Engineers at Astrium plan to examine ways to use technology developed for Europe's Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) and the Columbus laboratory module on the International Space Station under two €6.5 million ($8.19 million) contracts from the European Space Agency. Results of the work, set to run until the end of 2012, are intended to support decisions on development of European space vehicles at the ESA ministerial meeting in November.
Lunar explorers may find it easier than expected to mine water ice at the Moon's South Pole, if a new interpretation of laser altimeter data from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is correct. Mapping the floor of Shackleton Crater at what NASA describes as unprecedented detail, scientists calculated that unusually bright laser returns from the crater floor may be caused by ice mixed with other material there. As much as 22% of the surface material in Shackleton could be ice, according to a paper published in the journal Nature.
Every day, hundreds of aircraft traverse the world's busiest oceanic airspace over the North Atlantic, spending most of their journey out of range of existing surveillance technology. A planned global satellite-based service could change that, bringing the advantages of air traffic control to this vital corridor as well as to other areas lacking surveillance coverage.
The U.S. Air Force is gearing up to set another round of firsts with the pending third launch of the Boeing X-37B, but what those milestones may be will remain as much of a mystery as it has been with the recently completed second flight. Looking relatively pristine after its fiery reentry through the atmosphere, the second X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle (OTV-2) completed a record-breaking 15-month classified mission with a textbook autonomous landing at Vandenberg AFB, Calif., on June 16.
On the Ares defense blog, International Editor Robert Wall takes note of “Close Air Support With a French Flair,” which highlights France-based LH Aviation's work on a close air support (CAS) version of its LH10 Ellipse. Comments included: Sintra who notes: CAS with the LH10 Ellipse? Talk about “macho” pilots! That aircraft weights roughly the same as a Citroen 2CV.
Trevor Stedke (see photo) has been named VP-technical services of Southwest Airlines. He was managing director of aircraft engineering planning and performance at Federal Express.
Sebastian Hirsch has become managing director of Pluna Airlines, Montevideo, Uruguay, succeeding Matias Campiani, who resigned. Hirsch was a VP at Leadgate, one of Pluna's investors.
It took European space scientists eight months to bite the bullet and formally agree on June 20 to start the $1 billion Euclid project devoted to the study of dark energy. In the end, with commitments from France, U.K. and Italy to fund instruments and ground structure, Euclid proved too compelling to set aside, despite far exceeding the funding allocated for what the European Space Agency calls its medium-class missions.
Daniel E. McFadden has been named director of operations for the aerospace bearings business of the Canton, Ohio-based Timken Co. He was manager of package bearing operations at the company's plant in Gaffney, S.C.
Assembly of the International Space Station has been complete for almost a year, but the community of its potential users still is taking shape. Station-partner space agencies are starting to get good results with their own research, but U.S. efforts to open up the station to all comers, via a “National Lab” setup, are off to a slow start.
While the U.S. capital struggles to come to any kind of agreement on anything this year, policy debates involving UAVs seem to be raining from the skies. First, there was the disagreement over UAVs in ongoing anti-terrorism operations overseas, including killing Americans who have taken up with the enemy. Now, there is growing concern back home over the potentially prolific deployment of UAVs by law-enforcement authorities.
Forget politics, congressional investigators are issuing a stream of inconvenient truths showing that a key challenge to affording the Pentagon's largest weapon acquisitions next decade will be the size of the programs themselves. In the latest missive, the military must find more than $15 billion a year from 2019-28 just for the Lockheed Martin F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program of record, according to the Government Accountability Office.
The North Carolina Global TransPark in Kinston, where Spirit AeroSystems established its factory to make composite fuselage and wing assemblies for the Airbus A350, has signed its first tenant supporting that operation. CrateTech Inc. will provide custom packaging for Spirit's shipments to its St. Nazaire assembly facility in France.
In the mid-1990s, the U.S. government decided to merge its military and civilian polar-orbiting weather satellite programs, because they shared a number of similarities. The combination of future weather-satellite systems into a single program, designated the National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (Npoess), was justified as a cost-saving measure. Consequently, military-civilian weather satellite ground control stations were integrated into NOAA facilities at Suitland, Md.
The independent organization that NASA selected to run National Laboratory work on the International Space Station may be off to a slow start, but outside “pathfinders” on the ISS are demonstrating ways to use its unique environment that already fall outside traditional government methods.
Embraer has finally secured government approval to assemble Embraer Legacy 600/650 business jets in China, extending a relationship that existed with the ERJ 145 using the Harbin Embraer Aircraft Industry Co. joint venture with Avic. The first aircraft is to be delivered next year. Embraer initially considered moving some E-Jet assembly to the site, but China balked because of its own ARJ21 program. Concurrently, ICBC Financial Leasing Co. announced a firm order for five Legacy 650s with an option for five more. The lessor is the launch customer for Chinese deliveries.
Astronaut Don Pettit is a real Mr. Fixit, and that is just fine with the scientists who trust him to run their experiments on the International Space Station.
