The U.S. Air Force is planning to issue a request for proposals for a new presidential aircraft by this fall, but it remains to be seen just how much of the work on the project will actually be up for competition.
LOS ANGELES — Boeing is expediting work to define a larger, more capable exploration upper stage (EUS) for NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) that it says could, if approved, reduce overall costs as well as expand potential early deep-space mission possibilities to include everything from Moon or Mars missions to asteroid recovery flights.
GROWLER: A House panel tasked with funding the Pentagon will consider a bill that adds $4.1 billion to the president’s budget request for fiscal 2015, including $975 million to pay for 12 EA-18 Growler electronic warfare aircraft. The bill also provides $79.4 billion in war funding, the same amount included in the defense authorization bill recently passed by the House. The House Appropriations defense subcommittee plans to vote on the bill in a closed session May 30. The Pentagon had not requested funding for Growlers, but they are among the top items on the U.S.
LONDON — L-3 Communications, Selex ES and Ultra Electronics have partnered to offer Bombardier’s Q400 turboprop airliner as the platform to meet an expected requirement for a multi-mission aircraft for the U.K. The aircraft would be highly modified, with extended-range fuel tanks and an under-fuselage canoe fairing that could be configured to carry a wide-area surveillance sensor or even weaponry to meet a range of tasks, such as maritime patrol, overland surveillance or anti-submarine warfare.
The Obama administration’s decision to prolong significant U.S. military presence in Afghanistan through 2015 is relatively good news for military service contractors and other companies providing war-related products.
LONDON — The U.K. Defense Ministry is spending £16.7 million ($28 million) updating the missile warning systems for its helicopters under a contract with BAE Systems. The deal, revealed on May 27, covers the purchase of third-generation (Gen3) Common Missile Warning Systems (CMWS); these will be fitted to the U.K.’s fleet of Apache, Chinook, Wildcat and Merlin helicopters, as well as a single fixed-wing type, which the defense ministry has not disclosed. Eventually the system will be fitted to 300 aircraft.
HOUSTON — Russian, U.S. and German astronauts returned the International Space Station to six-person operations late May 28, as their Soyuz-TMA-13M spacecraft arrived at the orbiting science laboratory following a six-hr., four-orbit launch-to-docking transit. Soyuz pilot Maxim Suraev, a 42-year-old Russian air force colonel; Reid Wiseman, a 39-year-old NASA astronaut and U.S. Navy test pilot; and Alexander Gerst, a 38-year-old German geophysicist, floated aboard the ISS at 11:52 p.m. EDT to begin a 166-day stay.
CHENGDU, China — China has decided to use new test facilities for military and civil engines, boosting commercial powerplant development but weakening a policy of separating the two sides of the country’s aeronautics industry. “A special type of outdoor test facility is under construction,” says an official of the Civil Aviation Administration of China. “The government has agreed that it should be used for both military and civil purposes.”
The aircraft carrier CVN 71 USS Theodore Roosevelt’s close-in weapons system (CIWS) successfully tracked and fired upon a mobile surface target earlier this month during a Combat System Ship Qualification Trial (CSSQT) surface gun exercise (Gunex). The CIWS, a 20mm, radar-guided Gatling gun, fires 75 rounds per second and protects the ship from surface and air threats. It uses forward-looking infrared radar (FLIR) and other radar systems to track, lock onto and take down incoming threats.
Engineers probing the May 22 failure of an Aerojet Rocketdyne AJ-26 engine during an acceptance test for a future Orbital Sciences Antares mission to the International Space Station (ISS) have yet to determine whether the mishap will delay the next Antares launch. Preparations for that mission, set to launch from Wallops Flight Facility, Va., on June 10, continue as planned, according to Orbital spokesman Barry Beneski. “The team will continue to progress toward the June 10 launch until they are told not to,” he said May 27.
As it waits for a follow-on to the X-51A scramjet engine demonstrator program to get underway, the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) is looking to international projects to advance hypersonics research for applications ranging from high-speed weapons to space-access vehicles.
BERLIN — German arms manufacturer Diehl Defense will partner with Israel’s Elbit Systems to equip the Bundeswehr’s A400M tactical airlifters with a self-protection system based on Elbit’s J-Music (Multi-Spectral Infrared Countermeasure) offering, which is designed to protect large aircraft from infrared-guided missiles.
Skilled at intercepting cellphone and wireless signals, the U.S. is facing new challenges as terrorists turn to “old” communications technologies to circumvent efforts to locate and target their networks. High-frequency (HF) radio, largely eclipsed by the military’s move to satellite communications, as well as bands once dominated by terrestrial television broadcasts are increasingly being used by illicit networks to avoid detection by sophisticated communications-intelligence (comint) systems.
NEW DELHI — An Indian air force (IAF) MiG-21 fighter crashed May 27 in the Himalayan border state of Jammu and Kashmir, killing the pilot. The latest crash has once again highlighted India’s urgent need to replace its aging fleet of the Soviet-era fighters. The accident took place near Awantipur airbase in the south of the state, at 10:48 a.m. local time, while the single-seater MiG-21 Bison was on a routine training sortie after taking off from the Technical Airport in Srinagar city, a senior IAF official says.
LOS ANGELES — XCOR Aerospace plans to accelerate development of its Lynx suborbital, reusable spaceplane with the injection of $14.2 million in additional investment from Netherlands-based Space Expedition Corp (SXC).
PARIS — The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) says it has completed initial on-orbit checkout of its Daichi-2 Earth observation satellite following the spacecraft’s May 24 launch atop an H-IIA rocket from the Tanegashima Space Center. Also known as the Advanced Land Observing Satellite 2 (ALOS-2), Daichi-2 was declared operational after telemetry confirmed its attitude control system had shifted to regular operations mode, JAXA said May 27.
PARIS - Commercial launch services provider Sea Launch orbited the Eutelsat-3B communications satellite May 26, launching from a platform in the Pacific Ocean and marking the company’s first mission since a February 2013 failure of the Zenit-3SL rocket led to the loss of the Intelsat 27 spacecraft.
NEW DELHI — India’s new right-wing government, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has appointed seasoned politician and leading corporate lawyer Arun Jaitley as its joint finance and defense minister. Taking charge at the defense ministry on May 27, a few hours after assuming office at the finance ministry, Jaitley assures that “speeding up the [purchase of] equipment required for their support are going to be priority areas as far as our government is concerned.”
General Atomics Aeronautical Systems (GA-ASI) has completed a U.S. Army-funded extended-endurance demonstration flight with the Improved Gray Eagle (IGE) unmanned aircraft, but procurement of the upgrade remains in the balance. The second endurance flight of the prototype IGE lasted 36.7 hr., with the aircraft carrying a signals-intelligence pod under one wing and two Hellfire missiles under the other.
