Laurence A. Price, director of Small Launch Vehicles at Lockheed Martin Astronautics, has been awarded the George M. Low Space Transportation Award by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA). The award, for outstanding technical and manageraial leadership in developing the Athena family of launch vehicles, was presented at the AIAA Defense and Civil Space Programs Conference in Huntsville, Ala.
Program managers often keep the costs of their programs artificially low by not spending money to insure their systems are interoperable, says Adm. Harold Gehman, commander-in-chief of the U.S. Atlantic Command. He says program managers "tend to ignore things like the joint cost, and the interoperability costs and stuff like that because it inflates cost." But, he says, future programs will be reviewed for their interoperability performance and evaluated during major milestone reviews to ensure they meet all requirements.
Brig. Gen. Willie B. Nance Jr., director of the National Missile Defense Joint Program Office, said the NMD program will share data it gathers from upcoming development and test phase of the Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle (EKV) program.
Pembroke Capital Ltd., an aircraft lease and financial services company based in Dublin, Ireland, will acquire 10 Boeing 717s to be delivered in 2000 and 2002, according to BMW Rolls-Royce, which supplies the engines for the 100-seat aircraft. Pembroke Chief Executive Shane Cooke said the company "will make a material contribution to the development of market acceptance for this new aircraft type." Orders for the 717 now total 65. It is powered by two new BR715 turbofans in the 20,000-pounds thrust class.
Carl A. Anderson has been appointed vice president and operations manager in the fleet support segment in Chesapeake, Va. He will direct the Company's ship repair and industrial services initiative.
There's one difference between the status of the Pentagon's ballistic missile defense effort this year and last year - all the major programs haven fallen behind in schedule and increased in cost, Ballistic Missile Defense Organization Director Lt. Gen. Lester Lyles said in a heated speech here on Friday.
Louis M. Carrier Jr. has been appointed sector vice president - Airborne Early Warning and Electronic Warfare Systems for the Integrated Systems and Aerostructures (ISA) Sector, Bethpage, N.Y. Martin E. Dandridge has been appointed sector vice president - Airborne Ground Surveillance and Battle Management Systems for the ISA Sector in Dallas, Tex.
EVANS&SUTHERLAND COMPUTER CORP., Orlando, Fla., said it was chosen by Lockheed Martin's Federal Systems unit to supply the Common Visual Systems (CVS ) component of the U.S. Navy H-60 weapons systems training retrofit program. If all options are exercised, the company said, the contract will be worth $40 million. E&S said the CVS initiative is intended to improve the training effectiveness of the Navy's inventory of SH-60B, SH-60F and HH-60F aircraft trainers.
FAA estimates of the cost of modernizing the U.S. air traffic control system have increased $3.8 billion since February to nearly $42 billion, according to the General Accounting Office. The increase was attributed to new funding levels provided by the Office of Management and Budget that allow for acceleration of the effort.
Boeing Co. completed the final design review of its X-32 Joint Strike Fighter concept demonstration aircraft with the U.S. Defense Dept.'s JSF Joint Program Office. Frank Statkus, Boeing vice president and JSF program manager, said the company "met all design requirements and closure criteria for the X-32. We are clearly continuing down a path of strong performance."
Formal commissioning of the Royal Navy's No 700M Squadron at RNAS Culdrose with the first GKN Westland-built EH101 Merlin HM Mk 1 helicopters on Dec. 1 met a schedule laid out for the $2.5 billion program in 1991, and cleared the way for a two and a half year effort by the squadron to establish operating procedures (DAILY, Dec. 2). At the ceremony, however, RAF Air Commodore Barry Thornton revealed that the planned HM.2 upgrade program had slipped by some three years.
L-3 Communications said it plans to buy Microdyne Corp., a developer and manufacturer of telemetry receivers and provider of services and products for the U.S. signals intelligence industry, for about $90 million. L-3, which itself supplies secure communication systems and products, said it expected the acquisition of Microdyne, Alexandria, Va., to close early next year.
U.S. Navy operational testers have determined that for important issues, the F/A-18E/F's negative aspects are outweighed by positive characteristics, program officials told reporters here yesterday. "The positive attributes demonstrated by the aircraft outweighed the negative impacts for all critical issues," F/A-18 program manager Capt. J.B. Godwin read from the operational test report. He said this means that while there are issues that continue to be worked, testers didn't see them as show-stoppers.
The U.S./European Cassini Saturn probe fired its on-board rocket engine for 90 minutes yesterday, setting up the spacecraft for a June gravity assist from Venus that will send it careening toward its final destination. According to a status report issued by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, one of Cassini's two redundant 445-newton bipropellant engines started firing at 1:06 a.m. EST and continued until 2:36 p.m. EST in what trajectory planners termed a "deep space maneuver."
Operators of Boeing 747s were ordered by the FAA to immediately change fuel pump procedures to prevent the possibility of "ignition of the center fuel or horizontal stabilizer tanks," an action that will cut about an hour of flight time from the 747-400 and could have a huge impact on operating costs and schedules. The emergency order, issued yesterday, could have a greater impact on already ailing Asian carriers, if they comply with the order, than on carriers in the U.S., where the 747-400 is flown by United and Northwest.
DRS TECHNOLOGIES won a $2 million contract to supply its Emergency Avionics Systems 3000F to Canada for installation in the CP-140 maritime patrol aircraft. The EAS-3000F will replace the aircraft's existing flight data acquisition unit, flight data/cockpit voice recorder and emergency locator beacon. DRS said the award, from the Canadian Dept. of National Defense, is its first for the EAS-3000F, a fixed-wing version of the EAS-3000 system built for helicopters. DRS said it has won about $8.5 million in the past three years for systems in the EAS-3000 product line.
France's Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES) has budgeted 2.5 billion francs (about $443 million) for its part in a planned joint mission with NASA to return samples from Mars in the second half of the coming decade, officials told the French Senate this week. Education and Research Minister Claude Allegre revealed the figure in parliamentary testimony on Monday, according to news reports from Paris.
An F-16CJ from the 78th Fighter Squadron at Shaw AFB, S.C., crashed July 22 because of the failure of a "critical bearing in a linkage that controls air flow" to its General Electric F110 turbofan, the U.S. Air Force says. Air Combat Command investigators say the "faulty part" led to "abnormal engine operations and a low thrust condition, incapable of supporting flight to an airfield suitable for landing." The pilot ejected safely, but the aircraft was destroyed when it crashed into the Atlantic Ocean off the South Carolina coast.
A range communications problem late Wednesday forced a delay in launch of NASA's Submillimeter Wave Astronomy Satellite (SWAS) until this afternoon at the earliest, NASA reported. The launch was scrubbed at about 8:50 p.m. EST Wednesday after communications problems with the range developed. The satellite was to have been launched at 8:40 p.m. EST aboard a Pegasus XL vehicle air-launched from the Orbital Sciences Corp. L-1011 carrier aircraft flying from Vandenberg AFB, Calif. (DAILY, Dec. 2).
Republican Sens. Tim Hutchinson (Ark.) and Wayne Allard (Colo.), each of whom will be starting his third year in the Senate in January, have been named to fill the two GOP vacancies on the Senate Armed Services Committee in the new Congress, Senate sources said. Their seniority was the decisive factor in securing the vacancies on SASC, since newly elected Sen. Michael Crapo (R-Idaho) was the only candidate who openly sought one of the two vacancies.
