LICENSE BACKLOG: The Government Accountability Office (GAO) is studying the State Department's backlog in considering export licenses of critical technology, says Anne Marie Calvaresi Barr, director of GAO's acquisition and sourcing management unit. According to a new industry trade group, the Coalition for Security and Competitiveness, the State Department has a 10,000-case backlog.
A Russian proposal to use Azerbaijan to house parts of a third U.S. national missile defense site may not be feasible for geographic reasons, NATO and industry officials suggest. Russia has been strongly opposed to a U.S. proposal to place interceptors in Poland and a cueing radar in the Czech Republic. Last week, Moscow said it could live with a Pentagon installation near its borders if it were placed in Azerbaijan (DAILY, June 8).
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) should focus on a broad maritime domain awareness strategy rather than specific attack scenarios involving small boats or other terrorist threats, a think tank study concludes. "Fixating on reducing vulnerabilities by addressing a particular attack method or trying to protect a particular target set is a loser strategy," says the paper written by James Carafano, a homeland security scholar at the Heritage Foundation.
NASA and planetary scientists have split on the issue of how to mount human exploration of the moon, with NASA moving toward a fixed outpost at one of the poles and the scientists looking for lunar samples from across the lunar surface. The final report of a National Research Council (NRC) panel on "The Scientific Context for Exploration of the Moon" urges a "diversity of lunar samples" to fill gaps left by the Apollo and Luna sample-return data.
FUNDING PLEA: NATO defense ministers due to convene this week in Brussels will get an ear full from the alliance's secretary general Jaap de Hoop Scheffer to put more effort into rebuilding the Afghan army. "We should do much more," he argues, adding that "NATO, as an alliance, is lagging behind" where it should be. That's necessary as a show of commitment to locals, he argues, and to ensure Afghan forces can take control of territory once the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force has driven Taliban fighters from a region.
SATMEX ACQUIRED: Eutelsat has acquired 100 percent of Mexican telecom satellite operator Satmex for an undisclosed sum, in partnership with Miguel Aleman and Clemente Serna, a pair of local investors. Troubled Satmex had been on the block since a reorganization last year.
PLANET FINDER: Ball Aerospace expects to begin integrating NASA's Kepler planet-finding spacecraft in August, and has already bonded a Schmidt Corrector to the mounting ring that will hold it about 3 meters in front of the 1.4-meter primary light-gathering mirror. There it will correct spherical aberration in the main mirror once the spacecraft is in orbit, staring at a field of 100,000 stars and measuring their brightness every half-hour to detect transiting planets.
Scientists on the Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry and Ranging (Messenger) mission will spend the coming weeks examining some six gigabits of data from as close as 200 miles above the clouds of Venus.
Australia is playing a significant role in the U.S. Navy's Broad Area Maritime Surveillance (BAMS) unmanned aerial system (UAS) program and helping to pick the winning bid, Northrop Grumman executives said June 6. In a briefing to reporters about the company's unmanned maritime efforts, executives said six Australian representatives are based at the Navy's Patuxent River, Md., facilities now.
China will postpone its first unmanned mission to the moon by at least 5-6 months, a delay that under current scheduling means Japan will beat China into lunar orbit with a far more ambitious triple-spacecraft launch in midsummer. The Asian space race to the moon is politically important in Asia-Pacific technology circles where China talks a good game, but Japan has produced far more concrete results, especially in space exploration.
The U.S. Navy and Marine Corps will allow General Dynamics to keep the troubled Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle (EFV) program, but the Corps will dramatically scale back its future orders and restructure the contract to address award fees among other concerns, officials told reporters June 7 at the Pentagon. The program now will seek only 573 EFVs, almost halved from 1,013 units previously, and officials have built in a delay of four to five years in the schedule.
The White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) has asked NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to come up with alternatives to reinstating the climate sensors cut from the National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS) during last year's Nunn-McCurdy recertification.
The United States and Russia are neither friends nor foes, and their current disagreements are less dangerous than those during the Cold War, says U.S. Air Force Maj. Gen. Roger Burg, director of Strategic Security. "We're certainly no longer the adversaries we were during the Cold War," Burg said during a June 6 breakfast speech in Washington. "But neither are we allies. We are in that middle ground. There's lots of room for growth in that relationship."
SUPERCOMPUTER CHOSEN: NASA Ames Research Center, headquarters for the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility, has chosen the IBM System p575+ supercomputer for the space agency's future supercomputing needs, including environmental studies, spacecraft design and atmospheric research. The system, which is being installed at NAS, has a peak performance of approximately 5.6 teraflops and will augment the Columbia system, currently ranked eighth fastest in the world.
Russian President Vladimir Putin threw a missile defense curveball June 7, proposing to U.S. President Bush to build a joint missile defense shield with the United States based in Azerbaijan versus the current U.S. pitch for a radar site in the Czech Republic and 10 ground-based midcourse ballistic interceptors in Poland.
HUBBLE FLIGHT: NASA plans to launch the final scheduled mission to service the Hubble Space Telescope on Sept. 10, 2008, which should free Launch Pad 39-B at Kennedy Space Center for the start of modifications to accommodate the next-generation Ares I rocket. The servicing mission will replace batteries and other components to keep the telescope operating at least until 2013, install two new instruments, repair at least one other, and install a docking ring for a deorbit motor or perhaps a future servicing vehicle.
The U.S. Navy plans to release the request for proposals (RFP) for its Tier II Small Tactical Unmanned Air System (STUAS) this October or November, according to Capt. Paul Morgan, the service's unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) program manager.
OFFICIALY OUTBOUND: Kenneth Krieg, undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics, formally announced his resignation June 6. Krieg's resignation - long expected - becomes effective July 20 or on the confirmation of his successor, whichever comes first, the Defense Department said.
The Information Technology Association of America, the Semiconductor Industry Association and Electronic Industries Alliance are asking congressional defense authorizers to reverse or forego conservative-led provisions under fiscal 2008 legislation that reverse last year's loosening of requirements for U.S.-made specialty metals in military hardware.
DDG 1000: The U.S. Naval Sea Systems Command on June 5 awarded Northrop Grumman Ship Systems a $191.1 million contract modification for long-lead time material and production readiness for construction of the first Zumwalt-class DDG 1000 destroyer. Work under the cost-reimbursement type modification mostly will occur in Pascagoula, Miss., but also in various northwest and Midwest locations.
