Jeff has been involved in aerospace journalism since the mid 1990s. Prior to joining Aviation Week, Jeff served as managing editor of Launchspace magazine and the International Space Industry Report. He has been the editor and chief of Aviation Week's Aerospace Daily & Defense Report since 2007 and has been a regular contributor to Aviation Week magazine. He received his B.A. from the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Va.
Space Adventures, which markets commercial space tourism trips to the International Space Station (ISS) using Russian Soyuz vehicles, hopes eventually to mount missions to the lunar surface using a variant of the Russian Soyuz TMA spacecraft. The company announced last year that it plans to offer trips that will orbit the moon using a lunar-rated Soyuz starting in 2009 or 2010, at a ticket price of $100 million per seat on the two-seat vehicle (DAILY, Aug. 12, 2005).
The U.S. Navy is developing a master plan for unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) that should be complete in June, according to Jim Thomsen, program executive officer for littoral and mine warfare. The master plan follows a similar plan for unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) released last year, which specified four classes of UUV that the service plans to acquire. The Navy wants to move toward standardized families of unmanned vehicles so as not to overtax support infrastructure, Thomsen said.
The timeliness of commercial imagery data is becoming the next issue over which the U.S. government may want to exercise "shutter control," according to Air Force Col. Anthony Russo, chief of the space division at U.S. Strategic Command. "The argument has shifted," Russo said during a Feb. 8 lunch in Washington sponsored by the Center for Media and Security. "It used to be the argument over whether we could release less-than-one-meter resolution imagery, which was military quality at the time. The issue now is about real time."
