Sep 20 1978
From The Space Library
NASA reported that a flight-configured Space Shuttle engine fired in tests at NASA's Bay St. Louis, Miss., facility had exceeded 5000sec, the level to be met by a production engine to certify the main propulsion system for manned flight. Testing of the Space Shuttle main engine had increased dramatically, both in number of tests and time accumulated, since Aug. 12, 1978. Two engines had each accumulated approximately 7100sec of testing time, putting total engine-testing time over 25 000sec in 342 tests. Among these were five consecutive runs of 520sec, the length of time needed to put the Shuttle into orbit, on one engine at rated power level. Preliminary flight certification, which required a flight engine to have run 5000sec, was expected in the spring of 1979. Full-duration testing of the complete main propulsion system (a cluster of three engines) would resume in early 1979 when the first manned orbital flight configuration engines would become :available. (NASA Release 78-144; JSC Release 78-40; Marshall Star, Sept 13/78, 1)
NASA Administrator Dr. Robert Frosch and Dr. John Keys, assistant deputy minister of Canada's Dept. of Energy, Mines, and Resources (EMR), had signed an agreement Sept. 19 in Ottawa to establish a Canadian ground station at Shoe Cave, Newfoundland, to receive SEASAT data and to study data use, NASA announced. Under the agreement, Canada would build and operate a ground station to collect from SEASAT's five sensors the data needed to support their own surveillance satellite project (SURSAT) and to furnish SEASAT data and related surface-truth information to NASA at no cost. NASA would be responsible for SEASAT data transmission to the station and for necessary technical information. Data from SEASAT would support a number of Canadian experiments to assess the usefulness of its synthetic aperture radar and other sensors for oceanographic research and coastal management. (NASA Release 78-143)
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