The cautious mating dance between China and the U.S. on possible manned space cooperation took another turn in late October when Chinese President Jiang Zemin got a VIP tour of astronaut training and Mission Control facilities at the NASA Johnson Space Center. Jiang stopped at JSC on his way to visit President Bush at his Texas ranch, just after attendees at the World Space Congress in Houston roundly criticized the U.S. for thwarting visa requests from about half of China's representatives to the congress.
Lufthansa has completed the first satellite e-mail transmission for its Connexion by Boeing high-speed onboard Internet access service. The transmittal, on Oct. 25, used a standard portable connected to a corporate intranet across a protected and secure VPN hookup installed on a 747-400. Lufthansa executives said they also had completed the first internal tests on hardware to be utilized on its service, dubbed FlyNet. Initial tests on the dedicated Lufthansa Web site, developed with Tomorrow Focus, have also been performed.
Last week's U.S. mid-term election results generally are expected to help sustain the momentum behind defense stocks, one of the few sectors of the market that has seen absolute price increases in 2002.
Qantas Airways has ordered LTN-92 Inertial Navigation Systems for installation in its fleet of Boeing 747-300 aircraft from Northrop Grumman Corp.'s Navigation Systems Div.
NTSB investigators are scrutinizing the engines and propellers of a Beechcraft A100 King Air that crashed Oct. 25 at Eveleth, Minn., killing U.S. Sen. Paul Wellstone and seven other people. A safety board representative said the probe is continuing to focus on a number of key areas, including the weather, the airplane's anti-ice and deicing systems, and operation of both Pratt & Whitney Canada PT6A-28 turboprop engines and Hartzell propellers.
Thomas A. Gendron has been promoted to president/chief operating officer from vice president/industrial controls general manager of the Woodward Governor Co., Rockford, Ill.
Marine Corps Commandant Gen. James Jones has come out against giving authority to combatant commanders to buy the joint command-and-control equipment needed for network-centric warfare and against setting up a joint office to direct the effort. His boss, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, is proposing both concepts (see p. 32). "If the Joint Requirements Oversight Council, headed by the vice chairman [of the Joint Chiefs of Staff], is not doing its job, how is another layer of bureaucracy going to help?
apan's National Space Development Agency has set Dec. 14 for the launch of the Advanced Earth Observation Satellite-2 (Adeos-2) on the fourth H-IIA mission. At 3,700-kg. (8,140-lb.), Adeos-2 would be the heaviest payload ever launched in Japan. Designed to replace the original Adeos that failed in orbit in 1996, Adeos-2 is to be placed in an 800-km. polar orbit. It will also carry three 50-kg. experimental satellites.
Bonnie Dalton has been appointed deputy director for the Astrobiology and Space Research Directorate of the NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif. She was acting chief of the NASA Ames Life Sciences Div.
NOAA's GOES 9 weather satellite, currently in a parking orbit at 105 deg. W. Long., will be moved to 155 deg. E. Long. under an agreement with Japan's Meteorological Agency, where it will be a temporary replacement for Japan's GMS-5. Japan's weather watchers expected to have the agency's MT-SAT functioning by now, but the original spacecraft was lost in a 1999 H-II launch failure. The agency has pushed GMS-5 well beyond its design life, but the old bird is dying. A replacement MT-SAT is due for launch by an H-IIA next summer but won't be operational until December 2003.
Pilots of NASA's Boeing 757 Aries (Airborne Research Integrated Experiments System) aircraft saw this nighttime view of Chicago during the first real-world demonstration of the agency's airborne computer system, Advanced Terminal Area Approach Spacing (ATAAS). The 757, based at the NASA Langley Research Center, teamed with a Rockwell Collins Sabreliner and a Piper Chieftain to validate the system. The aircraft flew 37 scenarios while performing approaches into Chicago O'Hare International Airport during four nights in mid-September.
Airbags are likely to become more commonplace on airliners, now that several carriers are installing the devices to meet head injury criteria set forth in FAR/JAR 25.562, a rule that requires airline seats to pass 16g dynamic test standards.
Joseph Paresi has become president of L-3 Communications Security and Detection Systems, Woburn, Mass. He was vice president-product development of the L-3 Communications Corp. and president of L-3 Security Systems before the parent company acquired PerkinElmer Detection Systems.
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I have long felt the events of Sept. 11, 2001, did not cause the problems facing airlines but only made them worse. CEOs have, in their chase to improve bottom lines, forgotten why airlines exist.
China Southern Airlines will wet-lease a Boeing 747-400 freighter from Atlas Air for shipments from Shenzhen and Shanghai, China, to Liege, Belgium. It is the third 747-400F that China Southern has put into service this year.
Northrop Grumman Corp.'s Integrated Systems Sector will use a package of workstation management services provided by EDS to support engineering work for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Northrop Grumman is a key member of Lockheed Martin's team to produce the airplane. Plans call for EDS to deploy and manage the workstations and servers that use the company's product life-cycle management software.
In addition to manned space initiatives, China is also accelerating its development of remote-sensing spacecraft, including those with military applications. On Oct. 27, it launched the ZY-2B digital imaging remote-sensing satellite into a 300-mi. Sun-synchronous polar orbit. The spacecraft was fired from the Taiyuan Space Center south of Beijing on a southern flight path atop a Long March 4B. This is the second satellite in the series, following ZY-2A, launched in late 2000.
By returning Republicans to power in the Senate, the midterm elections gave impetus to an idea already circulating here--extend the Fiscal 2003 continuing resolution through March or so instead of trying to pass 11 separate appropriations or an omnibus money bill during Congress' lame-duck session. The argument: Funds from many departments and agencies will have to be moved into the Homeland Security Dept. once it is established, and it will be better to do it in an appropriation rather than some sort of fiscal bucket brigade.
LANCAIR CO. OFFICIALS HAVE REACHED an agreement with a private company to receive "a substantial equity investment" in the business, according to a company official. Bend, Ore.-based Lancair builds a series of high-performance light aircraft. The company has delivered 54 Columbia 300s and plans to begin work to fill 180 orders for the Columbia 300, 350 and the turbocharged Columbia 400 models, according to President Bing Lantis
Lighter-than-air vessels' assets of extremely long endurance and large payload potential have led the U.S. military to reexamine the use of blimps, with two demonstrations scheduled to begin soon, and a third on the drawing board.
