POINT AND FOCUS: Boeing’s Airborne Laser (ABL) soon will fire its high-energy laser during flight tests, first into an onboard calorimeter, then through its beam control/fire control system. The ABL team then will test the entire weapon system against in-flight missiles, culminating with ABL’s first high-energy laser intercept test against a ballistic missile later this year. On Aug. 10, the U.S. Missile Defense Agency completed its first in-flight test against an instrumented target missile.
Boeing and NASA have taken the wraps off the X-48C, a modified variant of the blended wing body sub-scale demonstrator aimed at proving ultra-low noise targets for future transports including airliners as well as military tanker-transports.
NASA will ship the first Orion crew module for launch abort tests at White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico, on Aug. 19, but confirms that the Pad Abort 1 (PA-1) flight test has slipped into early 2010.
TIME FLIES: Flight trials of the British Watchkeeper unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) system have concluded in Israel, clearing the way for tests in the U.K. in the fourth quarter of this year. The Watchkeeper UAV, based on the Elbit Hermes 450, will likely begin trials using the Parc Aberporth range in Wales in October or November. Thales is leading the development of the Watchkeeper. The system is planned to enter service with the British toward the end of 2010.
Lockheed Martin has begun hose-and-drogue refueling tests with the second short-takeoff vertical-landing (STOVL) F-35B, aircraft BF-2. The tanker for these tests is a C-130J. The significance of the flights is that they will clear the way to ferry the first F-35B, aircraft BF-1, to the U.S. Navy test center at Patuxent River, Md., for powered-lift STOVL testing. BF-1 is due back in the air soon having completed hover-pit tests following modifications.
ELBIT EARNINGS: Israel-based Elbit reported $728.3 million in second-quarter revenue, representing 11.5 percent year-on-year growth. Net income grew 91.7 percent compared to the 2008 second quarter, reaching $59.7 million. Sales of unmanned aerial vehicles in Israel and other activities helped offset reductions in sales of land systems in the U.S. Elbit also saw a slowdown in quick-reaction orders from the Pentagon that had boosted margins.
GROUNDED AGAIN: In what marks the second comeuppance in almost as many weeks for Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.), the House’s top defense appropriator says he will agree to reverse an earmark that would have forced the U.S. Air Force to buy and sustain more VIP-transport jets than had been requested by the Pentagon and White House. “If the Department of Defense does not want these aircraft, they will be eliminated from the bill,” Murtha said after the issue grabbed headlines earlier this month and embarrassed lawmakers across the country (Aerospace DAILY, Aug. 10).
STANDING TALL: Assembly of NASA’s Ares I-X test rocket was completed Aug. 13. The 327-foot tall launch vehicle now stands in the Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy Space Center, Fla., marking the first time in more than 25 years that a new space vehicle has stood in the cavernous facility. The rocket, with a simulated crew module stacked atop it, stands on a mobile launch platform in preparation for launch Oct. 31.
ARES BURN: NASA and Alliant Techsystems (ATK) have slightly slipped the first full-scale, full-duration test of the new first-stage solid rocket motor for the Ares I rocket, which is now set for 3 p.m. EDT Aug. 27 at ATK’s facility in Promontory, Utah. Previously set for Aug. 25, the new test date allows gives NASA and ATK more breathing room to support both the test and the upcoming STS-128 space shuttle mission, which is eyeing launch on Aug. 24.
INDIAN FIGHTER: Flight trials are now underway with Boeing for the aerospace industry’s largest fighter jet procurement battle — India’s competition for 126 Medium Multi-role Combat Aircraft (MMRCA). Boeing is offering the F/A-18. The trials are to be wrapped up by next March and are being held in Leh for altitude testing, Jaisalmer for hot operations and Bengaluru (Bangalore) for humidity. Five other contenders are participating in trials lasting three weeks each.
ODD COUPLE: Staffers at Texas A&M University say forcibly retired former U.S. Air Force chief of staff Gen. T. Michael “Buzz” Moseley, an alumnus, is on the short list for the next president of the College Station, Texas institution. Meanwhile, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who was president of A&M prior to taking over at the Pentagon, has voiced interest in returning to the institution. The irony, of course, is that Gates fired Moseley as chief of staff, officially because of inattention to nuclear weapons stewardship.
NEW DELHI — Boeing has decided to bid on India’s programs to purchase 22 combat helicopters and 15 heavy-lift helicopters. Proposals for the combat helicopters are due Sept. 22, and the deadline for the heavy-lift helicopters is the next day. This is the second time India has issued a tender for attack helicopters. The first tender — issued in May 2008 — was scrapped in March by the government. Neither Bell Helicopter nor Boeing participated in that effort. Bell has said it will not participate in the new competition.
NASA has not been properly funded to meet the goal set by Congress that it discover 90 percent of all near-Earth objects (NEOs) 140 meters in diameter or larger by 2020, according to a National Research Council (NRC) panel.
WEBSTER FIELD, Md. — U.S. Navy planners are sorting out how they will beef up unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) operations in Afghanistan over the next 18 months — a period deemed as critical in determining if U.S. strategy there is working or not Navy operations have so far been limited to small UAVs, but will soon be reinforced with bigger designs. “[Navy UAVs] have flown hundreds of thousands of hours over four years” with the ScanEagle, Raven, Wasp and Shadow, says Gary Kessler, deputy program executive officer for unmanned aviation.
In the run up to the planned launch of space shuttle Discovery later this month on STS-128, NASA is still analyzing the surprising foam debris shedding on the previous mission, with some engineers calling for the shuttle to be rolled back from the launch pad for more in-depth analysis. STS-127 saw worrisome foam losses from three areas of the big external fuel tank — the forward bipod area, an ice/frost ramp on the liquid oxygen tank, and the intertank area.
There is a sleeper in the race for fielding more unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) capability worldwide — General Atomics Aeronautical Systems is already flying a reduced-signature Predator C and the company is looking to bank its existing gains.
While the U.S. Air Force will train more unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) operators this year than fighter and bomber pilots, one former fighter pilot and current Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher does not see much correlation between the two.
Remote sensing rivals DigitalGlobe and GeoEye both are reporting healthy second-quarter earnings and say that demand for imaging worldwide is recession-proof. DigitalGlobe reported its first quarterly earnings as a public company this week. The company went public in May and raised $68 million in cash from its initial offering, reported in its second-quarter results.
MOSCOW — An International Launch Services (ILS) Proton rocket launched AsiaSat 5, a Space Systems/Loral 1300 series telecommunication satellite, on Aug. 11. Liftoff from Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, occurred at 1:47 a.m. local time Aug. 12 (19:47 GMT Aug. 11), and the Proton’s Briz-M upper stage deployed the 3.7-metric ton spacecraft into geostationary transfer orbit 9 hours and 15 minutes later. Hong Kong-based AsiaSatellite Telecommunications already has received the first signals from the satellite.
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ARMING AFGHANISTAN: The Afghan Air Corps’s Mi-35 attack helicopters are about to reach initial operational capability, says U.S. Air Force Brig. Gen. Walter Givhan, who leads the allied effort to rebuild the Afghan service. Czech advisors have been training Mi-35 crews. The helos will give the Afghan Air Corps its first real air-to-ground strike capability, although some of the Mi-17s are fitted with machine guns. Givhan says studies are currently underway to assess what kind of fixed-wing intelligence gathering aircraft to provide.
The first deployment of a 19-helicopter squadron attached to a carrier strike wing is complete, and the U.S. Navy is pleased with the results. The eleven MH-60R and eight MH-60S helicopters deployed with the USS John Stennis Carrier Strike Group, which returned in July, provided commanders with “a lot more flexibility to respond to real-world tasking at a faster pace,” said Capt. Donald Williamson, commodore of the Helicopter Maritime Strike Wing August 12. The Navy’s “helicopter force has never been more relevant.”
RFID CLEARED: The U.S. Air Force has approved Savi Technology’s radio frequency identification (RFID) tags aboard its aircraft that transport Department of Defense supplies. This approval follows extensive Air Force tests that demonstrated the RFID tags didn’t interfere with aircraft electronics and avionics, even while the ISO 18000-7 compliance tags are on and transmitting microwatts of power intermittently. U.S.
