Aerospace & Defense Roundup: Mar. 10

Record deliveries of the Rafale fighter helped Dassault Aviation’s revenues reach unprecedented heights last year, and the airframer is engaged in several campaigns for more export sales.

The U.S. Space Force has a new launch goal, dubbed “Set the Pace for Space,” which aims to make launch on demand available for commercial and military customers.

Irelandia Aviation, the company behind five different low-cost carriers around the world, has invested in Skyports, a UK developer of infrastructure for passenger and cargo urban air mobility (UAM).

Rocket Lab will launch its second mission for the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), lofting three payloads from Launch Complex 1 on New Zealand’s Mahia Peninsula.

Finnair has signed an agreement with Finnish oil company Neste to increase the airline’s use of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) and boost production capacity in Finland. Neste already produces SAF at a pilot plant in Porvoo, Finland and is expanding its commercial renewable-fuel refinery in Singapore.

As SpaceX’s 18-year quest to fly people in space enters the home stretch, company founder and chief engineer Elon Musk says speeding up the pace of innovation is essential to U.S.—and his own personal goals—of sustained, deep-space human exploration.

The new variant, called the Strategic Anti-Jam Beamforming Receiver Y-Code (SABR-Y) will be installed on 25,000 JDAM tail kits in fiscal 2020, Air Force acquisition leaders said in written testimony to the House Armed Services Committee.

The U.S. Marine Corps now is pursuing an unmanned family of systems instead of having one large, expensive air vehicle that can do everything for the Marine Air-Ground Task Force Unmanned Aircraft Expeditionary (MUX) effort.

Battery thermal-management company Kulr Technology Group has secured up to $8 million in financing to develop products to improve battery safety by containing thermal runaways in electric aircraft and other applications.

Space-Based Infrared System

European missile manufacturer MBDA says it has completed the first qualification firing trial of its Anglo-French Sea Venom/Anti-Navire Leger (ANL) anti-ship missile.

A Russian private military company in Libya “almost certainly” shot down a U.S. unmanned aircraft system (UAS) last year, U.S. Africa Command chief Gen. Stephen Townsend said in written testimony to Congress March 10.

The U.S. Marine Corps is joining the U.S. Air Force’s Agility Prime program to accelerate commercial development of electric vertical-takeoff-and-landing (eVTOL) vehicles, with a view to using them for logistics and other potential missions.

Russian aerohydrodynamic institute TsAGI has completed a new series of wind-tunnel tests on a low-drag, low-noise concept for a short-range airliner.

Startup vertical-takeoff-and-landing (VTOL) aircraft developer Transcend Air is poised to start flight tests of a revised scaled version of its tiltwing Vy 400 intercity transport vehicle as work continues to refine flight-control software.