SINGAPORE — New Zealand will be enhancing its fixed-wing training capability with two new types of aircraft, and is hoping one of them can be used for light maritime surveillance. The country had earlier been looking at light transport aircraft, such as the EADS CASA CN-235, thinking it would take on the light maritime surveillance role. But New Zealand’s defense minister, Wayne Mapp, tells Aviation Week on the sidelines of the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore that trainers are a higher priority.
SINGAPORE — Boeing has moved on from its loss in India’s Medium Multi-Role Combat Aircraft competition and is now focusing on other opportunities in that country, while also preparing to compete for fighter contracts in Japan and South Korea. “Although we’re disappointed with the results of the fighter campaign in India, we’ve moved forward,” Boeing Defense, Space and Security CEO Dennis Muilenburg told journalists during a press briefing at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore June 3.
Astronomers at the University of Michigan using the Hubble Space Telescope have discovered that elliptical galaxies previously though to be dead are still producing stars, relatively slowly but apparently steadily. Using Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3, astronomers Alyson Force and Joel Bregman found young stars and star clusters in four galaxies about 40 million light years from the Milky Way.
The U.S. Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security will increasingly consider punishment of individuals, as well as companies, in pursuing purported export licensing violations, an official said June 2.
LONDON — As part of the U.K.’s larger effort to overhaul military procurement, Bernard Gray, the chief of defense materiel, has begun charting a new strategy. Consultations with industry and other stakeholders during the coming months will aim to have the new plan ready by early next year. The process will be largely informal, with no fixed schedule and no formal comment period as would be the case for a green or white paper.
CYBER COMBATANTS: The U.K. has set up a cyber-operations group as it further expands its activities in cyberwarfare. “Cyber will be part of a continuum of tools with which to achieve military effect, both defensive and otherwise, and will be an integral part of our armory,” says Nick Harvey, minister of state for the armed forces.
Boeing has issued 60-day layoff notices to roughly 510 employees in its Space Exploration division, primarily due to the impending retirement of the space shuttle.
The first cybersecurity advances to emerge from Northrop Grumman’s research partnership with three leading U.S. universities could be fielded within the next year or so, depending on government acquisition cycles, the company says. Advances in cloud-computing security, application software for mobile devices and forensic capabilities are among the first products to emerge from the 18-month-old Cybersecurity Research Consortium involving Carnegie Mellon University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Purdue University.
Despite all of the concern over U.S. border security and the billions sunk into supporting technologies, a House Appropriations Committee markup of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) budget proposes cutting border control technology efforts.
California Democratic Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer are asking NASA to compete the propulsion systems for a congressionally mandated heavy-lift rocket that is expected to leverage billions that the agency has invested in existing space shuttle and Ares rocket assets. In a May 27 letter to NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, the lawmakers assert a competitive bidding process would allow the agency to obtain better technology for NASA’s new Space Launch System (SLS) at lower initial and lifecycle costs.
The outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, acknowledges that the Defense Department is not exempt from fiscal belt tightening, but he cautions against additional manpower and program cuts. “We need to avoid just making the relatively easy decision of, ‘Let’s just cash in force structure,’ [such as] platforms and people,” Mullen said during a Defense Writers Group breakfast June 2 in Washington. “We have to go through everything else before we get to that.”
NASA and Arizona State University’s Biodesign Institute have entered a Space Act Agreement for vaccine research on the International Space Station (ISS). Under the nonreimbursable agreement, a team headed by Cheryl Nickerson, an associate professor of life sciences at the university, will continue work started on the space shuttle that takes advantage of the effects of microgravity on infectious microorganisms to produce vaccines against disease.
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European industry cost estimates are putting pressure on the ExoMars program while NASA budget cuts are forcing a redesign of key elements of the flagship U.S.-European cooperative space project. The European Space Agency (ESA) is negotiating €200 million ($287 million) in hardware cost reductions with European contractors supporting the multibillion-dollar ESA-NASA mission, which would send robotic science probes and surface rovers in search of life on Mars by the end of the decade.
ENGINE SUPPORT: The House Appropriations defense subcommittee does not include funding in its fiscal 2012 defense spending bill for the General Electric/Rolls-Royce F136 engine, but that does not mean its members do not support an alternative powerplant for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. The panel’s chairman, Rep. C.W. “Bill” Young (R-Fla.), told reporters June 1 that all but three of the subcommittee’s members supported funding the F136 last year. “We got shot down in the House,” he says.
NEW DELHI — A failure analysis committee has found no design problems with India’s Geo-Synchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV), despite two successive failures in 2010. “We had the opportunity to look at all aspects of [the] GSLV, at not only the missions that failed but also the successful missions,” says G. Madhavan Nair, the chairman of the failure analysis committee and a former chief of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO). “We could not find any design deficiency with respect to the GSLV.”
LONDON — The Swedish air force has begun operating Link 16 from its Gripen fighters after a rush program to field the data link. Sweden had been working on Link 16 for some time, but expectations were that it would take about a year from introduction until it was properly fielded. With the help of Danish military officials, the timeline was compressed to a mere two months, according to the Swedish air force. Swedish Gripens are participating in NATO’s operations over Libya, where Link 16 is playing a key role.
The enhanced Aegis system for the Ticonderoga-class guided-missile cruiser USS Monterey – the first U.S. Navy ship deployed in the Mediterranean as part of the nation’s Phased Adaptive Approach for ballistic missile defense (BMD) – is operating as expected, the ship’s commanding officer tells Aviation Week. “The radar’s been working great,” Capt. Jim Kilby said in a telephone interview during a recent deployment break.
HOUSTON — Endeavour soared to a landing at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center early June 1, ending an ambitious final mission that equipped the International Space Station with the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS), a $2 billion marquee science project, while leaving the space shuttle program on the brink of a long-anticipated retirement. Endeavour rolled onto Runway 15 at 2:35 a.m. EDT, with Mark Kelly, commander of the 16-day STS-134 mission, at the controls.
The U.S. Navy’s proposed five-year authorization plan for aircraft carriers could reduce the size of the fleet — now 11 — and also could lead to higher costs for Virginia-class submarines, a recent Rand report says.
The House Appropriations defense subcommittee approved a spending bill June 1 that cuts $9 billion from defense – largely by capturing money from programs that were running behind schedule or from unspent funds, according to committee members. Programs that took a hit in the fiscal 2012 spending measure include the Lockheed Martin Medium Extended Air Defense System (Meads), though members of Congress were reluctant to spell out details, which are embargoed until the committee releases its report on the bill June 9.
