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.”
NEW DELHI — On the eve of India’s elections, intelligence sources have warned that around 20 trained Pakistan-based militants, including seven or eight pilots, have entered India to carry out attacks and hijackings similar to the 9/11 attacks.
JIEDDO CONFERENCE: The U.S. Defense Department’s Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization (JIEDDO) will host a Technology Outreach Conference in Huntington Beach, Calif., in early May. The conference — restricted to those with secret-level clearances — comes as JIEDDO has been working on improving its reputation with Capitol Hill and industry after years of enigmatic relations with both, as well as reconsideration of the group’s role and mission.
Taking Pentagon and industry concerns into consideration, the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) passed a revised defense acquisition reform bill April 2 that drops an absolute ban on separate entities of the same contractor both advising the Defense Department on weapons systems and providing those systems.
PARIS — Europe is moving to streamline defense acquisition management, with negotiations soon to begin between the European Defense Agency (EDA) and the European defense procurement organization Occar on how to cooperate.
The majority of the Republicans on the House Armed Services Committee have asked President Barack Obama to authorize military commanders to employ the U.S. missile defense system if they perceive the United States or its allies are put at risk by an expected North Korean rocket launch. The April 1 letter comes after weekend comments by Defense Secretary Robert Gates that indicated the United States at least would not seek a military solution to stop the launch, expected April 4-8.
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo — The U.S. Air Force is expecting to finally launch its first Global Positioning System (GPS) IIF satellite in November, according to Craig Cooning, vice president of Boeing Space and Intelligence Systems. The program has experienced problems in the past. Most recently, the first GPS IIF satellite was found to have a problem with a piece of onboard equipment designed to integrate four signals. Cooning says a repair is in the works.
PERSISTENT EYE: The U.S. Army recently conducted a continuous, 30-hour demonstration of persistent surveillance of a point target using AeroVironment’s (AV) RQ-11B Raven small unmanned aerial system (UAS). The demonstration at Camp Roberts, Calif., followed an inquiry from Pentagon officials regarding the potential for AV’s Raven to perform low-cost, tactically relevant, persistent surveillance. The test used one standard production Raven baseline system, which consists of three aircraft and two ground control stations.
Reports that the Pentagon may be considering drastic cutbacks to elements of the Army’s $160 billion Future Combat Systems (FCS) program are alarming some key members of the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC). SASC Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.) says he wants to hear “what the arguments are [for cutting back] before I reach any conclusion.”
