Three U.S. Air Force F-35 Joint Strike Fighters (JSFs) and a brigade of U.S. Army Stryker vehicles will likely be cut from proposed Pentagon supplemental budget requests for fiscal 2007 and 2008, said U.S. Rep. Neil Abercrombie (D-Hawaii). The aircraft and vehicles are not emergency procurement items and have no place in the supplementals, Abercrombie said Feb. 14 during Aviation Week's Defense Technology & Requirements Conference 2007 in Washington.
Houston-based Ad Astra Rocket Company, which grew out of in-house research into Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket (VASIMR) technology conducted at Johnson Space Center by seven-time shuttle astronaut Franklin Chang-Diaz, expects to begin operating a 200-kilowatt "flight-like" VASIMR engine prototype in ground test by the end of the year.
China has come in for some "very specific" criticism over its Jan. 11 test of an anti-satellite (ASAT) weapon against a target in space from representatives of several spacefaring nations that have worked with Chinese experts for the past two years to develop U.N. guidelines for controlling space debris.
IRAQ EQUIPMENT: The Democratic leaders of the House and Senate tried to ramp up pressure Feb. 14 on the Bush administration to further equip U.S. troops for Iraq operations. "As Iraqi leaders bicker, the violence in Iraq continues to inflict casualties on our troops at unacceptably high rates," said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) in a letter to the White House.
IT OUTSOURCING: The U.S. government's outsourcing of information technology (IT) work will increase nearly 6 percent annually, reaching $18 billion by 2011, according to a new forecast. The report by Input, an IT market research firm in Reston, Va., finds that as federal agencies move to shift more core IT activities to the private sector, they're moving away from mega-contracts and breaking up work into smaller pieces that can be outsourced without a lot of red tape.
Researchers using notional six-dimensional geometries predicted by string theory to map energy distribution in the infant Universe hope Europe's upcoming Planck background energy mapper will give them some real data to work with.
The U.S. Army is eyeing about $52 billion in additional spending requests outside the budget plan it submitted this month for the next several years, including around $10 billion in unfunded priorities starting next fiscal year, the service's outgoing chief of staff told lawmakers Feb. 14.
COST CONCERNS: Cost growth concerns about the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) vertical lift-off and landing variant played into the U.S. Navy's decision to delay F-35 buys, Rear Adm. Stanley Bozin said Feb. 14 at Aviation Week's Defense Technology & Requirement Conference 2007 in Washington. "The primary reduction is on the cost side," Bozin said. Before, Navy officials said the JSF-buy delays mainly were due to service budget restraints. The Navy cut its proposed fiscal 2008 JSF buy to six from eight, and halved its propose FY '09 buy, bringing it down to 18.
TWO HATS: Alan Stern, NASA's newly named associate administrator for science, will continue as principal investigator (PI) on the New Horizons Pluto flyby mission that he shepherd to the launch pad in the face of opposition from former NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe. But he will stand down as PI on a mission to study the upper atmosphere of Mars that is in competition for funding as a Mars Scout spacecraft by the end of this year, NASA says.
The U.S. Navy is once again reconsidering the mix they will buy of F-35 Joint Strike Fighters (JSFs), F/A-18E/F Super Hornets and unmanned combat aircraft to carry them into the world beyond 2030. From the beginning of the JSF program, it was planned by both the U.S. Air Force and Navy that the F-35, late in its production life, would compete with an unmanned aircraft for funding. But with JSF numbers and production slipping in defense budget planning, that competition is ever more likely.
Belated but surging congressional oversight on U.S. Coast Guard and other Homeland Security Department (DHS) acquisition efforts - namely the Deepwater recapitalization program under Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman - seems likely to result in contract changes but not program cancellation, according to lawmakers' statements.
Japan's Koichi Wakata and Europe's Leopold Eyharts have been assigned slots on future long-duration expeditions to the International Space Station, continuing the trend toward broader national participation in the orbiting facility as NASA delivers pressurized modules supplied by the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).
The joint Israeli-U.S. Arrow missile defense system completed a successful intercept test on Feb. 11 over the Mediterranean Sea, destroying a Rafael-built "Black Sparrow" target launched from an F-15. Part of the Arrow System Improvement Program (ASIP), it was the first nighttime Arrow test and marked the system's 13th success out of 15 attempts. It also was the first test from the system's improved launcher, according to the U.S. Missile Defense Agency (MDA).
RAYTHEON AWARDS: Naval Sea Systems Command has awarded two separate contract actions to Raytheon Co., including a $305.7 million modification to a previously awarded contract for DDG-1000 Mission System Equipment (MSE) and engineering support services. The MSE is being developed as part of the destroyer's ship systems detailed design and integration effort.
Plans to train and equip national security forces in Afghanistan include providing a "small but capable air corps," to increase the Afghan army's combat mobility, Pentagon officials told the House Armed Services Committee Feb. 13.
MASINT AWARD: Science Applications International Corp. said Feb. 13 that it won a contract from the U.S. Air Force to provide measurement and signature intelligence within the Air Force's Distributed Common Ground System for Air Combat Command at Langley Air Force Base, Va. The single-award, firm-fixed-price contract runs five years and is worth $26.9 million. Teammates include Spectrum Comm Inc., SRA International Inc. and MacAulay-Brown Inc.
THAAD AWARD: The Defense Department's Missile Defense Agency is awarding Raytheon Co. a $20 million contract modification for the manufacture, delivery and integration support of the radar component of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system. The award brings the contract's total value to $212.2 million. DOD said late Feb. 10 that the work will be performed at Woburn, Mass., and is slated to be finished by May 2010. Fiscal 2007 research and development funds were used for the initial $20 million.
The U.S. Navy has asked Boeing to be ready to start building up to six EA-18G Growler electronic jamming and attack aircraft to meet supplemental requests, according to Mike Gibbons, Boeing's EA-18G program manager.
The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee is concerned about the Coast Guard's Deep-water recapitalization program but despite its qualms still wants the Bush administration to better fund the Homeland Security De-partment's armed service.
While the U.S. Air Force continues to act and plan as though the F-22 Raptor multiyear procurement (MYP) is a done deal, another independent federally funded review still has to be completed and Congress still has much to consider about the plan, according to a recent report by the Congressional Research Service (CRS).
