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.
The U.S. Air Force has not announced when it will replace its T-38C fast jet trainer, but industry is already posturing for a competition that will likely result in insourcing manufacturing jobs, amid high U.S. unemployment.
Virgin Galactic says Scaled Composites is on track to attempt the first suborbital flights of the SpaceShipTwo (SS2) space tourist vehicle in 2012 following a successful full-duration firing of the Sierra Nevada RM2 rocket motor.
European and U.S. satellite manufacturers are preparing for a global downturn as budget pressures curb funding for large government contracts and major commercial customers wind down their recent spending sprees. U.S. aerospace giants Lockheed Martin and Boeing are bracing for spending cuts in Washington as Congress seeks savings in the Pentagon's annual budget, which last year topped $663 billion.
NASA's next round of awards to support development of commercial systems to fly crews to the International Space Station (ISS) will be fixed-priced contracts, not the more flexible Space Act agreements favored by industry, the agency announced as it released a draft solicitation for the program's Integrated Design Phase.
Over the next two years, Alenia Aeronautica will execute a major restructuring that could shed as many as 1,700 jobs in an effort to make the company more efficient and competitive in the global market. Chief Executive Giuseppe Giordo and newly appointed Chairman Amedeo Caporaletti say the move is the second, more aggressive phase of a broader reorganization launched in November 2010 that reduced the company's workforce by 1,000 during the past year.
One might have thought that Chinese labor rates and abundant government capital would guarantee low-enough costs for any aircraft maker. Yet Avicopter says it is looking at outsourcing production to lower-cost countries.
AgustaWestland and a Chinese company are working to set up a privately owned helicopter assembly line, in a project that would mark a great advance for the country's non-government aircraft sector. If an agreement is concluded, the factory will begin delivering helicopters next year. AgustaWestland's aim is not only to save costs but also to establish a technical base for training and support.
Low-fare carriers have all but abandoned their original model in favor of broadening their presence in higher-yield markets. In the next phase of expected slower growth, even more innovation may be needed. The pressure to come up with new revenue streams is particularly intense in Europe and North America, where markets are mature and growth is slackening even for market leaders such as Southwest Airlines, Ryanair and EasyJet. And carriers in faster-growing markets are also adding creative product features.
Airbus is studying how to increase production of its single-aisle aircraft to up to 50 per month. The move is based on the manufacturer's updated global market forecast, which sees even higher demand for all categories of aircraft than predicted a year ago. John Leahy, chief operating officer for customers, believes the European manufacturer will soon decide to raise monthly output to 44 from the currently planned 42. He said in an interview that the 60 units Boeing is looking at as part of its longer-term plans were “ridiculous.”
Perhaps the trickiest decision in designing a turboprop airliner is choosing the speed. The main point of such aircraft is economy, but speed for a turboprop simply equates to power, and power equates to fuel burn—not to mention engine mass and cost. Moreover, many aviation professionals argue that, over the ranges that such aircraft usually fly, the passenger barely notices even a 20% difference in cruising speed.
The image should be one of a knight in shining armor—or perhaps a hundred of them, riding in from Montreal. Bombardier, offering potentially critical support to the C919 program, expects to begin signing definitive agreements of cooperation with Chinese manufacturer Comac before the end of the year. The deals could conceivably include support with the detail design of the C919, the Canadian company says. It is preparing a proposal to dispatch a team of engineers to help Comac, according to an industry executive.
A new tool being developed by the FAA and Saab Sensis Corp. promises to yield fresh insights into runway safety hazards, and is set to play a key role in assessing the benefits and risks of air traffic modernization projects.
Air cargo traffic collapsed from mid-2008 through mid-2009 and then recovered just as dramatically through the first half of 2010. Traffic levels regained, or modestly surpassed, prerecession levels by the year's halfway point. Since then, however, cargo growth has been listless at best, freight load factor is down and some in the industry are concerned about yield-damaging overcapacity. And with the traditional peak season looming, the next few months will go a long way toward determining how 2011 is remembered by the air cargo market.
Boeing's 787, the most talked about airliner of this young century, is no longer a dream in an engineer's computer. The long-sought advances of plastics being aerodynamically molded into a new kind of airframe, less-thirsty engines being kinder to the environment and passengers being flown more comfortably, thanks to electric motors, has become concrete.
