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.
NASA has given prospective bidders until Feb. 27 to deliver proposals for conceptual design work on the Altair lunar lander the agency will use to return astronauts to the moon by 2020. Johnson Space Center in Houston expects to make multiple awards in the spring under the Altair Conceptual Design Contract effort. NASA issued a draft request for proposals (RFP) and held a bidders’ conference last month (Aerospace DAILY, Dec. 17).
BAD DOG: NASA is trying to diagnose a problem with the Mars Exploration rover Spirit, which has been behaving erratically for several days. On Jan. 25 – the 1,800th Martian day of what was originally baselined as a 90-day mission – Spirit failed to respond to its daily driving commands, and did not record its main activities onto its hard drive. The next day, controllers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory sent a command for Spirit to orient itself by locating the sun, but this also failed. One possible culprit is cosmic rays striking the rover’s electronics, NASA says.
In a Jan. 15 DAILY article on the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS), the quote attributed to Ronald O’Rourke of the Congressional Research Service was a paraphrasing of the U.S. Navy’s position on LCS oversight, and not his own opinion.
