LONDON — Cobham has identified elements within the company it plans to divest as part of a broader plan to realign and strengthen the business through acquisitions, new company CEO Andy Stevens says.
HOUSTON — International Space Station mission managers on Aug. 5 decided to wait until Saturday, Aug. 7 to begin a quickly devised dual-spacewalk strategy to repair the orbiting laboratory’s cooling system, which was crippled by a July 31 electrical short in an external pump module assembly. The first of the six-and-a-half to seven-hour spacewalks by Expedition 24 flight engineers Doug Wheelock and Tracy Caldwell Dyson of NASA is scheduled to get underway on Saturday at 6:55 a.m. EDT.
BENGALURU, India — Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd.’s Helicopter Complex (HC) in Bengaluru has a new chief, P. Soundara Rajan, who is also director of marketing and corporate planning at HAL’s headquarters. AVIATION WEEK has learned from HAL insiders that Soundara assumed his additional responsibilities on Aug. 3, though HAL has yet to issue any formal announcement. This comes in the wake of current managing director R. Srinivasan going on extended leave, citing health reasons.
COLLISION COURSE: Missile defense giants Lockheed Martin and Raytheon are teaming up in an effort to nab a $600 million contract to oversee future operations and sustainment of the Ground-Based Missile Defense (GMD) system. The U.S. Missile Defense Agency is expected to issue a request for proposals within weeks, and bids would be due 60 days later. The contract could come as soon as early 2011. A Boeing loss of this work would be a major blow to the GMD prime’s penetration of the missile defense market.
PARIS — African telecom users and the global satcom community each have something to be happy about following the successful launch of Rascom-QAF1R and Nilesat 201 Aug. 4 in Arianespace’s third launch so far this year. Rascom-QAF1R will permit the deployment of the first pan-African geostationary telecom service. It will replace an initial unit whose lifetime was cut short not long after launch in December 2007.
BENGALURU, India — Indian Defense Minister A.K. Antony says the first batch of the Indian Air Force’s (IAF) Antonov AN-32 transport aircraft has been sent to the Ukraine for a life extension and overhaul program. Antony told the Indian Parliament’s upper house on Aug. 4 that the move followed a deal that India signed with the Ukraine in June 2009.
The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) has a healthy set of case law exploring the question of proposal tardiness upon which to draw during its review of the U.S. Aerospace protest of the U.S. Air Force’s KC-X source selection process, according to a GAO official. Ralph White, managing associate general counsel for procurement law, says that there have been many similar cases reviewed by GAO in its 50 years of handling bid protests.
The Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) has begun what is described by one U.S. defense official as a “pre-Nunn-McCurdy” review of the Global Hawk UAV program. If there is a so-called Nunn-McCurdy breach of cost growth caps, this would be the second breach of the statute that dictates how to handle major cost increases in government programs for the high-flying UAV. The first took place in 2006 and resulted from a miscalculation of the work required to shift from the Block 10 configuration to a more robust Block 20.
The Pentagon is assessing only two bids for the U.S. Air Force KC-135 replacement competition because a last-minute proposal from U.S. Aerospace/Antonov was not received before the deadline, according to Geoff Morrell, Pentagon press secretary.
LONDON — NATO has established an office focused on assessing new security challenges. The mandate of the Emerging Security Challenges Division is to look at issues such as terrorism, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, cyberdefense and energy security. None of the topics are new for NATO, but this is the first time the alliance has aligned itself organizationally to deal with them.
NASHVILLE, Tenn. — The U.S. government should lead development of a nuclear thermal propulsion system for a future Mars mission and leave new heavy-lift launchers to commercial entities, Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) says. Unveiling conceptual plans for a family of Falcon X and XX future heavy-lift vehicles at last week’s AIAA Joint Propulsion conference here, SpaceX McGregor rocket development facility director Tom Markusic said, “Mars is the ultimate goal of SpaceX.”
The Pentagon is exploring the potential export of F-16s to Oman. The foreign military sales deal would cover up to 18 Block 50/52 F-16s. Many of the configuration issues, including engine and electronic warfare selection, remain to be addressed, the Pentagon suggests in its notification to Congress, although the country already operates Block 50 F-16s. As part of the $3.5 billion deal now under review, 12 F-16s already operated by Oman will be upgraded.
The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) has terminated a project that was designed to “fractionate” satellite capabilities, or develop a distributed satellite architecture that can better avoid threats posed against the large and valuable platforms now in orbit. The rationale given to F6 prime contractor Orbital Sciences was “termination for convenience.” Darpa officials say they remain committed to developing technologies for fractionation, though the effort is being rescoped.
Sikorsky Aircraft Corp. has filed a protest against U.S. Naval Air Systems Command (Navair) demanding the suspension of a request for proposals (RFP) for Russian Mi-17 helicopters for Afghanistan
India and Russia are continuing their longstanding cooperation in space with top-level talks on possible human missions. Meeting in Moscow this week, Anatoly Perminov, head of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, and D. Radhakrishnan, chairman of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), discussed ways Roscosmos and RSC Energia — builder of Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft — could help India’s nascent human-spaceflight effort.
The U.S. Navy has established a new program office to manage its unmanned maritime vehicle (UMV) efforts, marrying traditional acquisition and advanced development into a single charter. “The goal is to coordinate [unmanned vehicle acquisition] efforts and then direct specific experimentation and technology maturation,” says new program manager Capt. Duane Ashton.
BUYING BACK: General Dynamics’ board of directors on Aug. 4 declared a regular quarterly dividend of 42 cents per share on the company’s common stock, payable Nov. 12, 2010, to shareholders of record at the close of business on Oct. 8. The board also authorized the repurchase of up to 10 million shares of the company’s issued and outstanding common stock on the open market.
HOUSTON — Nearly 300 participants gathered Aug. 3 for the first NASA International Space Station Research Academy, a three-day offering designed to familiarize researchers and payload developers with the orbiting outpost’s designation as a National Laboratory and its capabilities to support experiments in fields ranging from fundamental biology and physics to biotechnology and Earth observations.
HOUSTON — The Orion rendezvous navigation system demonstration planned for NASA’s STS-134 mission, the last scheduled flight of the space shuttle, holds unusual significance for the future of human spaceflight, according to Lockheed Martin’s Pam Melroy, a former shuttle commander.
