as meeting the needs of a low-cost/near-term Powersat demonstration in Europe. In general, this seems to be the view of the majority of European space industries consulted on this matter, as indicated in the Appendix. If the political climate becomes more conducive to using former Soviet launch systems and platforms, then a competitive option to ASAP would be a piggyback launch on the Resurs-F (or equivalent) and the flight of an experiment on the Mir Space Station, as will be discussed later. The Mir possibility is particularly interesting because this station is capable of providing a high level of power to the experiment. Sounding rockets are more expensive to use than ASAP and provide only a few minutes of space exposure time. A small launch vehicle would provide an orbital capability for an ASAP-sized payload, but at an order of magnitude higher cost. The one advantage of these two, however, is that they provide dedicated launch opportunities. In other words, the Powersat demonstrator would justify the launch and not have to rely on the schedule of the primary pay loads. Perhaps both of these options should be reserved as back-ups in the event that all of the others become unsuitable. Beyond these it seems clear that use of the Shuttle to launch the demonstrator is the only real option. There are a wide number of choices enabling a full-range of Powersat demonstrator possibilities, from GAS Cans and Hitchhikers to Eureca and Astro-SPAS. Of these, a comparable capability to ASAP is the Hitchhiker-G structure which could be flown during the Spacelab E-l mission in 1995/96. The advantages Hitchhiker-G has over ASAP are that it is capable of supplying a high level of power to the experiment and it can be returned to Earth. However, these advantages must be weighed against the number of launch options and uncertainty of Shuttle schedules. Realistically, Europe probably can only expect one Hitchhiker-G opportunity during the
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