Airbus is close to acquiring a 51% stake in PFW Aerospace. The German supplier has been in increasing financial difficulties, given delays in two major aircraft programs in which it participates, the Airbus A350XWB and Boeing 787. According to Airbus, the decision was made to insure a continued supply of parts for Airbus programs and avoid an imminent liquidity crisis.
NASA tentatively plans to modify its Ares I upper-stage contract with Boeing to build the main core stage and upper stage of the heavy-lift Space Launch System (SLS), under a “synopsis” of the agency's procurement plans for the big new rocket through 2021. Boeing also will build the avionics suite for the SLS, according to the synopsis released Sept. 22.
PWR says hot-fire tests of its liquid-hydrogen/liquid-oxygen RS-68A engine have demonstrated a cumulative run time in excess of 4,800 sec., four times the engine's design life and 10 times what is needed to boost the United Launch Alliance Delta IV family into space. An evolved version of the RS-68 common-core booster for the Delta IV's first stage, the RS-68A, will provide 702,000 lb. of liftoff thrust—39,000 more than the current RS-68.
U.S. Air Force ground crews will begin checking out the Commercially Hosted Infrared Payload (Chirp) riding on the SES-2 communications satellite launched Sept. 21 by an Ariane 5 from the European space center near Kourou, French Guiana. Also launched was Arabsat-5C, a multimission spacecraft owned by the Arab Satellite Communications Organization. The Chirp payload will remain switched off for about 30 days while the SES-2 communications platform that is hosting it is checked out and placed in its operational geostationary orbit at 87 deg. W. Long.
The Pentagon's clean-energy investments increased 300% in 2006-09, to $1.2 billion from $400 million, and are projected to exceed $10 billion annually by 2030, according to a Sept. 21 report by the Pew Charitable Trusts. U.S. Defense Department investments will focus on vehicle efficiency, advanced biofuels and energy efficiency, and renewable energy at military bases. The department had 450 renewable energy projects producing or procuring 9.6% of its energy from “clean” sources in fiscal 2010.
India will open the bids of its two short-listed vendors for the $11 billion Medium Multi-Role Combat Aircraft by mid-October, with the deal likely to be finalized by year-end, says Air Chief Marshal Norman Anil Kumar Browne. In April, India downselected the Eurofighter Typhoon and Dassault Rafale as the final contenders for the 126-fighter deal. They have extended their offers until December.
Michael J. Drake, a regents' professor and director of the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory (LPL), died Sept. 21 at the university's medical center in Tucson. He was 65. No cause of death had been cited late last week.
The Npoess Preparatory Project (NPP) weather satellite is scheduled to begin its transfer to the launch pad Oct. 7, in anticipation of liftoff Oct. 25 during a 5:48-5:57 p.m. EDT window. Liftoff will be aboard a United Launch Alliance Delta II rocket in the 7920-10 configuration.
FlightSafety International's recent decision to terminate pilot training on a variety of orphaned aircraft such as the Cessna Conquest and 421, Piper Cheyenne, Twin Commander and Saab 2000 was good news for an outfit that has made that kind of work its specialty. Indeed, the company eagerly bought the equipment and courseware that FlightSafety shed.
Capt. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger became instantly famous for safely ditching his A320 in the Hudson River in January 2009. But it turns out that the river had been targeted for similar activity a decade earlier by the New York State Legislature.
Score one for reality over alarmism. The argument for maintaining the new rules for union-representation elections at U.S. airlines received a major boost—or at least it should have—from a vote in August by JetBlue Airways pilots. Proponents of the new rules, which the National Mediation Board (NMB) implemented last year, should be using the election as Exhibit A in the case against the push by some airlines and Republicans to have Congress overturn the changes.
Here is something else that is difficult to ignore: the growing divide between U.S. airlines and the U.S. Transportation Department. It is starting to get difficult to keep track of how many regulatory battles are going on between them. For example: •Allegiant Air, Spirit Airlines and Southwest Airlines are in court challenging some new passenger rights rules as unsupported, unconstitutional and in violation of the Airline Deregulation Act.
NASA's new technology office will test two lightweight approaches to slowing spacecraft entering a planetary atmosphere, with potential applications in Mars landings and returning payloads from the International Space Station (ISS). The flights are planned next year with hypersonic and supersonic inflatable decelerators, using a sounding rocket flown from Wallops Flight Facility, Va., and a high-altitude balloon managed by Wallops, according to Mike Gazarik, space technology program director in the Office of the Chief Technologist.
Astronauts from Japan and Canada will join ISS veteran Shannon Walker for a 13-day mission on the NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations (Neemo) underwater spacecraft analog, along with a leading planetary scientist and a trio of experienced spacewalkers working on asteroid-exploration techniques. Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Takuya Onishi and David Saint-Jacques of the Canadian Space Agency will join Steven Squyres of Cornell University, principal investigator on the Mars Exploration Rovers, in Aquarius, an underwater habitat near Key Largo, Fla.
European Space Agency astronaut Alexander Gerst of Germany will spend six months on the ISS following a May 2014 liftoff aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. The 35-year-old geophysicist will become the sixth European to carry out a long-duration spaceflight, according to Thomas Reiter, ESA's director for human spaceflight and operations. Gerst will serve as a flight engineer during Expeditions 40-41. He will be launched with Russian Fyodor Yurchikhin and Reid Wiseman of NASA from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
NASA is spreading $12 million among research institutions from eight states to study the effects of cosmic radiation on human space explorers. The effort will focus on exposure hazards to the heart and central nervous system. With space radiation considered a limiting factor in human exploration beyond Earth orbit, the studies will also examine the cancer risks and underlying influence of genetic factors affected by the space-radiation environment.
The Pentagon's top civilians and officers are turning up the rhetorical heat about further budget cuts, saying they would gut the military and threaten national security—and it does not matter whether lawmakers and the White House agree to them, or they are automatically triggered by their failure to agree. “Since the cuts would have to be applied in equal percentages to every project area, we just simply could not avoid hollowing out the force,” Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told reporters last week.
Airlines and the unions have finally found common ground. They have united to fight the proposed $100-per-flight fee for air traffic services that is part of President Barack Obama's $3 trillion deficit-reduction package. “Our policymakers should be focused on increasing U.S. international competitiveness rather than viewing the industry as a national piggybank,” say the groups in a letter to House and Senate leaders.
The days of bipartisan support for the U.S. space program may be gone for good. In a 3-hr. House committee reprise of testimony they gave in the Senate 16 months ago, moonwalkers Neil Armstrong and Eugene Cernan decried the loss of momentum in the U.S. space program. Aside from Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson of Texas, the top Democrat on the panel, no Democrats questioned the illustrious witnesses and almost no others attended the hearing. “I'm concerned this administration's president has no vision,” said Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas).
The White House is proposing tougher lobbying rules that might outlaw the free attendance of government employees at trade shows. Elected in 2008 on the heels of the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal, Obama restricted the gifts from lobbyists to political appointees. The new proposal coming out of the Office of Government Ethics extends those restrictions to all federal employees and tightens the definitions of what events they can attend on a lobbyist's dime.
Ever since a wave of mergers greatly reduced the number of prime contractors in aerospace and defense from 1992-2003, prevailing wisdom has held that the industry's top-tier companies have grown large enough. Now one of those giants, United Technologies Corp., is challenging that assumption by forging an $18.4 billion agreement to acquire Goodrich Corp.
The U.S. Air Force's fleet of intelligence-collection aircraft—from the high-flying U-2 to a bevy of newer unmanned vehicles and mainstay Boeing 707-based platforms—has undergone substantial change owing to a funding windfall and urgent requirements since the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Ten years later, though, the service is at the precipice of a series of decisions that will influence the shape of a smaller intelligence force structure that must endure and meet the demands of a variety of threats for decades to come.
Amy Butler (Washington), David A. Fulghum (Washington)
The National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) is developing faster, cheaper ways to process the millions of pieces of signals, communications and imagery it gathers; but despite recent advances in data fusion, progress is still about “five orders of magnitude below what it needs to be,” says the agency's chief.
Pressure to deliver the first 18 KC-46A refuelers by mid-2017 is creating some strange bedfellows at prime contractor Boeing as well as in the U.S. Air Force. Only a few years ago, disagreements between Boeing Commercial Airplanes and Boeing Defense Space & Security over an earlier tanker proposal contributed to the company's 2008 contract loss. But now the two are said to be in lockstep, largely due to the need to deliver on time under a fixed-price contRact.
