The Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP) plans to recommend that NASA adopt a new method of categorizing and distributing information during flight safety reviews that will give more latitude to lower-level managers to solve simpler problems on their own, while leaving senior managers free to focus on larger, thornier issues.
Skepticism inside Washington's Beltway continues over the Defense Department's desire to refit some Trident nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) with conventional warheads for a prompt global strike capability, with opponents and influential lawmakers suggesting the Pentagon stick with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and their precision-strike munitions.
Thomas Canfield has been named general counsel and corporate secretary. John Siemer has been appointed COO and chief of staff. Sam White has been named head of global sales.
European Space Agency recruiters will soon begin placing help-wanted ads for new astronauts to staff its Columbus laboratory, now set for launch to the International Space Station in October 2007. "Today we have only seven astronauts ready to fly,'' Daniel Sacotte, ESA human spaceflight chief, tells the International Astronautical Congress in Valencia, Spain. "We are planning after the launch of Columbus to start a new recruitment campaign.''
V-22 Ospreys will help the Pentagon in its current battles, Lexington Institute military analyst Loren Thompson says. "There is at least one new military system about to enter the force that is relevant right now, and badly needed in places like Iraq," Thompson wrote in his briefing, "V-22 Osprey Is One System the Military Needs Right Now," released Oct. 4. "That is the Marine Corps' V-22 Osprey, the world's first operational tilt-rotor aircraft."
The U.S. government's approval of Lockheed Martin and Boeing's United Launch Alliance (ULA) came through on the basis of its anticipated benefits to national security, despite the expectation that it will damage competition and yield little or no savings to the government in the long run, according to documents released by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
PENETRATING MUNITION: Boeing Co. has been awarded a $9 million contract modification to design and test a large penetrating munition, the Defense Department said Oct. 4. Boeing will demonstrate the weapon's lethality against a multistory building with hardened bunkers and tunnel facilities. The company will also seek to reduce technology risk for future development.
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has discovered 16 extrasolar planet candidates orbiting distant stars in the central region of our Milky Way galaxy, the space agency announced Oct. 4. The candidates were uncovered during a sky survey known as the Sagittarius Window Eclipsing Extrasolar Planet Search (SWEEPS). The telescope observed 180,000 stars in the central bulge of the Milky Way, 26,000 light-years from Earth, over a swath of sky equal in angular area to about 2 percent of a full moon.
The second of the two Voyager spacecraft should cross the termination shock wave, where the solar wind drops below the deep-space analogy for supersonic speed, sometime in the coming year. At that point it will have passed out of the "bubble" of particles flowing from the sun and into a turbulent region where the solar wind mixes with the "wind" from other stars.
LAUNCH DELAY: The launch of MetOp, Europe's first polar-orbiting weather satellite, has been put off once again by a handling incident. Eumetsat officials say a crane loading the satellite/Fregat upper stage composite onto a flatbed car dropped the load "a few centimeters." A review was set to determine if there was any damage and, if not, set a new launch date. Ground-segment glitches already have delayed launch of the Soyuz/ST rocket carrying MetOp from the Baikonur Cosmodrome several times. The most recent launch date was Oct. 7.
The Pentagon is looking far and wide for ways to conserve energy or use alternative fuel, and is looking at a synthetic fuel apparently developed for commercial South African jets, said John Young, department director of defense research and engineering. "We have military engines and much older engines," Young said during an Oct. 4 briefing. "We will need to do some testing." Still, the synthetic fuel application holds promise, said Young, the Pentagon's chief technology officer.
Northrop Grumman has completed acoustic testing of the payload for the first Space-Based Infrared System (SBIRS) geosynchronous satellite (GEO-1), the company announced Oct. 3. During tests at a company facility in Redondo Beach, Calif., the GEO-1 payload was subjected to the maximum sound and vibration levels expected during the spacecraft's launch.
Astronomers at the University of Arizona's Steward Observatory in Tuscon have observed protoplanetary disks orbiting stars like the sun ripped apart by intense ultraviolet light and solar wind from powerful O-type stars in the vicinity.
A NATO plan to buy three or four more C-17 Globemaster III cargo lifters through a consortium doesn't go far enough "but it's better than zero," according to Gen. James Jones, NATO's Supreme Allied Commander Europe. Earlier this year, Jones, who is also head of U.S. European Command and a former Marine Corps commandant, said strategic airlift was "a critical shortfall" for NATO (DAILY March 8) as its missions grew in Afghanistan and sub-Saharan Africa.
