UNIQUE OPPORTUNITIES FOR THE INSTITUTE The past months have been among the most challenging, the most exciting, and the most rewarding in the history of the Space Studies Institute. I have been working with our tremendously dedicated staff and associates to make Lunar Prospector a reality. On the eve of the 20th Anniversary of Apollo Il’s landing on the Moon, we held a press briefing at the National Press Club entitled "Apollo: The Unfinished Mission." Your support as a Senior Associate of the Institute helped make this event the huge success it was. Representatives of many of the major news organizations were there, and SSI received significant national attention as a result of this event. (Details about press coverage will follow - read on!) On that same day, we also briefed members of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee about our work with Lunar Prospector. The positive response was quite gratifying, and the event enabled SSI to make some excellent contacts in Washington. Of course, you heard the wonderful news that President Bush explicitly endorsed a lunar outpost as the next logical step in human expansion into the Solar System. This represents a very positive development - for the first time in years, we have explicitly stated space goals endorsed by the President. Much remains to be done, and we are eager to see the President unveil a specific timeframe for his proposals, but his speech was a most welcome first step. The rest of the SSI staff and I had a busy and rewarding summer. A request for proposals was issued on the design of Lunar Prospector (we are in the process of evaluating the design study proposals we received at this very moment). James French, formerly of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, agreed to become the Senior Project Manager for Lunar Prospector. Jim prepared SSI’s first official look at the possibility of a small lunar polar probe while at JPL, and his report was presented to the President’s National Commission on Space which subsequently endorsed the concept. The Chicago Society for Space Studies contributed one-thousand dollars to assist in the design project for Lunar Prospector, and the Houston Space Society’s Lunar Prospector Team has been actively donating time and funds to increase support for the mission. Ever mindful that reaching out to the Moon requires a firm support foundation on Earth, Preston Carter and Alan Binder have assembled a team of over 40 engineers from the Johnson Space Center contractor community to work on the Lunar Prospector ground segment - the command and control operations for the craft that will handle data, communications, and other Earth-based operations necessary for a successful Lunar Prospector mission. NASA ADMINISTRATOR RICHARD TRULY AGREES TO AID PROSPECTOR Yet even with this great outpouring of support, I must confess that I had not foreseen just how rapid a rate of progress we would make on Lunar Prospector. In my last Confidential Senior Associate Newsletter to you, I outlined two different ways for making Lunar Prospector work - through a Space Shuttle "getaway special" canister launch and on a more powerful expendable launch vehicle (ELV). Both ways had one thing in common: they would use a surplus gamma-ray spectrometer which was prepared for the Apollo program but which was never flown. This instrument, a sodium iodide detector, is significantly better suited for our purposes than the newer germanium detectors which, while more sensitive, require active refrigeration which dramatically increases the engineering problems associated with designing spacecraft.
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