AERONAUTICS: "Aeronautics is a core part of the NASA mission, always has been, in my view, always will be," says new NASA Administrator Michael Griffin. However, the agency must brace itself for some painful "dislocations" among its aeronautics work force as it gears up to execute its space exploration agenda, he says. "I don't see a way to avoid some of those dislocations at present. We do live in a world of limited resources and we do have to set priorities. But setting priorities is not a binary event.
Four U.S. Air Force programs are slated to receive fresh scrutiny by the Defense Department's Inspector General (IG), further expanding a probe into the service's procurement practices.
The U.S. Air Force's competition for the Personnel Recovery Vehicle (PRV) is the "most promising near-term opportunity to inject innovation" into the vertical lift industrial base, and if missed could commit the Defense Department to 30 more years of legacy technology, according to Suzanne D. Patrick, deputy undersecretary of defense for industrial policy.
BUYOUTS: Rep. Ken Calvert (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Science Committee's Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics, is concerned that NASA's employee buyouts are being carried out in the absence of a vision for the agency's future in aeronautics. "It seems that they have the budget and they're creating the cuts to meet that budget," Calvert says. "There's not any real plan to put together the work force around [their] vision.
Ahead of his Senate Armed Services Committee confirmation hearing April 19 to become the next chief of naval operations, Adm. Michael G. Mullen met April 14 with SASC member Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and heard her argue against competing the DD(X) destroyer program.
FCS OPPORTUNITY: The U.S. Army will release a draft request for proposals (RFP) for the Future Combat System's Active Protection System (APS) in about 30 days, says an Army Tank-automotive and Armaments Command representative. A bidders' conference, which had been scheduled for March, will take place soon after the draft RFP is released and most likely will be held in St. Louis, Mo. or Huntsville, Ala., he told The DAILY April 14. The Army sent out a request for information for the system on Jan. 14.
NOT DEAD YET: Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) isn't likely to give up his campaign against the U.S. Navy's intention to retire the John F. Kennedy aircraft carrier this year, despite a recent dearth of Senate support. Nelson introduced an amendment to the Senate's version of the fiscal 2005 supplemental - a must-pass measure bogged down in the Senate due to unrelated immigration proposals - that would require the service to maintain all of its current 12 aircraft carriers.
Raytheon Co. has announced that it will be the warfare systems integrator for the CVN 78, the lead ship in the U.S. Navy's next generation of CVN 21 aircraft carriers. Integration will be centered on Raytheon's Total Ship System Engineering approach to a common enterprise-computing environment. The task order, issued under the Navy's SeaPort-e contract, has a one-year base, four annual options and up to seven one-year award terms for a total of 12 years and is worth up to $95 million, a Raytheon spokeswoman told The DAILY.
IED WARPATH: The Department of Defense is "succeeding in getting what it wanted," in the form of industry proposals to counter improvised explosive devices (IED), a Joint IED Task Force representative says. DOD still is sorting through and answering a total of 2,166 responses to two Broad Agency Announcement requests for ideas, says Dick Bridges, public affairs officer for the task force. The March 2 and 3 BAA responses were due April 4. Of the responses, 818 were for 18 specific capabilities the task force is looking for, he said.
FIGHTING DEBRIS: More than 200 researchers from all over the world are expected to attend the fourth European Conference on Space Debris, set for April 18-20 in Darmstadt, Germany. The conference is hosted by the European Space Agency and cosponsored by the space agencies of the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Italy, the Committee on Space Research and the International Academy of Astronautics. Conference speakers will talk about the growing problem of space debris and ways to deal with it.
Defense electronics supplier Orbit International Corp. has won a $400,000 contract from General Dynamics Canada Ltd. for initial production of commander's display units and central control panels, which will be integrated into the U.S. Army's Stryker Mobile Gun System vehicle. The work will be done by Orbit's newly acquired subsidiary, Tulip Development Laboratory Inc. in Quakertown, Penn., Orbit said April 14. Delivery of the units is expected to begin this quarter and continue through the first quarter of 2006. Follow-on orders are expected.
Boeing's Virtual Warfare Center in St. Louis is opening in a new, larger facility May 9 that will allow it to increase the number of entities it can simulate by an order of magnitude, according to Guy Higgins, Boeing's vice president in charge of Analysis, Modeling and Simulation. "We're standing up an ability to extensively broaden the scope of the conflict that we can simulate, from notionally 100 entities in the battlespace to a couple thousand," Higgins told The DAILY. LVC integration
GLOBAL HAWK: Aurora Flight Sciences plans to deliver the vertical tails for the first RQ-4B Global Hawk unmanned aerial vehicle this summer, a company spokesman says. The company recently shipped the RQ-4B's first aft fuselage to prime contractor Northrop Grumman (DAILY, April 8) and is now building the second aft fuselage. The RQ-4B is a larger, more capable version of the RQ-4A Global Hawk surveillance UAV that the U.S. Air Force is now using. The Air Force plans to buy 44 RQ-4Bs.
April 18 - 21 -- Air Traffic Control Association/Federal Aviation Administration/National Aeronautics and Space Administration Co-Sponsored Technical Symposium, Sheraton Atlantic City Convention Center Hotel, Atlantic City, New Jersey. For more information go to www.atca.org.
VXX TURBULENCE: The Defense Department's office of the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation (DOT&E) continues to urge Navy officials to revamp the $6.1 billion presidential helicopter replacement program. The acting director, David W. Duma, tells House lawmakers that he is "committed" to working within DOD to achieve an event-driven strategy for the prestigious program. An event-based strategy allows time to perform early operational testing, fix bugs and then proceed to production, he says.
The U.S. Army passed the first major goal in procuring a massive commercial, off-the-shelf financial management planning system that will allow the service to be completely audited for the first time. The General Fund Enterprise Business System (GFEBS) passed Milestone A, concept and technology development, on April 13, Lt. Gen. Jerry Sinn, Army military deputy for budget, said at an Association of the U.S. Army forum on April 14.
The chairmen of the House Armed Services and International Relations committees believe the United States and other countries should establish a new multinational export controls group to limit technology transfer to potential future adversaries such as China, according to Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.). Hunter, HASC chairman, said he and Rep. Henry Hyde (R-Ill.), International Relations chairman, support the idea of a new version of the Cold War-era Coordinating Committee on Multilateral Export Controls (COCOM), which was disbanded in the mid-1990s.
MOSCOW - On April 12 Kosmotras, a joint Russian-Ukrainian company that provides satellite launches using Dnepr launch vehicles, announced it has signed an agreement with Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd. (SSTL) of the United Kingdom to launch five RapidEye Earth observation satellites. The Dnepr program recently was criticized by Russia's Federal Space Agency for prices that the agency said undercut the world market (DAILY, April 5).
In his first address to NASA employees, Mike Griffin said that he would try to strike a balance between directed work and competition at NASA's field centers during his tenure as the agency's 11th administrator. "A certain amount of competition is healthy for the federal centers to engage in," Griffin said April 14. "I will be striving for an appropriate balance between a certain amount of directed work and a certain amount of competition at the margins."
NEW DELHI - Arlington, Va.-based Space Adventures plans to start suborbital spaceflights in 2008, company President and CEO Eric Anderson said at the World Travel and Tourism Council summit here. Space Adventures already has accepted more than 100 reservations for suborbital space flight, which is to take passengers to the boundary between the atmosphere and space, where they can experience up to five minutes of weightlessness. Each flight will be directed by both a skilled pilot and a computer-controlled system.
The space shuttle program is studying two areas of possible ice formation on the external tank that still could pose a debris threat to the orbiter during launch.
X PRIZE CUP: On April 13, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson announced a series of events to be held in October that will preview some of the technologies that will fly in next year's X Prize Cup. Called "Countdown to the X Prize Cup," the event will include demonstration flights of reusable spacecraft by future X Prize Cup contenders at the Las Cruces International Airport, static hardware displays, educational events and simulated weightless flights aboard Zero Gravity Corp.'s G-Force One aircraft.
