An article that appeared in the June 25 issue of AW&ST (p. 36) included an incorrect spelling of the name of Intelsat Chief Technical Officer Thierry Guillemin.
Lockheed Martin's union workers in Fort Worth and elsewhere who build the F-35 and F-16, voted June 28 by an 80% margin to accept a new four-year labor contract that will provide yearly pay increases of 2.5-3% and bonuses.
A tightly wrapped object the size and shape of a combat aircraft was hauled along Chinese highways in June, sparking speculation that the country was deliberately revealing a new twin-engine fighter from Shenyang Aircraft.
Flight tests of a fuel-saving upgrade to the Rolls-Royce T56 are set to begin at Edwards AFB, Calif, in July and run through August. The modified engine will be fitted to an Air National Guard Lockheed Martin C-130H and is aimed at demonstrating flying qualities data as well as verifying overall improvements in performance.
In the complex hypersonics test environment, events rarely turn out 100% as planned. But researchers at Germany's DLR aerospace center remain optimistic that they have enough data to refine the future Shefex III (Sharp-Edged Flight Experiment) demonstrator even as data uncertainty hangs over the final seconds of the Shefex II's flight.
Also on the Ares blog, Robert Wall reports on Norway's commitment to purchase the JSF. He writes: “That Norway would go ahead with buying the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter has been more or less a given as long as the U.S. showed its willingness to make the aircraft a home for Kongsberg's stealthy Joint Strike Missile. That has now apparently happened.” Some background and pertinent details of the deal are listed.
While NASA astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS) are fully booked with scientific and engineering research for now, most of that work has involved projects the U.S. space agency is funding
China continues to find itself shut out of the International Space Station, blocked by U.S. congressional anger over the way the nation treats its dissidents and regional separatists. But China takes the long view and its leaders appear willing to do whatever it takes to establish a Chinese presence in space eventually. Last week the crew of Shenzhou 9—mission commander Jing Haipeng, Liu Wang, the first Chinese woman in space, and Liu Yang—entered the Tiangong-1 spacecraft launched earlier (see photo).
In regard to the item “Sense of Disproportion” in the Washington Outlook column (AW&ST May 28, p. 22), the National Guard needs a real mission to justify its existence. One such assignment could involve combating wildfires. Four regions in the U.S. should be established: NE, SE, NW and SW. In each, a centrally located base should be equipped with a fleet of modern, capable water bombers. The Guard could fight fires locally or be combined with other regions to combat the super fires that all too often rage.
The number-crunching capability of the Pleiades supercomputer at NASA's Ames Research Center has been boosted by 14% to 1.24 petaflops—a quadrillion calculations per second. If the world's population did a calculation a second, it would take 370 days to complete what Pleiades can accomplish in 60 sec. The upgrade is the eighth performed on the supercomputer since its installation in 2008 at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility at Ames.
External pressures and unreasonable expectations contributed to the losses of Challenger and Columbia. I hope emerging manned commercial space ventures do not fall victim to similar traps. Alexandria, Va.
USAF Col. Sean L. Murphy has been selected for promotion to brigadier general and has been named commander of the Air Force Medical Operations Agency, Office of the Surgeon General, San Antonio. He has been deputy assistant surgeon general in the Directorate of Healthcare Operations at USAF headquarters at the Pentagon. Brig. Gen. Francis L. Hendricks, who has been commander of the Army and Air Force Exchange Service in Dallas, has been named special assistant to the deputy chief of staff for manpower, personnel and services at USAF headquarters.
The U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) has approved the initial operations capability for a sensors package to upgrade the largest spacecraft-tracking telescope in the Defense Department's inventory. Built by Boeing Defense, Space & Security for the AFRL under a $409 million contract, the sensors, control software and computer systems upgrade were made to the Advanced Electro-Optical System, a 12-ft.-dia. telescope that began operations in 2000 at the Maui Space Surveillance Complex on Mt. Haleakala, Hawaii.
Can we believe in the reliability of long-term airline traffic forecasts? Should we trust economists and industry experts who tell us how many commercial transports will be needed by 2050 to handle an impressive number of travelers? Will the world's airlines carry more than 10 billion passengers annually less than 40 years from now? And does it even make sense to try to predict how big the airline industry could be in 2150?
Buddy Walls (see photo) has been promoted to director of the Space Avionics Department from manager of the Avionics Systems Section in Southwest Research Institute's Space Science and Engineering Div. in San Antonio.
