A congressionally chartered commission created to undertake a broad review of the National Reconnaissance Office is expected to start its work this week to determine what changes are needed in the organization.
A federal court has ruled that startup carrier Legend Airlines has the right to begin long-haul flights from Dallas' Love Field Feb. 29, but key events required for FAA certification remain incomplete and could delay inaugural service.
Geoffrey E. Perry, acclaimed sleuth of Russian space activities and founder of the Kettering Space Observer Group in England, who died Jan. 18. Perry, an unassuming schoolteacher, turned an educational project for his physics students into a 35-year quest, uncovering the secrets of the Soviet and Russian space program.
Daniel D. Mickelson has been named president/chief operating officer of the VisionAire Corp., Chesterfield, Mo. He was chairman/president/CEO of Aerofil Technology Inc.
Tera Computer is testing its eight-processor Multi-Threaded Architecture (MTA) supercomputer at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, and the National Security Agency is funding upgrades to an MTA-16 configuration with 16 processors and 16 gigabytes of shared memory. The MTA-8 was initially funded by the National Science Foundation and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. ``The performance achieved on our eight-processor MTA supports the argument that hardware multithreading will be the future of high-end computing,'' said SDSC director Sid Karin.
Derek Quigley, former chairman of a select defense committee in the New Zealand parliament, has been named by Prime Minister Helen Clark to look into the diplomatic, financial and strategic implications of canceling the proposed lease of 28 Block 15 F-16A/Bs. In her parliamentary election campaign, she said the F-16 deal was a waste of money. New Zealand has told allies it is not reducing defense spending but wants to shift programs to benefit the army, including converting the F-16 expenditure to change six options on Lockheed Martin C-130J-30s to firm orders.
CIA director George Tenet is telling Congress that the U.S. can expect tensions between China and Taiwan to escalate, with the possibility of a military encounter in the run-up to Taiwan's presidential elections this spring.
The replacement of a critical electronics box on Endeavour will delay liftoff of the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission until at least Feb. 11. But the discovery of what should have been a scrapped part, in an engine on a different orbiter, will have a broader impact on shuttle vendor process control and documentation.
The U.S. Navy is reinitiating a competition to field a supersonic sea-skimming target for use in testing ship self-defense systems. The first attempt to start an engineering and manufacturing development program failed when none of the bidders met all of the service's requirements. The Navy is looking to buy up to 80 missiles, each capable of a speed of Mach 2 and a range of 45 naut. mi. The primary target the Navy wants to replicate is Russia's SS-N-22 antiship missile.
To get final congressional approval to buy both the F-22 and Joint Strike Fighter in the numbers it wants, the U.S. Air Force must clearly explain the differences between the aircraft and define the advantages each will provide in its own combat arena in some future conflict.
The U.S. Air Force and Boeing have worked out a complex arrangement that will allow the service to cut the number of C-17s it is buying this year from 15 to 12 without breaking the multiyear contracting arrangement for the transport, officials said. In budget drills, the Air Force reduced its C-17 buy, but was at risk of having to pay Boeing a fee for violating the terms of the existing contract. The reduction is part of the Air Force's Fiscal 2001 budget being submitted to Congress on Feb. 7.
After four years of record airline pilot hiring, a shortage of flight simulator and training capacity might slow this year's intake. U.S. carriers tracked by Air Inc., an Atlanta-based pilot career services firm, hired a total of 15,747 cockpit crew last year, up from 14,143 new pilots in 1998. However, several big airlines are running out of pilot training capacity, according to Kit Darby, president of Air Inc. Third-party training and excess simulator capacity at other airlines also is limited, he said.
SILICON GRAPHICS INC. (SGI) IS EXPANDING its family of open-source Linux computer operating systems to provide a range of computer clusters for increasingly complex problems. Linux competes with proprietary Unix and NT systems. Solutions range from the SGI 1200 at the low end to high-end clusters with 512 processors. SGI provides software called the Advanced Cluster Environment which allows customers to manage a cluster as a single system.
Col. C.D. Moore, Lt. Col. David (Doc) Nelson, Lt. Col. Steve Rainey and the government/industry F-22 flight test team, for rapidly achieving critical program milestones under an aggressive testing schedule. As F-22 Combined Test Force leaders, Moore, Nelson and Rainey resisted external pressures to cut corners, while providing unprecedented daily visibility into test team activities, successes and problems.
Herve Arditty, president of Paris-based Comite Richelieu, an association of more than 200 small, high-technology companies, and founder/chairman/CEO of Photonetics, for fostering a strong role for small- and medium-size high-tech companies in a world of aerospace giants. Raymond Deque, who recently retired after heading the Aerospatiale Matra avionics team that developed Airbus Industrie's fly-by-wire control systems and established new standards in the commercial transport industry.
Senior Pentagon and aerospace industry officials expect Congress to resist the temptation to slash the 2001 defense budget through the expedient of attacking major aviation programs and to instead turn its efforts to getting through budget duties early in order to focus on this fall's presidential elections.
Aviation Week&Space Technology has selected the following Laurels Legends for 1999. The Legends are Laurels winners from prior to 1988, when the selection of Laureates started, as well as Laurel awardees from recent years. The descriptions are from the actual Laurels citations in the magazine. The Legends also will be recognized at the Apr. 12 dinner in Washington. Eugene Adam, McDonnell Douglas
NASA Administrator Daniel S. Goldin's patience with Russia has finally run out. Goldin has ordered that the station's backup Interim Control Module (ICM) be launched by the end of the year, after Russian space officials said their ``Zvezda'' service module now won't be launched until August. Goldin also says he is pushing station prime contractor Boeing to complete development of a more robust U.S. propulsion module and ordered accelerated work on environmental control and life support systems.
Kansai International Airport may have given Japan a 24-hr. gateway, but the traffic has not lived up to expectations and that means continuing operating losses. The offshore airport, which serves the Osaka-Kobe region, has accumulated losses since opening in 1994 that have reached about $1.2 billion. For instance, the airport projected 129,000 movements for the fiscal year ending April 1999 but handled only 118,000. It also carries a heavy debt--and interest payments that account for about 33% of its expenditures. They were about $442 million in the last fiscal year.
The Federal Communications Commission has cleared the way for Europe's largest satellite operator, Eutelsat, to enter the U.S. market. The FCC last week authorized CBS Broadcasting and BT North America to provide satellite services to and from the U.S. via Eutelsat's II-F2 satellite, which is stationed at 12.5 deg. W. Long. and has a footprint covering the northeast U.S. Eutelsat plans to expand its coverage to the eastern halves of the U.S. and Canada and most of South America by mid-2001 with Atlantic Bird 1, a satellite now under construction.
THE NAVAL AIR SYSTEMS COMMAND INTENDS to issue Lockheed Martin Sanders a contract in November to begin low rate initial production of the AN/ALQ-214 radio frequency countermeasures system (RFCMs) and fiber optic towed decoys (FOTDs), major elements of the Integrated Defensive Electronic Countermeasures (IDECM). Up to 80 RFCM systems can be procured under the contract, with an additional 13 sets of interim spares and up to 340 FOTDs to support U.S. Navy, U.S. Air Force and foreign military sales customers.
Russia's launch of the first new Progress M1 tanker/transport to Mir on Feb. 1 is a major step toward reactivating the 14-year-old space station and an important flight test for the advanced resupply spacecraft that will be used for International Space Station operations. The spacecraft, designated M1-1, docked with Mir about 11 a.m. Moscow time Feb. 3 as they were flying about 200 mi. above Russia. The automatic docking went smoothly, indicating that Mir's avionics continue to work properly after the station has been flying unmanned for about six months.
Capt. Devi Sharan, for remaining calm, alert and in good humor during the hijacking of Indian Airlines Flight 814 from Kathmandu to New Delhi on Dec. 24. Sharan's demeanor was credited by passengers with helping to keep the situation bearable in a week-long standoff.
Requests for bids for two spacecraft and a ground spare will go out this month from Inmarsat for the $1.4-billion mobile multimedia satellite system. The recently privatized company is to launch in 2004 (AW&ST Dec. 19, 1999, p. 42). The L-band spacecraft are to serve laptops or palmtops at connectivity rates as high as 432 kilobits per sec. instead of today's high rate of 64 kbps.
