Aerospace Daily & Defense Report

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — Saab soon will display its Saab 340 Maritime Security Aircraft (MSA), a new variant that aims to create a market for second-hand Saab 340Bs.

FORT WASHINGTON, Md. — During this quarter, the first DDG-1000 Zumwalt destroyer should start look even more like the new U.S. Navy warship it is planned to be, as contractors prepare to marry the vessel’s composite hangar with its hull.

SEA LAUNCH: Sea Launch has received Intelsat 19 from Space Systems/Loral at its home port in Long Beach, Calif. Sea Launch will use a Zenit-3SL to launch the satellite in May from the company’s Odyssey platform in the western Pacific. The satellite is to be placed into a geostationary parking orbit at 166 deg. E. long. and replace Intelsat 8. It will provide video services across the Asia-Pacific region.

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — The industrial cooperation package that manufacturers can offer Malaysia appears to be the key to winning government support in the country, which has a competition under way for the purchase of 18 fighters.

ESA’s Envisat spacecraft remains stable in orbit after unexpectedly ceasing communication with ground stations April 8.

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — Boeing’s UAV subsidiary Insitu has secured a contract to supply its ScanEagle UAV to Malaysia, for help in monitoring territory off the north coast of the state of Sabah. Malaysian company Unmanned Systems Technology (UST), a subsidiary of Malaysian composites parts manufacturer CTRM, has a government contract to provide UAV surveillance covering sections of land and sea in and around Sabah. At the Defense Services Asia (DSA) exhibition in Kuala Lumpur this week, UST signed a contract with Insitu.

BEIJING — South Korea has announced the deployment of two types of surface-to-surface weapons, one a cruise missile and the other ballistic. The Tomahawk-like cruise missile, which must be the previously reported Hyunmu 3C, has world-class precision, good enough to fly through a window, says Maj. Gen. Shin Won-sik, director general of planning at the defense ministry, who did not name either weapon. Its range is 1,500 km (930 mi.), he says.

KUALA LUMPUR — Eurocopter aims to deliver the first of 12 EC-725 tactical transport helicopters ordered by the Malaysian air force by the end of the year. Training starts in July, Eurocopter Malaysia President Pierre Rossignol tells Aviation Week on the sidelines of the Defense Services Asia exhibition in Kuala Lumpur. He also says an EC-225/725 training simulator will be coming to Malaysia and will be stationed here.

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To list an event, send information in calendar format to Donna Thomas at [email protected]. (Bold type indicates new calendar listing.) Apr. 23 - 25 — Aviation Week NextGen Ahead Air Transportation Modernization Conference, Washington Marriott at Metro Center, Washington, D.C. For more information go to www.aviationweek.com/events

HOUSTON — Russia’s 47 Progress supply ship sped toward an April 22 docking with the International Space Station (ISS) following a flawless liftoff from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, to initiate a two-day transit. The Russian freighter and its nearly three tons of propellant, water, compressed air and other supplies was on course to dock with the ISS’s Russian segment Pirs module at 10:40 a.m. EDT.

It’s time for the U.S. to start funding and fielding directed-energy weapons such as high-energy lasers and high-power microwave, a new study argues, and not just because they are cheaper than one-shot kinetic weapons. The cost per shot for interceptor missiles is not only expensive—at least $9 million each—it puts U.S. forces on the bad side of what is called the “cost-imposition curve,” says Mark Gunzinger, author of “Changing the Game: The Promise of Directed-Energy Weapons,” the latest report from the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Analysis.

FORT WASHINGTON, Md. — The budget plan to delay the purchase of one Virginia class submarine from fiscal 2014 to 2018 is a retreat in the program’s progress in bringing down unit costs, according to the manager for the U.S. Navy program. The cost hit from the delay has not been totaled, says Rear Adm. Michael Jabaley, because the Block IV 2014-18 contract has not been awarded, but unit cost on a single sub in 2014 would necessarily go up, since overhead costs would remain relatively constant.

NEW DELHI — India on April 19 successfully test-fired a long-range missile capable of targeting parts of northern China and eastern Europe, bringing the emerging South Asian power into an elite club of nations with intercontinental defense capability. The Agni-V, an intercontinental ballistic missile designed to hit a target up to 5,000 km (3,100 mi.) away, was launched from Wheeler Island off the coast of the eastern state of Odisha at 8:07 a.m. local time, according to V.K. Saraswat, chief of India’s Defense Research and Development Organization (DRDO).

COLORADO SPRINGS — Orbital Sciences Corp. has installed its Antares medium-lift launch vehicle on the pad built for it at the Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, in preparation for a hot-fire test of the new rocket later this spring.

AEHF LAUNCH: The second Lockheed Martin Advanced Extremely High Frequency (AEHF) satellite is set to be launched by an Atlas V rocket on May 3 with a backup window of May 5, only days after the scheduled April 30 launch of Space Exploration Technologies’ Falcon 9, both from Cape Canaveral. Operational testing of the spacecraft is set for next year. One of the first two AEHF satellites will eventually be placed in geosynchronous orbit over Europe for Washington to fulfill its agreement to share some of the capacity with the U.K., Canada and the Netherlands.

Evaluators of Commercial Crew Integrated Capability have a choice of techniques for returning astronauts to Earth.

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A repairable fault with a piece of electronics onboard the Space-Based Space Surveillance satellite is prompting Air Force Space Command to hold off on declaring initial operational capability.

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In Washington, when the administration proposes, Congress disposes. That was certainly the case this week with NASA’s $830 million budget request for development of a commercial crew vehicle (CCDev) to provide rides to the International Space Station. Instead, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle cut the request by about $300 million and provided more funding for the Orion multipurpose crew vehicle and the heavy-lift Space Launch Vehicle (SLS).

'ISR is really becoming a crisis. There is no new cash. There's not even the money to continue to fly legacy systems.'

GENOA — The Italian air force has achieved initial operational capability for its fleet of four Boeing KC-767A tanker/transports and is mulling its options to equip the aircraft with a self-protection suite. Work is still under way to complete qualification testing and move into full operational capability (FOC), which will probably come first in the transport configuration by mid-2012 and in the refueling role by year’s end. The only Italian aircraft so far qualified for boom refueling is the KC-767A; trials with the KC-130J and the C-27J have yet to start.

FORT WASHINGTON, Md. — As the U.S. Navy redoubles its efforts to make maintenance a major priority across the fleet, the service is taking great pains to clean up the tanks and voids in its surface vessels — with special focus on destroyers and cruisers, which have often had to defer shipboard work because of smaller crews.

COLORADO SPRINGS — Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) plans to load “late cargo” into its Dragon capsule around April 20 after passing NASA’s final flight readiness review in advance of the first private space mission expected to dock with the International Space Station (ISS).