NASA is preparing to ask scientists about which instruments they would need to make a reconnaissance of the Moon in anticipation of a human return sometime in the century's second decade.
Brent Collins has become senior vice president/deputy general manager for operations in the Launch Systems Group of the Orbital Sciences Corp., Dulles, Va. He was chief engineer for the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense system interceptor program and chief technologist for Boeing's Missile Defense Systems.
China's first astronaut, Col. Yang Liwei and the Chinese Shenzhou spacecraft/booster development team have earned the 2003 Space Laureate Award for the first flight of a Chinese manned space mission. China follows only Russia and the U.S. as a nation with manned space capability. Yang's historic October 2003 flight is important to China both politically and technologically.
Mary Jo O'Connor (see photo) has been named director of inflight services for Aloha Airlines. She was flight attendant purser manager at the Miami base of American Airlines.
Dave Zimmerman has been appointed Central and Western U.S. chief technical adviser and Phil Tuckner as Central U.S. electromagnetic compatibility product manager for TUV America Inc., Danvers, Mass.
Tom Macdonald, the Bell Boeing V-22 Integrated Test Team's chief test pilot, has received the National Defense Industrial Assn.'s Contractor Tester of the Year Award. Macdonald, who has accumulated nearly 700 hr. in the V-22, was cited for being the first test pilot to fully define a high rate of descent-low airspeed envelope for a helicopter-like aircraft. James B. Foulk, who is president of the Survice Engineering Co., Aberdeen, Md., has received the Combat Survivability Award for Leadership.
Condor Engineering, one leading provider of military and commercial avionics databus solutions, has added National Instruments LabVIEW Real-Time support for its Mil-Std-1553 CompactPCI hardware on PXI and cPCI platforms. This allows design and test engineers who need high-performance, real-time 1553 databus data acquisition and control to have a more powerful way to shorten development cycles of avionics applications.
In the latest bit of remarkable fortune on Mars, the rover Opportunity discovered that the only big rock in its neighborhood is the cousin, if not the brother, of a famous Martian meteorite found on Earth. The finding is all the more special because the rock is itself rare on Mars.
Earl Dodge Osborn (1893-1988), who founded the New York-based EDO Corp., has been inducted into the Long Island Technology Hall of Fame. He was honored for the impact on Long Island of his work, including establishment of the then-EDO Aircraft Co., which built seaplanes and developed all-metal floats that allowed takeoffs and landings on water.
The vision of a Wichita-built Boeing aircraft skimming the cornfields of Kansas is likely gone forever--a casualty of the company's growing emphasis on large-scale systems integration and final assembly over sub-assembly manufacturing. For years, employees at Boeing Wichita--one of the airframers principal centers for engineering, fabrication, assembly and modification for both commercial and military aircraft--have said that their ultimate dream was to build and assemble a complete airplane that could fly away.
Jeffrey R. Myers has become executive vice president-communications for the Frederick, Md.-based Aircraft Owners and Pilots Assn. He was vice president-integrated marketing and sales for Avocet Aircraft.
Europe's Mars Express orbiter has delivered new images of what scientists believe are sapping channels formed when groundwater seeped into the open air at a cliff or crater, adding to the in-situ evidence returned by NASA's Mars Exploration Rovers that water once flowed on Mars. The 13-meter-per-pixel images of a previously named system called Louros Valles--just south of the Martian equator--suggest that on Mars, unlike Earth, seep water either froze or evaporated by the time it reached the bottom of the slope where it emerged.
A mechanic for Continental Airlines inspects a GE90 engine installed on a Boeing 777 parked in the carrier's maintenance facility at Newark Liberty International Airport. The global MRO industry is poised to begin recovering from a three-year downturn that has adversely affected maintenance providers worldwide (see p. 66). But as carriers struggle to control costs, they will be careful how and where they spend precious maintenance dollars.
A long-standing effort by 12 European nations to establish a joint advanced pilot training program has moved forward a step with the submittal of a feasibility study to the countries' respective air forces. The study is intended to devise possible concepts and related life-cycle costs for an Advanced European Jet Pilot Training (Eurotraining) system.
On a recent trip to Asia, I flew for the first time on Korean Air and Asiana Airlines. I was amazed at the professionalism from gate check-in to flight attendant attention to detail and aircraft cleanliness.
Lockheed Martin has unveiled the concept for a new assault seacraft that borrows heavily from first-generation stealth aircraft as well as from special operations and attack helicopters.
To protect sensitive technology, the U.S. military bombed and destroyed an Air Force Special Operations MH-53 Pave Low helicopter that went down in Iraq last week. None of the six crewmembers were injured.
The multibillion-dollar MRO industry has proved a vibrant spawning ground for software vendors--but not all are created equal. The independent research analysis company AMR Research, known for unbiased, straight-shooting analyses on the enterprise software center, has vetted leading software suppliers.
A distinguished scientist, Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam--the 12th president of India, father of India's missile program, a promoter of space and education and now a political leader--is a true national hero. He graciously declined to accept our award but we honor his contribution, nonetheless.
Administrator Sean O'Keefe has taken to heart a consultant's report that NASA employees "do not feel fully comfortable raising safety concerns to management" and that "people do not feel respected or appreciated by the organization." After getting those results in a poll of NASA's workforce, Behavioral Science Technology Inc. (BST) proposed "executive leadership coaching" to O'Keefe and nine of his top aides at agency headquarters.
The global MRO business is showing signs of strengthening with airlines slowly adding capacity as maintenance providers seek strategic partnerships with carriers and original equipment manufacturers to position themselves for long-term viability.
French Finance Minister Nicolas Sarkozy says 4 billion euros ($4.8 billion) in the 2004 budget will not be spent at this time. The budget freeze will impact all sectors of the government, including the Defense Ministry and the Interior Ministry, which is responsible for homeland security. A similar freeze last year, intended like this one to bring the deficit back within the envelope permitted under European Union stability pact rules, spared those ministries.
More than $115 billion in federal information technology contracts was awarded in 2003, according to the Reston, Va., IT market research organization Input Inc. The Defense Dept. racked up a hefty $83 billion in contract awards, compared with $32 billion for civilian agencies. The Army was the biggest spender on IT, awarding contracts worth more than $38 billion.
