To list an event, send information in calendar format to Donna Thomas at [email protected]. (Bold type indicated new calendar listing.) Apr. 6 - 9 — 2009 Gun and Missile Systems Conference & Exhibition, “Shaping the Future in Weapon Systems Development, Deployment, and Reset,” Hyatt Regency Crown Center, Kansas City, Mo. For more information go to http://exhibits.ndia.org
MOSCOW — Russian Space Agency Roscosmos has chosen a team consisting of Samara Space Center (TcSKB Progress), RSC Energia and the Makeev Rocket Design Bureau to develop a new medium-class booster. The rocket will launch from the yet-to-be-built Vostochny cosmodrome in the far east of Russia. It should be able to boost manned and cargo spacecraft, as well as space station modules, to low-Earth orbit.
MOON BUMP: NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and the piggyback Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite will launch on an Atlas V no earlier than June 2, to accommodate the delayed Atlas V launch of the second U.S. Air Force Wideband Global Satcom spacecraft. That launch, which was delayed by a liquid oxygen leak in its Centaur upper stage, was scheduled for 8:31 p.m. EDT April 3.
COST CONTROL: In a recent briefing, Teal Group Vice President Richard Aboulafia offers his explanation of why defense programs are in a bit of a fix. “Program problems aren’t just the result of requirements people working in a vacuum,” he says. “The requirements people respond to the broader environment, to the weapons acquisition philosophy created by each administration.” The Clinton era emphasized CAIV (Cost As an Independent Variable) as a response to limited budgets, establishing price as a key guideline for new systems development.
DOD is expected to announce the termination of the U.S. Navy’s Harpoon Block III anti-ship missile early this week, according to government and industry sources close to the effort. Harpoon Block III is said to be among 55 programs over which Defense Secretary Robert Gates is expected to announce significant changes as early as April 6.
DONE DEAL: Northrop Grumman Corp. and the U.S. Justice Dept. have agreed to settle a pair of procurement cases by essentially trading off $325 million in completing claims.
SHADY DEALINGS: The sun shield being developed to shade the upper-stage fuel tanks on the Atlas V rocket and prevent fuel burn-off should be ready for testing by April 2011, according to United Launch Alliance (ULA). The test deployment will take place after the primary payload separates, during a flight that doesn’t require the shield. Normally, the shield will inflate and deploy after the payload fairing is jettisoned.
ORGANIC FUEL: The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency wants to turn lawn clippings and wood chips into jet fuel and is funding Logos Technologies to demonstrate the conversion of such cellulosic biomass into surrogate JP-8 as part of its BioFuels program. With a $19.6 million contract, Logos joins General Atomics and Science Application International, which have been funded to demonstrate cost-competitive production of JP-8 from algae.
The White House is expected to get its first official briefing on the way forward in buying secret intelligence-gathering satellites as soon as next week, industry and Pentagon officials say. The intelligence community (IC) is pushing for high-end technology and larger satellites for the electro-optical (EO) and infrared (IR) collection mission. The Pentagon, by contrast, advocates for medium-class satellites in a lower orbit.
COBB RESIGNS: Embattled NASA Inspector General Robert Cobb will be resigning from the agency effective April 11. He sent his resignation letter to the White House April 2. Cobb had been criticized for his performance by the Government Accountability Office (Aerospace DAILY, Jan. 16), which prompted calls for his ouster by members of Congress.
COOL NAVY: Later this year, the USS Carl Vinson will return to the fleet post-overhaul, equipped with 10 air-conditioning plants and five refrigeration plants that have been converted from chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) refrigerants to non-ozone depleting hydrofluorocarbon (HFC) refrigerants. CFC refrigerants are ozone-depleting substances and potent greenhouse gases. Although HFC refrigerants also are greenhouse gases, the Navy says they have lower global warming potential.
Because of budget constraints, the U.S. should invest in just a single boost-phase missile defense system, the former director of the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) says.
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — The chief designer of China’s manned space program, Zhou Jiaping, says more tests of the spacesuit used in his nation’s first spacewalk are upcoming, along with upgrades planned to meet long-term requirements for lunar exploration.
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — Australia is a possible site for the first new Space Fence radar monitoring station, according to Gary Payton, the deputy undersecretary of the U.S. Air Force for space. The Space Fence is a program to replace aging bistatic S-band radar sites designed during the Cold War to monitor the number and orbital behavior of satellites. The existing infrastructure is aging and requires upgrade to monitor more satellites and smaller objects in space. The first new site is expected to begin operating in 2015.
Alliant Techsystems (ATK) has completed a ground test firing of a subscale attitude control motor thruster at its Elkton, Md., site for the launch abort system (LAS) of NASA’s Orion crew exploration vehicle.
NO AIR YET: The U.S. State Department says a decision has not been made yet on who will perform airborne protective security details in Iraq, although based on Iraq’s recent decision over dumping Xe — formerly Blackwater — State has had to notify the company in writing that it did not renew Xe’s task order for air operations. “I believe that we still require air assets. No decision has been made on who will do that job,” a department spokesman said April 1. Current services, including helicopters, run through May and are provided by Presidential Airways, a part of Xe.
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — The U.S. Air Force plans to issue a final request for proposals for the Transformational Satellite (TSAT) program April 24, says Craig Cooning, vice president of Boeing Space and Intelligence Systems. But Boeing and competitor Lockheed Martin don’t seem to be relying on TSAT to continue with their space businesses. The program is widely thought to be near the top on a list of likely kills expected in the wake of the financial downturn and cuts in Pentagon spending.
BEIJING — China is accelerating reform of its military aircraft sector by bringing forward the establishment of a company that will be its national defense champion. Government and industry leaders have dropped plans to initially restrict the new business — a maker of fighters, trainers, drones and missiles — to the status of a division of national aeronautics conglomerate Avic. Instead, the organization has now been set up as a company under the name Avic Defence.
As anxiety over the health of the Pentagon’s overhead nonimaging infrared (ONIR) constellation continues, yet another idea for an alternate system is emerging. U.S. Strategic Command is proposing a single satellite called the IR Augmentation System (IRAS), which would be a free flier.
UNMANNED NAVY: Oshkosh Defense is partnering with the U.S. Naval Warfare Center (NSWC) to develop and evaluate potential new uses of the company’s autonomous technology. The NSWC will sponsor these cooperative operations, which will involve Oshkosh’s unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) TerraMax, and take place at Eglin Air Force Base, Fla. The NSWC will investigate using the TerraMax, based on Oshkosh’s Medium Tactical Vehicle Replacement (MTVR) 4x4, as a robotic MTVR in different mission-specific scenarios.
Contractors working on NASA’s Orion crew exploration vehicle and its Ares I launcher will get more money this spring — about $1.8 billion for Lockheed Martin’s work on Orion alone — to account for schedule and design changes since the human-rated spacecraft developments started in 2006. “We’ve matured the design substantially, so there will be new costs because we made it harder to build,” Constellation Program Manager Jeff Hanley says, characterizing the Orion contract modification only as “substantial.”
