Feb 10 1978
From The Space Library
NASA announced it had selected Fairchild Space and Electronics Co., Germantown, Md., to negotiate a fixed-price incentive contract for integrating, testing, and delivering 2 multimission modular spacecraft (MMS) for Landsat-D at a target cost of about $10.3 million. The MMSs would serve as basic spacecraft buses for the Landsat-D mission and a backup.
Under the contract managed by GSFC, Fairchild would integrate and test the spacecraft buses; design and test the propulsion module; fabricate and test a signal-conditioning and control unit; fabricate a spacecraft structure; design and fabricate a spacecraft harness for the thermal and electrical systems; acquire ground-support systems and a simulator for spacecraft integration and testing, and for delivery to spacecraft users; integrate these elements with 3 government-furnished subsystem modules (power, communications and data-handling, and attitude-control subsystems); test the integrated systems; and provide 24 man-months of instrument support. The contract would include options for integrating and testing up to 4 additional MSSs for future programs through approximately 1982. (NASA Release 78-21)
NASA announced plans to develop hardware systems to support materials-processing experiments aboard the Space Shuttle in mid-1981. The materials-processing in space (MPS) program would take advantage of near-weightlessness in earth orbit to eliminate sedimentation in liquid materials and to reduce movement of liquid caused by heat, allowing precise control of processes such as casting and crystal growth.
MSFC had asked industry to submit proposals by Feb. 23 for support of 8 materials-processing experiments on 1981 Shuttle/Spacelab missions, specifically a fluids-experiments system and a solidification experiments system using a high-temperature furnace; other hardware attempt to put a man in orbit, reported FBIS. Navigation Knowledge; published by the China Navigation Society, had printed a description of manned-flight problems such as weightlessness and satellite design, the effects of weightlessness on the body, and the growing of food in outer space. The article suggested that the PRC, having retrieved three unmanned satellites from orbit, was now ready to experiment with living in space.
Much of the article concerned physical changes resulting from a space capsule environment, and the food, clothes, and waste facilities appropriate for an astronaut, information apparently based on completed experiments. By using the direct rays of the sun, the article claimed, a space voyager could grow rice and wheat the size of a Chinese date tree and eggplant and peppers the size of watermelon. Observers believed Chinese space technology had developed considerably since the initial space launches and that the next (No. 8) launch might have an animal aboard. (FBIS, Kyodo in English, Feb. 2/78
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