BOUNCING BACK: Boeing may have stumbled during the recent flight demonstrations for the hotly contested U.S. Navy/Marine Corps small tactical unmanned aircraft (STUAS) program when subsidiary Insitu’s Integrator UAS suffered a launch malfunction early in the demo, but an industry insider says the company believes the system performed successfully overall. Insitu is seen as the one to beat, as STUAS will replace its ScanEagle. Other known competitors at the demo were the AAI Aerosonde Mark 4.7, General Dynamics/Elbit Systems Hermes 90 and Raytheon KillerBee.
Members of the White House panel reviewing options for future U.S. human spaceflight have dropped site visits in the interest of efficiency as they work to meet an end-of-August deadline. The 10-member panel, headed by retired Lockheed Martin CEO Norm Augustine, has visited Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, where NASA is developing the Ares I crew launch vehicle; the Delta IV production facility in Decatur, Ala., the Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans, and the SpaceX plant in Hawthorne, Calif., to gather data.
COMPUTER LITERACY: BBN Technologies AND Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC) are both developing so-called machine reading technology under contracts from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the Air Force Research Laboratory. The effort “seeks to advance the ability of machines to understand text by bridging the gap between human textual representations and those used by machine reasoning systems,” according to SAIC. BBN said in late June it was awarded $29.7 million.
AUSSIE VESSEL: The Australian Customs and Border Protection Service is looking for a new Southern Ocean Patrol and Response Vessel, with industry responses due by September 24. The vessel will be used for surveillance, patrol and response operations in Australia’s Southern Ocean and to protect natural resources like the Patagonian Toothfish. The boat’s speed has yet to be determined, but it should run at a minimum of 16 knots (18 knots preferred), have a 12,000 nautical mile range, and be fitted with deck-mounted weapons.
NASA is funding the development of a turbulence/severe weather detection system for use in remote ocean regions, where pilots have little access to weather information. Scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo., and the University of Wisconsin will design the system using satellite data and computer weather models with artificial intelligence techniques.
FIRE AWAY: Work on the second post-delivery availability for the first Littoral Combat Ship (LCS), the Freedom, built by Lockheed Martin, will continue through September at the Colonna shipyard in Norfolk, Virginia. The ship conducted structural test firings recently, firing all the weapons aboard ship. The 57-mm gun was fired over 70 times, two rolling airframe missiles were fired, as were the 50-caliber machine guns and the soft-kill weapons system (decoys), according to company officials.
NO SUMMER BREAK: Lockheed Martin’s F-35 avionics flying testbed, the CATBird, is heading to Eglin Air Force Base, Fla., for two months of flights over instrumented ranges to test the fusion of radar and electronic-warfare data and push the maturity of the systems before they fly in the fighter itself. A two-week trip to Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., in April focused on radar tests.
COAST GUARD: Congressional auditors expect to issue their report on the Coast Guard’s newest vessel, the National Security Cutter (NSC), later this summer. The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) is studying the development and procurement of the NSC at the behest of the homeland security panels of both the House and Senate Appropriations committees. Delivery of the first NSC, USCG Bertholf, was delayed by design changes after 9/11 and hurricane damage to the shipyard in 2008.
DINGING DENEL: South Africa’s new defense minister, Lindiwe Sisulu, wants to make changes at Denel, bringing the arms maker under closer government control due to some unhappiness over how the business has performed. In her first address to parliament, she signaled changes at Armscor, the country’s official arms procurement agency. Industry officials suggest that at this point there are no immediate changes looming, and that Denel’s strategic industrial relationships with Saab, Rheinmetall and Carl Zeiss are not at risk.
New restrictions on funding military equipment recapitalization have lawmakers concerned the services will not receive critical upgrades. “At just the time we need more money because of reset [demands], now we have less money,” said Rep. Roscoe Bartlett (R-Md.), ranking member of the House Air and Land Forces Subcommittee.
JTRS AWARD: ITT has been awarded a $22.9 million contract for Single Channel Ground and Airborne Radio Systems (SINCGARS) Software In-Service Support (SwISS) by the Joint Tactical Radio System (JTRS) Joint Program Executive Office. The work will include technical support, enhancements, maintenance and upgrades to the JTRS SINCGARS waveform. The total program value could reach $62 million if all options are exercised. ITT has partnered with Thales Communications Inc. of Clarksburg, Md., to perform the work.
General Electric has initiated the first bench tests of the GE38 turboshaft engine it is developing for the U.S. Marine Corps/Sikorsky CH-53K heavy-lift helicopter at the company’s development center in Lynn, Mass. The engine is expected to lower fuel burn by 20 percent while producing more than 7,500 shaft horsepower, a jump in current engine outputs that will give the upgraded twin-engine CH-53 better hot-and-high performance and longer range/higher payload potential.
Northrop Grumman will use data from a thermal vacuum test of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) engineering mockup to validate sophisticated thermal designs for the huge infrared observatory. The company had to use its largest thermal vacuum chamber in Redondo Beach, Calif., to chill the mockup down to temperatures as low as 13K (minus 435 F), simulating the operating environment engineers hope will exist behind the telescope’s sunscreen when it is deployed at the Sun-Earth second Lagrange point (L2).
A chorus of U.S., Japanese and Israeli officials believe that China, Russia and Iran present common problems that more F-22 Raptors could help solve. Japan’s F-15J force, once top of the line, is now “outclassed by the new generation of Chinese fighters” such as the Su-30MKK, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff U.S. Air Force Gen. Richard Myers (ret.), tells Aviation Week.
A&D Programs Conference November 2-4, 2009 Phoenix, AZ A&D Finance Conference December 2-3, 2009 New York, NY Defense Technology & Requirements Conference February 17-18, 2010 Washington, DC AVIATION WEEK Laureates Awards March 17, 2010 Washington, DC
A new Rand study distills 40 “unwieldy mission sets” for unmanned underwater vehicles (UUV), as identified in a 2004 U.S. Navy master plan, down to seven high-priority mission categories. A number of factors influenced Rand’s reorganization of priorities for the Navy, including evaluating operational need, vehicle size and sensor capability requirements and differing levels of UUV autonomy on given missions.
LOW BAND: The U.S. Navy has awarded Cobham a $32 million contract modification to provide 37 additional AN/ALQ-99 Low Band Transmitters (LBT) under Lot 2 of the program’s full rate production phase. Deliveries are scheduled to begin in March 2011 and continue through November 2011. The award is a modification to the existing Lot 1 contract, bringing the total number of LBTs ordered by the Navy to 157, reflecting $217 million in total contracts. The Navy intends to buy a total of 292 LBTs. To date, 46 systems have been delivered.
Boeing Co. and VSMPO-Avisma, a Russian titanium producer, launched production July 6 of semi-finished titanium products for the Boeing 787 as part of a joint venture formed in 2007 called Ural Boeing Manufacturing (UBM). VSMPO-Avisma already has been exporting almost 70 percent of its products to Airbus and Boeing, as well as other aerospace companies. In 2007, VSMPO produced 27,500 metric tons of titanium.
MOSCOW – Three new Russian military satellites are in orbit following launch on a Rockot booster from northern Plesetsk Cosmodrome on July 7. The three spacecraft — officially identified as Kosmos 2451, 2452 and 2453 and thought to be communication satellites — separated from the Briz-KM upper stage successfully and have taken their position at a circular 1,500-kilometer (930-mile) high orbit with an inclination of 82.5 degrees.
