Thales Alenia Space of France and Italy says it will no longer advertise certain variants of its Spacebus 4000 communications satellite as free of components and materials controlled by the U.S. Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR).
PALM BEACH, Fla. — Lockheed Martin is working on upgrades for its Marlin autonomous undersea vehicle (AUV) that could make it a candidate for future long-endurance unmanned undersea missions the U.S. Navy has in mind for its planned large-diameter unmanned undersea vehicle (LDUUV) program.
To list an event, send information in calendar format to Donna Thomas at [email protected]. (Bold type indicates new calendar listing.) Aug. 12 - 14 — International Powered Lift Conference (IPLC), Los Angeles, Calif. For more information go to www.vtol.org/iplc Aug. 12 - 14 — AIAA AVIATION 2013, Hyatt Regency Century Plaza, Los Angeles, California For more information go www.aiaa.org/aviation2013 aug. 17 - 21 — 55th NEC Annual Conference, Pittsburgh, PA. For more information go to www.necconference.org
HOUSTON — International Space Station astronaut Karen Nyberg successfully grappled Japan’s unpiloted H-II transfer vehicle (HTV-4) early Aug. 9 using the orbiting lab’s Canadian robot arm. NASA ground control teams then took over the robotic operations to berth the 33-ft.-long freighter and its 3.6 tons of cargo to the U.S. segment after the initial capture.
The U.K. Ministry of Defense has launched a tender to provide a search-and-rescue helicopter capability for its remote Falkland Islands outpost. The 10-year contract, worth between £100-150 million ($160-230 million), would also potentially provide what the ministry calls “support helicopter services” for the U.K. garrison stationed on the islands since the end of the Falklands War in 1982.
Boeing controllers in California are operating the newest Wideband Global Satcom (WGS-6) military communications satellite following its launch on a Delta IV Aug. 7.
A National Research Council panel is calling on policymakers to establish a sustained and enhanced land imaging program to ensure data continuity from the 40-year Landsat effort. Stable follow-on efforts would end a chaotic history of federal oversight of Landsat, while assuring spacecraft continuity, technically advanced sensors and data management, and the widest possible distribution of the imagery, according to the panel’s Aug. 8 report.
The future of Huntington Ingalls Industries’ (HII) naval ship composites yard in Gulfport, Miss., is now in limbo with the U.S. Navy’s decision to use a steel deckhouse for the next Zumwalt destroyer. At the same time, HII is considering commercial shipbuilding work to keep open its Avondale yard in Louisiana, but only with the right partner to mitigate risks.
LONDON — Eurocopter’s Brazilian subsidiary Helibras has received permission to produce the Eurocopter EC225 helicopter domestically. Currently the EC225 is only built in France, but production of the EC225 in Brazil would pave the way for EC225s to support Brazil’s rapidly expanding oil and gas industry.
While leading U.S. Navy shipbuilder Huntington Ingalls Industries CEO Michael Petters warns against cutting the national aircraft carrier force, he says it would be better to do so by building new advanced carriers like the CVN-78 Ford Class while foregoing midlife refuelings of existing ships and retiring those vessels. “This is a debate that’s always going on,” Petters told Wall Street investment analysts during an Aug. 7 conference call to discuss quarterly financial results.
The United Nations has tapped Selex ES to fly its Falco UAV to support peacekeeping duties in the Democratic Republic of the Congo under a three-year, €10 million ($13 million) contract. The aircraft will be provided by Selex ES in the coming weeks, according to U.N. officials. The aircraft will be operated by Selex contractors under the control and security of the U.N., with all data from the platform provided exclusively to the peacekeeping mission. The contract has an option to be extended another three years.
Recent observations with the Hubble Space Telescope point to highly energetic mergers of binary neutron stars or neutron/black hole pairs as the source of mysterious, short-duration gamma-ray bursts. The findings, published online Aug. 3 in the journal Nature, address a mystery dating to the detection of powerful but unsourced gamma-ray flashes by U.S. Vela satellites placed in Earth orbit during the 1960s to document violations of the 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (signed by the U.S., the former USSR and the U.K.).
HAWK SIMS: Under subcontract to BAE Systems, CAE is to provide three full-mission simulators for the Royal Australian Air Force’s (RAAF) upgraded Hawk 127 lead-in fighter trainer. BAE is prime contractor for Project AIR 5438 Phase 1A to maintain the Hawk’s capability until its planned withdrawal from service in the mid- to late 2020s. The company was awarded a £90 million ($140 million) contract in July to upgrade the RAAF’s 33 Hawk 127s, ordered in 1997, to the same standard as the U.K. Royal Air Force’s newer Hawk T2s.
General Dynamics Advanced Information Systems has successfully completed the comprehensive risk reduction program for the U.S. Navy’s Knifefish surface mine countermeasure unmanned undersea vehicle (UUV) program. Designed to discover any potential systems defect early on in the program’s development phase, the configuration item test (CIT) successfully verified key components within the UUV system, including the hardware architecture and critical areas of hardware and software integration, the company says.
Lockheed Martin expects to lease its S301 Special Operations Forces dry combat submersible by the end of September, says Stephen Froelich, director and general manager of mission and unmanned systems. “We are just getting done classifying that for [the] military to use it,” he says.” We expect to be under lease by the end of September. They are contracting for 18 months initially, but could go longer.” “Lockheed can make modifications to the submarine as needed and to maintain classification,” he says.
The U.S. Navy continued to hone its at-sea surface-to-air missile skills with a set of special exercises earlier this month. The guided-missile cruiser CG-58 USS Philippine Sea and the DDG-103 USS Truxtun simultaneously launched Navy Standard Missile-2s (SM-2s) while DDG-80 USS Roosevelt launched shortly afterward during the so-called Missilx exercise.
Deactivating the USS Miami Los Angeles-class attack submarine could cause ripples — some good and others challenging — through the rest of the U.S. Navy’s sub fleet force structure. In announcing the Navy’s decision to forego fixing the Miami — whose innards were recently scorched in an arsonist-set fire — Rear Adm. Rick Breckenridge, director of Undersea Warfare, acknowledged in an Aug. 7 media briefing that the service hopes to shift some of the money slated for Miami repair work to other subs.
An aerostat-based cruise-missile defense system has now demonstrated compatibility with the U.S. services’ main land-, sea- and air-launched anti-aircraft weapons. The Raytheon-developed Joint Land Attack Cruise-Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor (Jlens) passed targeting data to a U.S. Air Force Boeing F-15E via Link 16, enabling the fighter to intercept a surrogate anti-ship cruise missile with an AIM-120C7 advanced medium-range air-to-air missile.
