JAPANESE AEGIS: Lockheed Martin has won a $33 million contract to provide the Japanese navy with Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) capabilities on their destroyer, JDS Chokai. The destroyer is the second of four Kongo-class Japanese ships to be outfitted with the Aegis BMD. In July 2005, Lockheed Martin won a 3-year, $124 million contract to engineer, develop and integrate Aegis onto the first Japanese ship.
Details about stealth, unmanned concepts of operation and new missions like air-to-air refueling are emerging following the award of the U.S. Navy's Unmanned Combat Air System Demonstration (UCAS-D) contract to Northrop Grumman. Building off the company's X-47B prototype, the $635.8-million, six-year contract includes landing an unmanned combat aircraft on a carrier deck by late 2011 (DAILY, Aug. 2).
Under a recently awarded $7.5 million U.S. Navy contract, Honeywell's micro air vehicle (MAV) is being used in Iraq by the U.S. multiservice Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) group in a far more specialized role than envisioned by its original sponsor, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
The Russian air force finally appears to be making significant progress on its next-generation air-launched strategic cruise missile. Russian Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov was quoted last week in the Russian press confirming that test firings of the Kh-102 cruise missile had been successfully carried out in the first half of this year.
Following lengthy negotiations, a 40-year agreement on India-U.S. civil nuclear cooperation is being called the biggest breakthrough in years. A draft agreement that will make the deal operational was made public Aug. 3. It says India and the U.S. will engage in full civil nuclear cooperation activities covering nuclear reactors and aspects of the associated nuclear fuel cycle including technology transfer on an industrial or commercial scale between the governments or authorized persons.
IRIDIUM NEXT: Iridium has invited seven new business partners to work on development and design of its new NEXT satellite constellation--Avaliant, Boeing, General Dynamics, KinetX, MicroSat Systems, Inc. and Trident Sensors. They will collaborate with Iridium on systems engineering, requirements definition and architecture development of NEXT, an upgrade to Iridium's global mobile satellite service. Iridium released a NEXT request for information (RFI) in July 2007 in a bid to add partners to the project.
The internationally funded Medium Extended Air Defense System (MEADS) recently began its System Preliminary Design Review (PDR), kicking off four months of reviews leading to a Summary System PDR in late October, according to Lockheed Martin. Successful completion of the review is required for the air and missile defense system to begin detailed design work building up to initial flight-tests in 2011, the company said.
CECOM AWARD: The U.S. Army's Communications-Electronics Command (CECOM) in Fort Monmouth, N.J., has awarded DataPath Inc. a $16.7 million contract to establish a nationwide Joint Incident Site Communications Capability (JISCC) for the Army National Guard. In partnership with Applied Global Technologies, DataPath's communications networks will enable first responders to establish full command and control capabilities at the site of a disaster within hours anywhere in the U.S., the company says.
A new space shuttle tile inspection method devised by Ames Research Center that uses wireless scanners that relay information to a computer database is replacing manual inspection, NASA announced Aug. 7. Technicians have used six new scanners to look for cracks and other imperfections in some of the 24,000 tiles that cover shuttle Endeavour, as the orbiter is prepared for launch from Kennedy Space Center Aug. 8 on mission STS-118.
The House Appropriations Committee (HAC) is concerned about the continued lack of an integrated defense of the homeland against cruise missiles, other low-altitude aircraft and short-range missile attacks. The committee added additional $15 million to the Bush administration's fiscal 2008 defense request for homeland cruise missile defense development, although the plus-up reportedly did not survive in the final House version of the defense appropriation bill passed Aug. 5.
The joint U.S. Navy-Marine Corps STUAS/Tier II request for proposals (RFP) has slipped into June/July 2008, Rick Ludwig, director of business development for unmanned systems at Northrop Grumman, told reporters at the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International's (AUVSI) show in Washington Aug. 7. However, Marine Corps Lt. Col. Ben Stinson, the STUAS integrated product team lead, told the DAILY Aug. 7 that there had been "no set date" for the RFP and the original late fall 2007 date was only "notional" (DAILY, June 8).
Advocates for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) research at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) hope that the modest request of $3.3 million for UAV activity at the agency in fiscal 2008 will plant the programmatic seeds for the extensive use of UAVs in support of weather prediction and global warming research.
The U.S. Air Force recently took delivery of its first Battlefield Air Tactical Micro Air Vehicle (BATMAV) micro unmanned aircraft system from AeroVironment, Inc. as part of the service's Beyond Line of Sight (BLOS) program. The Wasp III air vehicle, part of the BATMAV system, has a wingspan of 29 inches and weighs only one pound, yet manages to carry forward- and side-looking electro-optical color cameras.
HYBRID BOOSTER: French space agency CNES has performed the first launch of an experimental hybrid booster that could become the basis for a future nanosatellite launch system. Developed with student groups and defense research industry Onera, the "Perseus" demonstrator was orbited from a French military base last week. The booster could be air launched, perhaps using a high-altitude long-endurance unmanned aerial vehicle under study at Onera, and would be capable of lofting at least 10 kilograms (22 pounds) of payload into sun synchronous orbit by 2015.
MOVING PROENZA: House Science subcommittee chairmen Brad Miller (D-N.C.) and Nick Lampson (D-Texas) have written National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administrator (NOAA) Conrad Lautenbacher requesting that if controversial National Hurricane Center Director William Proenza is removed from his position, he be returned to his previous job as Southern Region chief of the National Weather Service rather than made training chief of the "little-noticed" Office of Climate, Water and Weather services.
