in the early morning hours June 27, taking images and other data that will be transmitted back to Earth.
Galileo passed within 835 km (520 miles) of Ganymede, traveling at a speed of 27,800 kmph (17,400 mph). Its closest approach to the moon was at 2:30am EDT on June 27.
Although the failure of the spacecraft's high-gain antenna prevented live transmission of images from the flyby, mission officials are planning to have two or more images from the flyby ready by a press conference on July 10.
The close approach by Galileo was more than 70 times closer than Voyager 2's closest approach to the moon, and 133 times closer than Voyager 1. The close approach will permit camera to obtain images with a resolution as small as 10 m (33 feet).
Galileo will make another flyby of Ganymede on September 6, when it passes a scant 255 km (160 mi) above the moon's surface. Two other Ganymede flybys, as well as three flybys each of Callisto and Europa, are also scheduled over the next eighteen months.
Russian cosmonauts Yuri Onufrienko and Yuri Usachev, currently aboard the Mir space station, will have to remin in orbit an extra 40 days because financial difficulties with the Russian space program have delayed the launch of their replacement crew.
Onufrienko and Usachev, who have been in space since February 23, were scheduled to return to Earth in mid-July. However, financial problems have delayed the completion of the booster that will carry their replacement crew into orbit, forcing the cosmonauts to remain in orbit until August 30.
The delay does not affect American astronaut Shannon Lucid. Lucid, who has been on Mir since March, will leave Mir when the shuttle Atlantis docks with Mir in early August. Astronaut John Blaha, who will be on Atlantis when launched, will swap places with Lucid.
The Mir crew does have a Soyuz module docked at the station which they can use if an emergency requires them to evacuate the station. However, the capsule would be used only as a last resort, as experts fear leaving Mir unmanned for any length of time might make the station permanently uninhabitable.
For the second time in just over a month, a Soyuz-U booster failed to place a satellite in orbit, forcing officials to delay a resupply mission for the space station Mir.
A Soyuz-U rocket launched from Plesetsk, in northern Russia, veered off course and was destroyed on June 20. The rocket was carrying a Kosmos military satellite, according to the Itar-Tass news agency.
On May 14 another Soyuz-U rocket, launched from Baikonur in Kazakhstan, also veered off course. That rocket burned up in the atmosphere. Engine problems with the Soyuz-U were believed to be the cause behind that failure.
The investigation into the failures of the two rockets has delayed the launch of a Progress resupply mission for Mir. The launch, originally scheduled for early July, is now planned for July 22. Officials state that the three-person Mir crew has enough supplies to last until Progress arrives.
The space shuttle Columbia was launched June 20 on a record-breaking 17-day mission to study the effects of microgravity on humans and other living organisms as well as make their own unique contribution to the Olympic spirit.
Columbia launched as scheduled at 10:49 am EDT (1449 GMT) on June 20. There were concerns in the days before launch that screws in power drive units that close umbilical doors may be loose, after an inspection of the shuttle Atlantis found loose screws in the equipment. X-rays of the equipment found no loose screws, and the countdown proceeded as planned.
Columbia is carrying the Spacelab module in the cargo bay, which the seven-person crew will use to conduct a number of experiments on how living organisms, from small plants to humans, react to weightlessness. The crew, which includes Canadian astronaut Robert Thirsk and French astronaut Jean-Jacques Favier, will also perform experiments on materials processing in microgravity.
The official plan for the mission was to land at the Kennedy Space Center on the morning of July 6, after 15 days and 22 hours in orbit. However, managers decided on June 29 to extend the mission by one day, with a landing on July 7. The 16 days and 22 hours in orbit would be a record for a shuttle mission, breaking the record of 16 days and 15 hours set by Endeavour on the STS-67 mission in March 1995.
The crew took some time during the mission to mark the upcoming Olympic games in Atlanta. Astronaut Charles Brady carried an unlit copy of the Olympic torch as he rode a bicycle ergometer in the Spacelab module June 28. Gold foil was used to simulate flames in the torch. The torch will be passed on to runners in the real Olympic torch relay in Florida when the shuttle lands.
The House of Representatives Wednesday, June 26, debated provisions of the VA-HUD-IA Appropriations Bill. The bill provides $84.3 billion overall, compared to $82.4 billion last year. In the bill, the veterans budget is boosted 1.1 percent, HUD is up 3.1 percent, EPA up 1 percent and NASA is cut 2.2 percent.
Rep. Joe Kennedy (D-MA) offered two amendments during the debate. The first amendment would have cut 3.2 percent from the space station budget ($174 million) and redirected the money to low-income housing. Rep. George Brown (D-CA) opposed the amendment. This amendment was defeated by voice vote.
Rep. Kennedy offered a second amendment, proposing to cut $297 million from NASA's human space flight budget and redirect the money to housing for the homeless. Brown again argued against; a recorded vote was called, and the amendment failed by 277 to 138. Twenty-five Republicans voted for the amendment and 75 Democrats voted against it.
Rep. Tim Roemer (D-IN) offered an amendment to cut $75 million per year (approximately 3 percent) from the station. Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-CA) argued against it. The amendment was defeated by voice vote.
On Friday, June 28, Roemer and Greg Ganske (R-IA) proposed an amendment that would prohibit funding for the Bion 11 and 12 projects. The $15 million joint U.S.-Russian projects would have launched satellites with monkeys on board to study the effects of weightlessness. The amendment was approved by a vote of 244-171.
[Ed. note: David Brandt and Bill Livingstone contributed to the above article.]
An Ariane-4 rocket placed an Intelsat communications satellite into orbit June 15, only 11 days after the maiden launch of the Ariane-5 heavy-lift booster ended in the destruction of the rocket.
The launch took place at 3:55 am local time (0655 GMT) from the launch facility at Kourou, French Guiana. The Intelsat-709 satellite, which will provide phone and broadcast services for the Americas, Europe, and Africa, reached orbit without incident.
Meanwhile, investigators continue to study the cause of the Ariane-5 failure, when the rocket veered sharply off course and had to be destroyed less than a minute after launch. A board of inquiry, headed by French professor Jacques-Louis Lions, is examining the accident.
Investigators got a break on June 14 when they recovered the vehicle equipment bay of the rocket. The bay provided additional evidence than a failure in the inertial platform of the rocket caused the accident. A full report from the board of inquiry is expected by mid-July.
Two new observations announced in June have provided new constraints on the age of the universe which may provide cosmologists struggling with the Big Bang theory additional headaches.
A group of British astronomers reported in the science journal Nature that they had found a galaxy which appears to be older than the age of the universe. The galaxy, named only 53W091, is more than 10 billion light-years from Earth.
James Dunlop of the University of Edinburgh estimated the age of of the galaxy as 3 to 3.5 billion years. That would make it more than 1 billion years older than the estimated age of the Universe, based on recent observations from the Hubble Space Telescope. Dunlop's observations were from the Keck Observatory and United Kingdom Infrared Telescope Facility, both located on Mauna Kea, Hawaii.
Meanwhile, a U.S.-Spanish team of astronomers, analyzing a set of very deep observations from the Hubble Space Telescope last year, found a set of galaxies farther away than any other seen before. The galaxies appear to have formed only a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, remarkably early in the history of the Universe.
"Our results have implications bearing not only on the formation and evolution of galaxies but also on the ultimate fate of the universe," said SUNY-Stony Brook astronomer Amos Yahil, one of the members of the team.
A pair of pink socks and a serving of Jello may seem like the unlikeliest of timepieces, but for American astronaut Shannon Lucid, they are two of her best ways to mark time while aboard the Russian Mir space station.
"Here it is, another Sunday on Mir!!!" Lucid wrote in a recent letter. "And how, you might ask, do I know that it's Sunday? Easy!!! I have on my pink socks and Yuri [Onufrienko], Yuri [Usachev], and I have just finished sharing a bag of Jello!!!"
Lucid explained that when a "day" in orbit can last as little as 90 minutes, one must look for other ways to keep track of time. "When light follows darkness every 45 minutes, it is important that I have simple ways of marking the passage of time."
The pink socks, she said, were found aboard the shuttle Atlantis during the STS-76 mission that brought Lucid to Mir. "Kevin [Chilton], the commander, said that they were obviously put on as a surprise for me, so I took them with me over to Mir and decided to wear them on Sundays," she said.
The Jello was a Sunday dinner tradition that started on Easter, according to Lucid. "It was so great that we decided the Mir 21-NASA 2 crew tradition would be to share a bag of Jello every Sunday night."
According to an internal NASA memo, NASA administrators are planning to slim the size of the headquarters staff from 1,460 to 896 by next year. Included in the cuts are the loss of all 48 positions in Code O, the Office of Space Communications; and all but 10 of the 105 positions in Code X, the Office of Space Access and Technology. Only Code XX, the Space Transportation Division, will be kept intact there... Amos, Israel's first communications satellite, is also the first to adhere to Jewish religious laws. The spacecraft's main motor does not operate on the Sabbath, and the system is set up so that it does not require human intervention on days of rest...
If you're twiddling your thumbs waiting for the movie Independence Day to premiere in North America on July 3 (if, for nothing else, to cheer when the aliens blow up the White House), you can visit their Web site at http://www.id4.com/ . Check out the "Break the News" game, a chhose-your-own-adventure type of game where you play a journalist trying to root out the facts behind the approach of aliens while avoiding the evil forces of the Director [sic] of NASA and his dark-suited henchmen, who can (and do) kill you if you make the wrong move. We still can't erase the mental image of Dan Goldin laughing manically...
For more realistic commercials, look for a new space-oriented ad by the American textile industry, appearing on radio stations in the U.S. The 60-second spot promotes the research efforts of the industry that, among other things, has developed the fabrics used in American spacesuits... Canadian astronaut Robert Thirsk took an unusual item with him into orbit on the current shuttle mission: the Stanley Cup championship ring of hockey legend Bobby Orr. Thirsk, who also took up several hockey pucks and a jersey from the former Boston Bruins star, says that he hasn't met Orr but that Orr won't "get this ring back until he promises to meet me face-to-face."
Errata: In the June 15 issue of SpaceViews Update, the article "Universe Gaining Weight, Scientists Report" states that "Observations suggest the amount of mass that could be held by MACHOs is still far short of the amount to prevent a Big Crunch." In fact, the mass of MACHOs is still far short of the amount required for a Big Crunch.
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