November 25, 1998 General Electric Aircraft Engines, Lynn, Mass., is being awarded a $15,998,515 ceiling-priced basic ordering agreement for 29,244 high pressure turbine blades used on the F404 engine on F/A-18 aircraft. Work will be performed in Lynn, Mass., and is expected to be completed in December 1999. Contract funds will not expire at the end of the current fiscal year. This contract was not competitively procured. The Naval Inventory Control Point, Philadelphia, Pa., is the contracting activity (F34601-97-G-0002).
Textron Inc. said that Lewis B. Campbell, president and chief executive officer, has been named chairman of the board and the executive committee effective Feb. 1. He will succeed James F. Hardymon, who will retire from the company and the board of directors on Jan. 31. Hardymon, 64, has been chairman of Textron since January 1993, and was CEO from Jan. 1, 1992, to July 1, 1998.
CHARLES H. NOSKI, president of Hughes Electronics Corp., has also been named chief operating officer of Hughes. The company said yesterday the Noski, 46, will continue to report to Michael T. Smith, chairman and CEO of Hughes Electronics. As COO, Hughes said, Noski will oversee Hughes Network Systems and various DIRECTV operations, as well as PanAmSat Corp.
EchoStar Communications Corp., the Colorado-based direct-to-home satellite television company, has announced a new approach to joining forces with Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation Ltd. and News Corp.'s partner MCI Telecommunications that could lead to a 500-channel single-dish delivery system across the U.S.
U.S. AIR FORCE RESEARCH LABORATORY announced good results in tests of lightweight, low-power cryogenic technology on the Space Shuttle Discovery during STS-95. The Cyrogenic Thermal Storage Unit (CRYOTSU) met all of its test goals as a secondary payload in the Shuttle cargo bay, validating a nitrogen thermal storage unit; nitrogen-filled capillary pumped loop, a gas-gap thermal switch and a paraffin-filled thermal storage unit in orbit. Air Force officials said the technology may be applied to the Space Based Infrared-Low early warning system for missile defenses.
The board of Aerolineas Argentinas has approved the purchase of 12 A340s, including six newly launched A340-600s, four A340-200s and two A340-300s. The A340-200s and -300s will be delivered starting next March. They will be powered by CFM56 engines. The A340-600s are to be delivered beginning in 2004, and will be powered by Rolls-Royce Trent 500 engines. The new aircraft will be used to serve Auckland, New Zealand, and points in Europe, including Paris and Rome.
A judge for the Federal District Court in Birmingham, Ala., has refused to grant a temporary injunction in Pemco Aeroplex's legal challenge concerning a U.S. Air Force decision to award Utah's Ogden Air Logistics Center a contract to take over maintenance work being outsourced from the Sacramento ALC in California. Pemco sought the injunction to block the AF from inducting any KC-135 tanker aircraft into Boeing's modification line while the case is being argued. Boeing teamed with Ogden and is in charge of KC-135 maintenance and modifications.
Boeing has demonstrated that it can track missiles with the seeker being developed for the Standard Missile SM-3, a critical piece of the U.S. Navy Theater Wide missile defense program. Two target missiles launched from the Kauai test range in Hawaii were tracked by the infrared seeker, developed by Raytheon, which was being carried by Boeing's Airborne Surveillance Testbed (AST) aircraft, a highly modified 767 airliner.
The U.S. Air Force next spring will decide the format of the Lot 2 production contract for the F-22. The service plans to buy 10 F-22s in FY '01. The two Production Representative Test Vehicles being bought this year and the six F-22s to be bought under Lot 1 next year are firm-fixed price arrangements. The spring decision will determine if the next few aircraft will be bought under a cost-plus or firm-fixed price contract, Mushala says.
SIKORSKY S-92 HELIBUS is being readied for first flight in December at Sikorsky's Development Flight Center in West Palm Beach, Fla. The company said Prototype No. 2 arrived at the facility Nov. 20 aboard a 66-ft. trailer from Sikorsky's main plant in Stratford, Conn. No. 1 has been serving as the ground test vehicle at West Palm Beach since this summer.
Controllers unexpectedly started the xenon ion engine on NASA's Deep Space 1 probe last week while running a diagnostic test designed to help them learn why the engine shut down four-and-a-half minutes after it was started the first time. The engine started running Tuesday evening when controllers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory uplinked a startup command, and continue running after that. JPL experts had not expected the engine to start, and were only looking for high-resolution data on the cause of its original shutdown (DAILY, Nov. 20, 25).
NASA is likely to face an expensive replacement issue next year as it scrapes and scrimps to feed the International Space Station. The Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP) is worried about the condition of the aging aircraft U.S. astronauts use for training, and probably will call for modernization in its 1998 report next February.
LITTON'S TASC unit says it has developed a tool that will allow military planners to represent weather is future wargames. Past wargames have relied on a sterile environment, but TASC, based in Reading, Mass., said its device will be able to create such atmospheric conditions as rain, clouds and smoke. The result is to make wargames more realistic, said TASC president Evan Hineman. J.C.
Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), co-author of the Nunn-Lugar Act that decommissions former Soviet nuclear weapons, argues against any budget cuts in the program, saying Nunn-Lugar has facilitated the destruction of 339 ballistic missiles, 286 ballistic missile launchers, 37 bombers, 96 submarine missile launchers and 30 submarine launched ballistic missiles, and led to the sealing of 191 nuclear test tunnels. Most notably, he says, 4,838 warheads that were on strategic weapons aimed at the U.S. have been deactivated.
Slips in the Space Station schedule have given NASA a fairly loose Shuttle launch manifest in 1999, when only six flights are scheduled if everything else (ie. Russia's contribution) goes as planned. The ASAP thinks it would be a good time for Kennedy Space Center to update obsolete Shuttle documentation, before Station assembly begins in earnest in 2000.
The U.S. Air Force is still assessing the potential effect of any temporary shutdown of the C-130J production line on the F-22 program. Lockheed Martin's Marietta, Ga., plant is the site of both. Lockheed Martin has said that unless the C-130J program is accelerated, the line would have to be shut down. The F-22 would then be the only program at Marietta to absorb overhead costs (DAILY, Nov. 5). A detailed analysis is being done by the Defense Contract Management Command and Air Force Audit Agency, but the results aren't in yet, says Brig. Gen.
The Chairman of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, Sen. Fred Thompson (R-Tenn.), plans to conduct a broad review of U.S. export control mechanisms next year, and introduce new non-proliferation legislation. The review would build upon and expand congressional inquiries into technology transfers to China, the senator's office said.
An international space business conference organized under the aegis of the U.S. Space Foundation hopes to attract attendees from the world's spacefaring nations next year to discuss issues growing out of efforts to exploit space commercially. Officials from the Space Foundation and several co-sponsoring organization announced the "International Space Business Assembly" Monday at the new Reagan International Trade Center in Washington, where the event will be held Nov. 2-4, 1999.
U.S. Navy officials believe they are within reach of the final fixes for the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet, but insist the aircraft is already superior to its predecessor, the F/A-18C. The Navy recently concluded operational testing (OT) of the E/F and will conduct operational evaluation in coming months. The OT report provides "the opportunity to correct any deficiencies we have," said Rear Adm. John Nathman, the Navy's air warfare director.
Researchers at the German aerospace center (DLR) are considering a development project that would orbit microsatellites using a ground-based, high-power laser, the research and development agency said. The laser would eliminate the need for an onboard propulsion system, DLR said. The agency is working on a subscale demonstration to show that energy can be transferred from a pulse laser to a microsatellite.
The Pentagon is updating the requirements document for the Milstar communication satellite system. The Joint Requirements Oversight Council is slated to bless the new document by next April, the GAO says. Among the issues to be addressed is UHF radios on bombers. Concern has been raised that the radios can't always be depended upon to receive emergency action messages from the National Command Authorities. The messages are sent via Milstar.
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission has proposed allowing non-geostationary orbit (NSGO) fixed satellite services to operate on a co-primary basis in the Ku-band. SkyBridge LP asked the FCC to consider rules allowing this type of operation (DAILY, Nov. 23). If adopted, SkyBridge and others would be allowed to provide global high-speed data services.
