HOUSTON — The shuttle Discovery began a two-day journey to the International Space Station (ISS) on April 5, following a pre-dawn lift off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center with more than 17,000 pounds of scientific gear and other supplies. Discovery’s seven astronauts were on course to link up with the orbiting laboratory on April 7 at 3:44 a.m. EDT. The 13-day STS-131 flight will prepare the nearly assembled station for operations well beyond the shuttle’s scheduled retirement late this year, after missions in May, July and September.
HOUSTON — Shuttle Discovery astronauts may have to tackle a pair of upcoming major mission activities without a functioning Ku-band communications antenna. The dish antenna, which was deployed soon after the seven shuttle astronauts reached orbit early April 5, failed a self-check and defied efforts by experts at NASA’s Houston Mission Control to recover the communications link used to transmit television signals back to Earth and radar signals during rendezvous operations.
Money for new-build U.S. Army Apache Block III helicopters arrived so late in the budget process that it forced the program into a breach of the Nunn-McCurdy statute, triggering a mandatory review of alternatives.
GATOR ARRAY: The U.S. Marine Corps announced April 5 the next system test phase for its Ground/Air Task Oriented Radar (G/ATOR), a multi-mission radar that will replace five legacy ground-based radars the service currently operates. The Northrop Grumman radar will be tested in a fully populated array, complete with all transmit/receive modules, radiating elements, prime power and distribution, RF manifold and associated control and processing electronics at the company’s antenna test facility in Norwalk, Conn.
The Republic of Singapore Air Force on April 5 inaugurated its first local F-15SG squadron, marking a significant step up in the country’s air warfare capability. The first batch of five of the fighters flew to Singapore from the Mountain Home Air Force Base, Idaho, together with 36 air and ground crew. The team had been based at Mountain Home since last May, undergoing flying and maintenance training.
U.S. SPECIAL OPERATIONS COMMAND L-3 Communications Corp., EOS Division, Garland, Texas, is being awarded a two-year indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract for the purchase of MX 10160 image intensifier assemblies in support of U.S. Special Operations Command Headquarters Procurement Division. The work will be performed in Tempe, Ariz., and is expected to be completed in 2012. The estimated value of the contract is $30,000,000. The contract number is H92222-10-D-0012.
HARTFORD, Conn. — Pratt & Whitney is completing its 1,000th F117 engine for Boeing’s C-17, and expects to continue building them up to around 2015. The 1,000th engine, a military derivative of the PW2000 commercial turbofan, will be delivered later this month and officially marked in a ceremony set for May. Despite the slowing of the C-17 production rate to 10 per year by 2013, “the engine will be an important part of the business for the next five years,” newly appointed Military Engines President Warren Boley says.
PUZZLE PIECES: The first major hull modules for the Royal Navy’s new aircraft carrier, Queen Elizabeth, are ready to be towed from Babcock’s Appledore shipyard in Devon to Rosyth in Scotland, where the Queen Elizabeth and the second CVF, Prince of Wales, will be assembled. The 400-ton shipment comprises two modules: the bulbous bow and the section just above it, between the bow and the aircraft hangar. The 65,000-ton turbine-electric ships, by far the largest warships ever built for the Royal Navy, are being constructed in modules around the U.K.
NEW DELHI — India on April 1 launched its third indigenous naval destroyer, INS Chennai – built under the code name Project 15 Alpha — which will be commissioned into the navy in August 2013. The ship will have stealth features, an advanced action information system and a comprehensive auxiliary control system.
Raytheon is moving to a new, more aggressive philosophy in dealing with an increasing number of sophisticated cyber-attacks aimed at obtaining classified and proprietary information from the company, according to Chief Information Officer Rebecca Rhoads.
BLOWING UP: “This is our coming out year, so to speak,” says Bigelow Aerospace founder Robert Bigelow, referring to the company’s plans to begin marketing its inflatable space station concept aggressively in 2010. The company is coming up with a range of pricing options for potential clients, which could include pharmaceutical companies, agribusiness firms and countries without their own space programs. A four-year lease of one of the modules on the space station — which the company plans to begin launching in 2014 — could run between $200 million and $400 million.
To list an event, send information in calendar format to Donna Thomas at [email protected]. (Bold type indicates new calendar listing.) April 12 - 15 — 26th Annual National Logistics Conference & Exhibition, Hyatt Regency, Miami, Fla. For more information go to www.ndia.org/meetings/0730 April 13 - 15 — 11th Annual Science and Engineering Technology Conference/DoD Tech Expo, “Enabling Technologies to Fight Current & Future Conflicts,” For more information go to www.exhibits.ndia.org
Orbital Sciences on April 2 completed the acquisition of General Dynamics’ satellite manufacturing unit, a deal the two companies announced in March. With the acquisition, Orbital is adding 325 employees and a 135,000 sq.-ft. manufacturing facility.
FUEL DEPENDENCE: On Capitol Hill, at least one conservative senator has muted praise for President Obama’s decision to open new tracts of the eastern Gulf of Mexico and off the Atlantic and Alaskan coasts to drilling for oil and gas to reduce U.S. energy dependence on foreign countries (Aerospace DAILY, March 31). But Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), a leading member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, says the president should go further if he wants to help relieve pressure on the Pentagon.
PARIS — The European Space Agency (ESA) has announced an award to Astrium for a second Sentinel-2 for Europe’s Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES) network.
LEGAL POINT: A key State Department official says the Obama administration is following established laws of war in its worldwide use of unmanned aircraft against al-Qaeda. Legal Adviser Harold Koh told an audience March 25 at the Annual Meeting of the American Society of International Law in Washington that U.S. rules for UAV-based operations are consistent with legal principles that define distinction of targeting and proportionality of force in their attacks.
CHECKOUT: On April 2 NASA’s Global Hawk unmanned aircraft performed its first flight after being loaded with 11 science instruments for the upcoming Global Hawk Pacific (GloPac) mission. The checkout flight, which took off at 10 a.m. EDT from Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., was to make sure all the instruments are operating properly. Actual GloPac scientific flights are to begin over the Pacific Ocean later this month, when the high-flying UAV will sample the chemical composition of the stratosphere and troposphere.
The Pentagon’s rogues gallery of weapon acquisitions has widened with the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, Apache Block III helicopter, CVN 78 Ford-class aircraft carriers and several others reporting significant cost increases, schedule slippages or both, according to the Defense Department’s latest data.
ON HOLD: A State Department spokesman in Washington announced April 1 that the U.S. is suspending delivery of several military transport ground vehicles and other so-called excess defense articles (EDA) to Cambodia after that country moved to return 20 Uighur asylum-seekers to China. U.S. diplomats say the move contravenes earlier statements by the Cambodians that they would honor their international obligations by working with the U.N. to properly determine the Uighurs’ status.
NEW DELHI — The Indian Navy and the Republic of Singapore Navy are holding SIMBEX 2010 — the Singapore Indian Maritime Bilateral Exercise — in the Andaman Sea and Bay of Bengal April 3-16.
The U.S. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) has emerged as the government-wide manager of a new service, providing commercial synthetic aperture radar (SAR) from spacecraft. But despite all of the money, ingenuity and might that the U.S. government and industry have put into space, not a single American company is capable of organically providing this service.
MANAGING EXPECTATIONS: The United States is not approaching the Nonproliferation Treaty Review Conference in May as an end in itself, according to U.S. Ambassador Susan Burk, but as a “critical milestone in the broader international effort to strengthen the international nonproliferation regime.” And while the U.S. and others have been considering how treaty parties might address the issue of abuse of the NPT’s withdrawal provision — specifically, how to dissuade a party from withdrawing from the treaty after having violated its NPT obligations — no change is seen.
