Apr 6 1976
From The Space Library
Marshall Space Flight Center announced award of a contract to Ivey's Plumbing and Electrical Co. of Kosciusko, Miss., for construction of a test facility at MSFC for the solar heating and cooling development program MSFC is directing for the Energy Research and Development Administration. The $647,243 contract was awarded by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which would monitor construction activities; completion date set by the contract was 1 Nov. 1976. The facility would be located in an area formerly used as a swing-arm test facility for Saturn; data-acquisition equipment instrument terminals and cabling from pad to blockhouse-used for Saturn would be available for the heating and cooling tests. The facility would consist of 4 test areas, 2 designed for complete system or subsystem tests; a third would be used to test liquid energy storage subsystems, and the fourth for passively testing solar collectors. A solar simulator constructed in a nearby building would be linked to the test facility for data collection.
Subsystems and components to be tested would include solar collectors, thermal-energy storage equipment, and solar heating and cooling devices. Testing the hardware against predetermined performance standards would produce data for input to analytical programs; the analyses in turn would be used to evaluate total systems performance under environmental conditions other than those simulated during tests. Components of the facility-heat exchangers, cooling towers, chillers, fans, pumps, and control valves-would be arranged to permit maximum flexibility for future modifications and use of other test positions or procedures. (MSFC Release 76-59)
New Mexico State University and NASA would sponsor a 3-day symposium aimed at motivating Hispanic and Native American college and highschool students to follow science and engineering as career fields, the Johnson Space Center announced. The symposium sent invitations to faculties of 14 colleges and universities with high numbers of Hispanic and Native American students, as well as local area high schools, to hear speakers and view exhibits from NASA field centers and from the aerospace industry. The session from 21 to 23 April would highlight career opportunities in the aerospace field, including a workshop session on the need for additional aerospace courses in the school curriculum and a job fair providing information on placement. (JSC Release 76-23)
The Michoud Assembly Facility operated for NASA by MSFC at New Orleans was nearing production capability for the Space Shuttle external tank, MSFC announced. Delivery of all required items to Michoud would require an estimated 225 trucks, about three fourths of them carrying loads classified as oversize. By the time all 225 trucks arrived, total "train" length would have reached more than 3 km. Getting the equipment from the suppliers located at faraway points such as Dallas, San Diego, Baltimore, and Nashville had presented problems because of the size of the loads; special escorts were required for oversized loads, and travel time at New Orleans for oversize loads was restricted to the period between 10 pm and 4 am. Tooling and fixtures being installed at Michoud would give Martin Marietta, prime external tank contractor, the capability needed to meet flight schedules; each Shuttle flight would require a new external tank, and NASA had planned more than 400 flights between 1979 and 1989. Launches should number 60 per year by 1984. (MSFC Release 76-60)
Every ruble spent on space research had been returned many times to the Soviet national economy, said Cosmonaut Aleksei A. Leonov in a Tass interview during observations of the 15th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's space flight. Leonov was one of the two USSR participants in the Apollo Soyuz Test Project, and had been the first man to walk in space during a Voskhod 2 flight 18 Mar. 1965. He stated that 496 spacecraft had been launched from Soviet cosmodromes in the last 5 yrs, 35 of them communications satellites, 13 Meteor weather satellites, and several Prognoz science satellites, as well as about 400 in the Cosmos series. The long-functioning Salyut stations were the main line of Soviet space activity, Leonov said, carrying out research in cartography, geology, agriculture, forestry, and hydrology as only a few of the many fields of knowledge expanded by work on orbital stations. Leonov also stressed the importance of the Soviet-American Apollo-Soyuz Test Project. (FRIS, Tass in English, 6 Apr 76)
6-9 April: Signatories of the International Telecommunications Satellite Organization (INTELSAT) held their 4th annual meeting in Singapore, with 68 of the 93 signatories attending. The meeting adopted the board of governors' recommendation to increase the capital ceiling for the global satellite system from $500 million U.S. to $900 million U.S., to allow financial flexibility for the INTELSAT V spacecraft program. (The capital ceiling was defined as the net capital contributions of signatories and all outstanding contractual capital commitments.) The meeting also approved requests from Nigeria and Zaire for use of the INTELSAT space segment for domestic public telecommunications on the same basis as for international services. INTELSAT satellites were providing full time services through 137 antennas at 109 earth stations in 73 countries. (INTELSAT Release 76-12-I)
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