Orbital Technologies Corp. (Orbitech), a Madison, Wis.-based subsystem house, will provide environmental control and life-support system (ECLSS) and thermal control system hardware for the planned Dream Chaser commercial crew launch vehicle under a deal with Hamilton Sundstrand.
International Launch Services (ILS) will orbit three Inmarsat-5 satellites aboard Proton vehicles launched from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan in 2013-14. Based on Boeing's 702HP bus, the three Ka-band satellites will support Inmarsat's Global Xpress mobile broadband service. Inmarsat is investing $1.2 billion in the Global Xpress program, including launch costs. ILS also launched Inmarsat's most recent satellite, the third Inmarsat-4, from Baikonur in August 2008.
Main Street and Wall Street may see nothing but dysfunction in the nation's capital, but the aviation sector can cheer one potential breakthrough. After 12 days of a partial shutdown of the FAA, the White House on Aug. 4 trumpeted a bipartisan deal that ostensibly puts thousands back to work on construction projects around the U.S. With mounting bad publicity that kicked into high gear once lawmakers approved a deal on the debt ceiling and left Washington for August, Sen.
Before leaving for an August recess, several senators got out their pens and wrote letters about their favorite and least-favorite weapons systems. Texas Republican Sens. John Cornyn and Kay Bailey Hutchison teamed up with four others to defend Lockheed Martin's F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, built largely in Fort Worth, by pressing the Pentagon to lower its headline-grabbing $1 trillion estimate of the jet's sustainment costs. “We are concerned that the department's F-35 operating and support cost models make overly conservative assumptions,” they say.
Meanwhile, lobbyists for the National Guard are building support in the Senate for legislation to boost the quasi-federal military force's representation inside the Pentagon, including a provision to give the Guard's senior officer a seat on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The House approved similar language in May. President Barack Obama promised to give the Guard a “seat at the table” in a 2008 campaign booklet. “We're getting close,” says Army Maj. Gen. (ret.) Gus Hargett, Jr., president of the National Guard Association of the United States.
Finally, the Republican representatives of Florida's Space Coast are seeking a so-called HUBZone designation for the traditional home of U.S. civil spaceflight. The designation as a “historically underutilized business zone” under the Small Business Reauthorization Act of 1997 would “help promote economic development and growth by providing access to more federal contracting opportunities,” according to Rep. Sandy Adams (R-Fla.). Neighboring Rep. Bill Posey (R-Fla.) also supports the proposed legislation.
NASA's budget woes are having an impact on the other side of the Atlantic, where the European Space Agency (ESA) has returned to the drawing board in recent months to scale back plans for joint robotic missions that the U.S. agency says it is unable to help fund. Last summer, the Obama administration unveiled a revised U.S. national space policy that, among other edicts, extended NASA's participation in the International Space Station and called for enhanced U.S. cooperation with Europe and other partners on national-security and civil space programs.
While many beleaguered U.S. aerospace manufacturers are trimming back amid continuing uncertainty over the nation's long-term goals, California-based SpaceX is ramping up plans to become the world's largest producer of rocket engines in less than five years, manufacturing more units per year than any other single country.
Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne (PWR) is laying off more workers amid continuing uncertainty over the future of the U.S. national space policy and NASA's proposed Space Launch System (SLS).
In the U.S., debate over the federal deficit has put the military-industrial complex on high alert. The White House refers to the debt ceiling deal signed into law last week as the “trigger,” and Republican senators deride it as a politically driven “gun to [our] heads.” There is no mistaking the fact that in order to extract concessions on tax matters, Democrats are taking the Pentagon prisoner.
A clash between the complexity of threats facing the U.S. and the nation's shrinking resources is under way, but the Pentagon is losing the battle due to the growing cost of equipment and personnel.
As the U.S. Navy's only anti-ship missile celebrates its 40th anniversary, parallel development of two highly survivable potential replacements for the long-serving Boeing Harpoon has reached a critical stage. Two variants of the Long-Range Anti-Ship Missile (LRASM), a joint effort by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) and Office of Naval Research, are on track for test flights beginning in late 2012, says developer Lockheed Martin, following completion of a major program review.
China's development of the DF-21D anti-ship ballistic missile and its first aircraft carrier has the world's attention, but weapon system advances also continue apace in less high-profile areas such as tactical missiles.
Precision weapons and unmanned aircraft technologies are two realms in which the Israeli military can rightly claim leadership positions. But just how closely the two have been linked in secret is just starting to become clear.
The winner of the Indian air force's $12 billion Medium Multi-Role Combat Aircraft (MMRCA) fighter competition should soon emerge, as the government is set to formally begin the process of identifying the lowest bidder in early September.
India's ambitions to develop an active, electronically scanned array (AESA) radar are stalled while the government reexamines the cooperative ties it wants as part of the technology's development. The latest delay means the government will almost certainly miss its original target of having an AESA ready to fly on the Tejas light combat aircraft (LCA) in about two years.
A long and fast landing is suspected in the runway overrun of a Caribbean Airlines Boeing 737-800 (9Y-PBM) early on July 30 at Cheddi Jagan International Airport near Guyana's capital, Georgetown. All 162 passengers and crew survived the accident, which caused the fuselage to break in two, although several injuries were reported. The aircraft's flight data and cockpit voice recorders have been recovered and are being downloaded by the NTSB, which is aiding the Guyana civil aviation authority's investigation.
The FAA's two-week partial shutdown has jeopardized the timetable for introducing a new en route ATC system, a further blow to a crucial program that has already suffered major delays.
Foreign airlines may soon find it even harder to gain more access to India's fast-growing aviation market following Star Alliance's decision not to accept Air India as a future member. The decision is also likely to focus attention of Star and Skyteam executives on signing up yet-unaligned Jet Airways.
With the onslaught from foreign airlines on African markets showing no signs of abating, indigenous carriers are feeling renewed pressure to tap intra-continental markets to generate revenue they are losing on intercontinental flights.
The growing rift between Europe and Africa over aviation safety could poison the atmosphere for cooperation. On the one side are African airlines, which feel under attack from the EU's aviation blacklist. Meanwhile, European safety officials worry their counterparts are not hewing to international standards.
There is a push for member countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) to have a common platform for military airlift, but national differences will make this very difficult to achieve. Indonesia's defense minister, Purnomo Yusgiantoro, says he has been speaking to his counterparts in Asean about agreeing on one type of military fixed-wing transport aircraft to ensure better interoperability, particularly during joint humanitarian missions.
After years of suffering massive program delays and cost overruns, the U.K. Defense Ministry has set out an aggressive agenda to ensure procurement decisions are grounded in fiscal reality and based on program certainty.
First, deliver things to the International Space Station. Second, deliver things and bring things back. Finally, send people up and bring them back. That, in a nutshell, is the sequence that the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) wants to follow as it takes the first step, launching the HTV Kounotori cargo craft, and sets out its plans for the next two.
