June 1985

From The Space Library

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Current revision

NASA announced that the Space Shuttle mission 51-G would carry three communications satellites, a deployable/retrievable Spartan 1 spacecraft, and six Get Away Special canisters. The orbiter Discovery would fly several mid-deck experiments including one for the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) organization and a materials processing furnace.

The Mexican spacecraft, Morelos-A, was a version of the Hughes HS 376 satellite, a number of which had already been deployed from the Space Shuttle. Morelos -A was the first of two domestic communications satellites that would provide advanced telecommunications to the more remote parts of Mexico.

Arabsat-A, owned by the Arab Satellite Communications Organization and built by Aerospatiale, would provide telecommunications links between the member nations.

A U.S. domestic communications satellite owned by American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T), Telestar 3-D would provide telecommunications services to the continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico.

All three spacecraft would first spring-eject from the orbiter's cargo bay, then on each a small attached payload assist module would ignite about 45 minutes after deployment to propel the satellites to transfer orbits out as far as 22,300 miles above earth. A second small rocket motor would then fire on each spacecraft to circularize the orbits, placing the spacecraft in geosynchronous orbits.

Three of the six Get Away Special canisters contained West German payloads for study of materials processing in space and behavior of liquid propellants. A fourth canister contained a U.S. Air Force/U.S. Naval Research Laboratory investigation of the ultraviolet radiation environment in space. A fifth canister had a package of nine student experiments in biological and physical sciences. A Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) investigation of a developmental heat transfer system was in the sixth canister. A capillary pumped loop (CPL) experiment, it was the first flight of a CPL two-phase thermal control system. The advanced development and flight experiments section of the thermal engineering branch at GSFC developed the CPL (NASA Release 85-83)

Although the Soviet Union in the past had responded to the introduction of every new U.S. weapons system by installing a corresponding system of its own and many observers assumed the same would be true with the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), there were increasing indications that the Soviet leadership might decide to restrict itself to taking countermeasures against the U.S. system and renounce the development of any Soviet counterpart to SDI, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists reported.

In 1983 Henry Trofimenko, head of the Foreign Policy Department of the Institute for the Study of the USA and Canada, said that in giving effective answer to the U.S.'s military program "the USSR is not going to match the U.S. in development of every new system of weapons, nor is it going to imitate it." More recently, a Soviet analysis by a committee of scientific and strategic experts of the implications of SDI stressed that Soviet countermeasures against a prospective U.S. system could be very effective, could be taken quite easily and quickly, and would cost much less than the system against which they were directed.

Possible countermeasures discussed in the analysis included destruction of the space platforms (done by relatively small missiles, by land-based lasers, by armed satellites functioning as "space mines," or by "clouds" of obstacles set in their path; encasing missiles with material capable of absorbing laser beams or of reflecting them; masking missile launches by means of smokescreens; designing a pattern of missile launches over time that would force the lasers constantly to redirect themselves in haphazard fashion, thereby reducing the effectiveness of the system; or launching dummy missiles in order to use up the destructive power of the system.

The Soviet scientists agreed with western investigators that an estimated total cost of SDI could eventually reach $2 trillion, and even at that expenditure SDI could not guarantee that at least a few missiles in a hypothetical Soviet first strike might not get through to their targets.

The Bulletin also pointed out that Soviet scientists had noted that the technologies required for countermeasures were in a much more advanced state than those required for SDI itself; in fact, much of the necessary technology already existed. Well before SDI would be in place, "an effective means of counteraction" could be set up and would probably cost only 1 or 2% as much as the system it was designed to counteract. (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, June/July 85, 38)

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