Feb. 12 - 14 -- Aerospace Lighting Institute's Aerospace Vehicle NVG and Glass Cockpit Lighting Seminar, Los Angeles Marriott Hotel, Los Angeles, Calif. For more information call (727)791-07990 or go to www.aligodfrey.com. Feb. 13 - 15 -- Undersea Distributed Networked Systems Conference, "Undersea Distributed Networked Systems... A Key Enabler to New Warfighting Paradigms," Newport, R.I. For more information call (703) 247-2578 or go to www.ndia.org/meetings/7280.
Military aviation analysts say the U.S. Marine Corps' decision to ground its 46 MV-22 Ospreys because of a computer chip malfunction will likely disrupt, but not derail, the tiltrotor aircraft's development and procurement program. An engineering check identified a fault caused by a computer chip in the Flight Control Computers (FCC) of some Ospreys, Marine Lt. Col. Scott Fazekas said Feb. 9. 'A few hassles'
NASA PAYBACK: Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.), chairman of the Senate appropriations subcommittee that funds NASA, says she's still trying to find a way to "reimburse" the agency for costs it incurred in returning the shuttle fleet to service after the Columbia accident four years ago. She and Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Tex.) introduced legislation that would have added $1 billion to NASA's fiscal 2007 funding for that purpose, but it died at the end of the past Congress.
MINOR ANOMOLIES: Eumetsat says instrument checkout on Metop-A, the new polar-orbiting weather satellite launched on Oct. 18, is proceeding nominally, despite a couple of minor anomalies. The instrument package and ground segment are functioning to specification, says project manager Marc Cohen. All instruments are operating at providing pre-operational level-one data except for Metop's most innovative instrument, the infrared atmospheric sounding interferometer, which is expected to begin doing so by March.
BANDWIDTH NEEDED: The incoming chief of the U.S. Central Command, U.S. Navy Adm. William Fallon, believes that one of his top challenges in the Middle East and Persian Gulf is efficiently managing information technology bandwidth to maximize impact from intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities. What military leaders have access to now is "sufficient," but the shortfalls are in sight.
FAA's five-year road map for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) should be complete by the end of March and made available for industry comment by April, according to Doug Davis, manager of FAA's Unmanned Aircraft Program Office.
House Armed Services Committee Chairman Ike Skelton (D-Mo.) says it's still very important to have a large U.S. naval presence around the world. "My constant thought is that we need to rebuild the United States Navy. Presence means so much," Skelton told AVIATION WEEK in a Feb. 9 interview.
NASA's Space Operations Mission Directorate is changing its approach to maintaining the International Space Station over the long haul, now that it knows it won't have the space shuttle's unique capabilities after September 2010. But some of the new "spares philosophy" may also apply to future exploration vehicles traveling to the moon and beyond, says William Gerstenmaier, associate administrator for space ops.
The four key areas the Army wanted to target in its proposed fiscal year 2008 budget are gathering intelligence, communications, force protection and moving people and materiel, says Lt. Gen. David Melcher, military deputy for budget, office of assistant secretary of the Army.
The Turkish defense ministry is launching a competition for medium-range anti-tank weapon systems (MRAWS). The government plans to buy 80 MRAWS. Each of the systems consist of 10 missiles -- for a total of 800 -- one weapon unit and tripod and ancillary devices. The equipment will be for the Turkish army. Turkey wants to field all of the equipment by the end of 2009. First deliveries should take place no later than the end of next year.
CASEY CONFIRMED: The Senate voted 83-14 on Feb. 8 to confirm President Bush's nomination of Gen. George Casey Jr. to become the next Army chief of staff. His nomination was opposed by the Senate Armed Services Committee's ranking Republican, Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), among others due to how the Iraq war has been prosecuted. But opposition senators never blocked his nomination as they could have done. Following the Senate's vote on Casey, the Senate Armed Services Committee favorably reported to the Senate the fiscal 2007 intelligence authorization bill.
TUCSON, Ariz. -- Ball Aerospace and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory are trying to determine the cause of detector degradation in the critical HiRise High Resolution Imaging System on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter that has forced managers to cut imaging operations by 50 percent.
At the same time the Army is cutting four of the 18 elements of its Future Combat Systems (FCS), the service is also stretching out procurement while spinning out some of the program equipment earlier to help troops in current battle zones. But the Army also has development issues it needs to solve for some of those early spinouts, according to a recently released Director, Operational Test and Evaluation (DOT&E) report.
COUNTER-IED SPENDING: The U.S. Naval Sea Systems Command will award Pegasus Global Inc. $36.9 million for 1,001 Revolving Frequency signal jamming systems against improvised explosive devices in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Pentagon said Feb. 6. Work on the contract, which was not competitively procured, will be performed in Reston, Va., and runs through June. Pentagon leaders on Feb. 5 proposed to spend $2.4 billion more in supplemental fiscal 2007 funds for development and fielding of anti-IED measures.
The U.S. Navy is delaying the Mission Reconfigurable Unmanned Underwater Vehicle System (MRUUVS) program, pushing back the contract award by two years due to a budget reshuffling. The MRUUVS is a torpedo-like 21-inch diameter UUV designed to be launched and recovered from submerged submarines for countermine and surveillance missions.
Underwriters don't expect the Sea Launch disaster to affect the space insurance market, provided there are no further loss events in the near term. Benito Pagnanelli, of London-based Pagnanelli Risk Solutions, notes that although the floating launch pad was insured for some $250 million -- about equal to the supposed cover for NSS-8 itself -- and ground equipment for unknown amounts, the bulk of this coverage was placed in the energy sector and other markets, not by space underwriters.
U.S. Marine Corps Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the House Armed Services Committee that strategic military risks have increased because U.S. forces are not training for the full range of operations they may face. U.S. armed forces have such a short turnaround time before heading back to Iraq and Afghanistan that some aspects of their training for higher-end, conventional wars are being shorted, Pace said Feb. 7. For example, combined arms training is being purposely cut to concentrate on aspects of war that soldiers will need in Iraq.
NASA astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria holds the new U.S. record for time spent spacewalking -- 61 hours, 22 minutes -- following his completion of a third extra-vehicular activity (EVA) in nine days. His spacewalking partner, NASA's Sunita Williams, gained the all-time women's record on the 6-hour, 40-minute EVA Feb. 8. She has now spent 29 hours, 17 minutes outside in four EVAs, all of them since she arrived at the International Space Station on the space shuttle Discovery in December.
Despite concerns about the fairness of the U.S. Air Force request for proposals for the $40 billion KC-X tanker competition, Northrop Grumman and EADS North America say they will enter the race against Boeing. The team had threatened to back out if the Air Force did not restructure performance metrics to objectively judge the A330-based tanker compared to rival Boeing's 767 candidate. A European industry official said there was concern that too much emphasis was on the low-cost offering, which would handicap the larger and newer A330.
