PARIS – General Electric and Volvo Aero are extending their fighter engine partnership with Saab’s decision to use the F414 for the Gripen Next Generation (NG). The two engine makers were already cooperating on the regular Gripen, whose Volvo Aero RM12 is a modified GE F404, and now are looking for ways to expand workshare on the F414.
PROTON LAUNCH: An International Launch Services Proton Breeze M rocket has orbited Astra 1M, a Ku-band telecom spacecraft intended to deliver direct-to-home broadcasting services to continental Europe from SES Astra’s 19.2 deg. E. Long. position. The 32-transponder satellite, built by EADS Astrium, marked the third Proton M mission for ILS – and the fourth overall – since the vehicle returned to service in mid-August after a five-month shutdown.
The Phoenix Mars lander is near shutdown as sunlight at its arctic landing site is no longer enough to provide solar array power to charge its batteries daily. Loss of the lander in November or earlier has always been expected, following a successful mission that began with its landing May 25. Phoenix has lasted about six weeks longer that its original specification.
PARIS – With details of India’s defense procurement policy still unclear, bidders for the country’s Medium Multi-Range Combat Aircraft (MMRCA) may find it difficult to absorb the more than $5 billion expected to fulfill the 50 percent offsets expected of them.
China is pulling back the veil of secrecy around its space program by revealing new internal contracting deals for several new spacecraft and Long March boosters. It is also continuing an aggressive space launch pace by orbiting a dual-satellite mission within two weeks of another Chinese launch carrying two spacecraft.
APACHE SENSORS: Lockheed Martin announced it has completed test flights demonstrating a low-light-level sensor system for the U.S. Army’s Arrowhead-equipped AH-64D Apache helicopters. The Visible/Near Infrared (V/NIR) sensor will be integrated into the Modernized-Pilot Night Vision Sensor (M-PNVS) system. Pilots will now be able to better see street lighting by blending V/NIR sensor imagery with M-PNVS forward looking infrared imagery to improve situational awareness in low-light conditions.
Industry winners of development contracts for the U.S. Defense Department’s Joint Light Tactical Vehicle program won a combined $122 million in awards last week. The headline on a brief item Oct. 30 in Aerospace DAILY incorrectly identified the amount.
Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) expects to begin commercial flights of its newly announced reusable DragonLab spacecraft in 2010, and is in negotiations with potential customers for room on the vehicle.
The U.S. Air Force’s new Strategic and Nuclear Integration Office began operations at the Pentagon Nov. 1, part of the service’s establishment of a nuclear-only major command. The new directorate, also known as A10, will be led by Maj. Gen. Donald Alston, who will take the role of assistant chief of staff for Strategic Deterrence and Nuclear Integration. The announcement follows an Oct. 24 Pentagon press conference announcing a new major command, called Global Strike Command, devoted to the nuclear enterprise.
Indian pilots flying Su-30MKIs are extremely professional, but they’re still learning how best to fight with their new aircraft. That opinion comes from an unidentified, senior F-15 pilot taped while briefing senior retired U.S. Air Force officers about the most recent Red Flag exercise. The video was made available online at YouTube.com. The French pilots flying the new Dassault Rafale appeared to be there to collect electronic intelligence on the Indian aircraft, according to the USAF pilot, who wears an Air Force Weapons School graduate patch.
WILLIAMSBURG, Va. – Ongoing arguments between the U.S. Air Force and Army over the value of mounted vertical maneuver are putting the brakes on the Joint Future Theater Lift Concept (JFTL), delaying the initial capabilities document (ICD) for a year and endangering budget planning.
President-elect Barack Obama, the next commander in chief starting Jan. 20, 2009, is expected to emphasize technological investments under national security and space exploration efforts at the expense – albeit still uncertain – of the Defense Department’s bigger-ticket acquisition efforts.
INCREASED PAYLOAD: U.S. Marine Corps CH-53D Sea Stallion and CH-53E Super Stallion engines soon should benefit from more power on hot temperature and high altitude flights thanks to engine upgrades. The CH-53D’s two General Electric T-64-GE-413 engines will be upgraded to the -416 model, which is in use on the –E model. The –E’s -416 engines will receive upgraded fuel controls along with titanium nitride compressor airfoils and improved hot section components, turning it into a -419 engine.
SES says it has been affected by further solar array failures on its fleet of Lockheed Martin A2100 spacecraft. In August, the satcom operator reported a small reduction in commercial capacity on two satellites, AMC-4 and AMC-16, with “some potential future additional degradation.”
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Most members of the House and Senate Armed Services committees up for re-election managed to survive challenges at the polls Nov. 4, although one race isn’t over yet.
Honeywell has received its first major production contract for the ducted-fan RQ-16A Micro Air Vehicle (MAV), with a $65 million U.S. Navy order for 90 systems to meet an urgent need for the “hover-and-stare” vehicles to detect improvised explosive devices (IEDs). Each with two backpackable air vehicles and laptop ground station, the systems will be delivered in 2009 to explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. The production order follows in-theater assessment of the MAV during 2007.
DRAGONLAB: Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) announced Nov. 4 that it is developing a new reusable spacecraft called DragonLab, which will accommodate pressurized or unpressurized experiments and be launched on the company’s upcoming Falcon 9 rocket. The spacecraft can provide a platform for on-orbit experiments, according to SpaceX, and will allow for payload recovery. The company plans to hold a DragonLab users workshop Nov. 6 to give potential customers the opportunity to learn more about the system and ask questions.
Electronic and cyber-attack weapons for the U.S. Air Force’s F-15Es are getting closer with the award of a contract to Boeing and Raytheon to develop and flight-test an advanced radar to modernize the Strike Eagle fleet of 224 aircraft. The $238 million development and demonstration contract will feed into the Radar Modernization Program (RMP) and possibly an electronic upgrade package about which both companies are intentionally vague (Aerospace DAILY, Oct. 31).
The German army has taken delivery of the first Krauss-Maffei Wegmann (KMW) FLW 100 lightweight stations to outfit ground vehicles deployed in Afghanistan. The handover Oct. 31 was only the start of delivery of more than 400 weapon stations. The contract the defense ministry signed last July calls for delivery of 230 light and 190 heavy weapon stations.
ST. LOUIS – Boeing is exploring a cut in its annual production rate of C-17 transports from 15 to eight per year in hopes of keeping the troubled production line open through an increasingly tough fiscal environment.
ELECTRIC FLIGHT: Boeing is to refine the configuration of an airlifter powered by multiple electrically-driven fans under a $473,500 Advanced Distributed Electric Propulsion (ADEPT) study contract from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The study will also assess the high-lift performance provided by the ADEPT propulsion system integrated with the airlifter’s wing. NASA has previously studied embedded and distributed propulsion systems for blended wing-body transports.
