LONDON — While the British Royal Navy’s senior officer goes out of his way to say they are not at “loggerheads,” the fault lines are already being drawn between the two oldest services in the run-up to London’s Strategic Defense Review (SDR).
Searchers on Jan. 15 located an Su-27M that disappeared the day before while doing advanced aerobatic maneuvers at Dzemgi air base, and the next day, the commander of the Russian Federation Air Force, Col. Gen. Alexsander Zelin, grounded all Su-27s until the crash’s cause has been determined.
LONDON — Weak business activity is forcing further job cuts at Saab, with 115 positions being eliminated. Saab last year already announced a series of layoffs and restructured its organization in light of reduced business (Aerospace DAILY, April 30, 2009). The commercial business, in particular, has been hit, but the job cuts also result from diminished military activity. Most of the 30 million Swedish kronor ($4.2 million) in restructuring costs will be booked in 2010.
LEADING WALLOPS: William Wrobel, a former Orbital Sciences Corp. executive who has been managing expendable space launches for NASA, will be the new director of the agency’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. At Orbital, Wrobel was program director for Orbital’s Taurus Launch Vehicle Program, which plans to launch cargo to the International Space Station from Wallops on the Taurus II rocket. “Bill is a natural fit as Wallops’ director,” said Administrator Charles Bolden. Wrobel will replace John Campbell, who retired at the end of 2009.
NEW DELHI – ST Kinetics, the Land Systems arm of Singapore Technologies Engineering, is participating in numerous programs in India and says it is looking at itself as a capability-based company able to integrate all dimensions of lifecycle support. Rated by Moodys as AAA, it has bid for six Indian defense contracts, including a Request for Proposals (RFP) for 34,377 Compact Personal Weapons.
PARIS — Intersputnik has concluded an agreement to lease 16 transponders on Eutelsat’s big W7 satellite. Built by Thales Alenia Space and launched on Nov. 24, W7 carries 74 Ku-band transponders. It is co-located at 36 deg. E. with W4, which carries four Intersputnik channels. The agreement, for the life of the satellite, will permit Eutelsat to double capacity at the 36 deg. slot, where traffic has grown 15 percent over the past 18 months, principally due to demand in Russia and Africa.
PARIS — The European Space Agency is poised to begin talks with NASA toward forging a partnership in Earth science similar to that enjoyed by the agencies in exploration and other domains. These dialogues will be one part of a concerted effort this year to reinforce and expand cooperation not only with NASA but with other international partners and the European Union (EU).
CYBER POSSE: Australia has opened its Cyber Security Operations Center, and officials say they are standing up a U.S.-style computer emergency response team while looking to audit Internet access points to the continent. The center falls under the Defense Signals Directorate and counts 51 personnel now, but will include representatives, up to 130 total, from across the Australian government, Defense Minister John Faulkner said Jan. 15, “Already we have evidence of sophisticated cyber intrusions onto networks in Australia, both government and private.
JUST SAY NO: Some 200 NASA and contractor employees are getting drug tests after a bag containing a small amount of cocaine was found inside the Orbiter Processing Facility at Kennedy Space Center (KSC), a restricted area where the space shuttle Discovery is being readied for a mission to the International Space Station in March. Agency officials termed the find “a rare and isolated incident,” and said it should have no effect on shuttle safety.
JOINT C4I: The French Ministry of Defense has kicked off design of a joint C4I (command, control, communications, computers and intelligence) system intended to serve all services. The system, to be ready around 2016, will serve to combine existing systems operated by the different services while providing improved security and interoperability.
In its Jan. 13 edition, Aerospace DAILY quoted the Congressional Research Service (CRS) as reporting: “Given the higher costs, lower work force and financial imperatives of doing business today, it is unlikely that a firm would decide to absorb losses for as long as Rockwell did on the B-1B program. Rather, that experience might be a ‘lesson learned’ that would encourage companies to cut their losses quickly and dispose of costly assets that are not earning revenue.” The CRS report was quoting an observation from an Aerospace Industries Association study.
PARIS — The price the European Union will pay for five Soyuz launches to orbit the first ten Galileo Full Operating Capability (FOC) satellites — 397 million euros ($572 million) — has raised some eyebrows in an industry used to cheap Soyuz launches.
NEW CHARGES: Former NASA Chief of Staff and White House liaison Courtney Stadd, already on probation for an ethics law conviction, faces new charges. A federal grand jury in Mississippi returned a nine-count indictment against Stadd, alleging conspiracy, fraud and obstruction in connection with a $600,000 sole-source NASA contract to Mississippi State University, a Stadd client, for a remote sensing study. Stadd, who served at NASA in the administration of President George W. Bush, pleaded innocent. He is scheduled to go on trial Mar. 1.
NATO CROSSROADS: “NATO is more divided over fundamentals today than at any time in its history,” stresses former U.S. Ambassador to NATO Kurt Volker in the first of a series of issue briefs to be published by the Washington-based Atlantic Council. The first brief calls for a New Transatlantic Compact.
ATV TESTS: Europe’s second Automated Transfer Vehicle, designed to supply and reboost the International Space Station, is undergoing post-integration functional and flight readiness tests at Astrium’s Bremen, Germany plant. The vehicle, named Johannes Kepler, will be shipped to the launch site in Kouruo, French Guiana, in the second half of the year, following final tests, in preparation for a November launch to the station.
LONDON — European Partner governments and industry will meet within the next week or so to try to hammer out a deal on the Airbus Military A400M airlifter, following the governments reaching broad agreement on a collective position Jan. 14. Quentin Davies, the British minister for defense equipment and support, says that the London meeting “achieved a wide measure of agreement” among the partner states as to their negotiating position.
A Northrop Grumman/EADS team “wouldn’t have competed the first time around” for the U.S. Air Force KC-X refueling tanker contract if the duel then — which the Northrop team won — contained judgment criteria structured like the Pentagon’s current draft request for proposals (RFP) for a new competition, says Ralph Crosby, chairman of the board of EADS North America.
To list an event, send information in calendar format to Donna Thomas at [email protected]. (Bold type indicates new calendar listing.) Jan. 20 - 21 — Strategic and Tactical Missile Systems Conference, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, Calf. For more information go to www.aiaa.org Jan. 20 - 22 — AHS International Specialists’ Meeting. Unmanned Rotorcraft Systems, Scottsdale, Ariz., Chaparral Suites Resort. For more information go to www.vtol.org
LONDON — The British Defense Ministry expects to save more than £260 million ($422 million) in Typhoon engine support costs following the conclusion of a deal with engine manufacturer Rolls-Royce.
An aerospace training center has wrapped up the first of what it hopes will be many courses to prepare scientists and teachers for the rigors of suborbital space flights. While dozens of wealthy space tourists have signed up for $200,000 commercial trips to the edge of the atmosphere to experience weightlessness, entrepreneurs believe there could be an even bigger market for scientific experiments and studies.
U.K. CUTS: British think-tank Royal United Services Institute suggests the U.K. military faces real-term budget cuts of 10-15 percent over the next six years. “Capability Cost Trends,” the institute’s latest paper on the pending defense review, argues that these cuts, coupled with annual cost growth of 1-2 percent, could result in an overall drop of 20 percent in personnel to 2016, along with further reductions in platform numbers.
