U.S. Defense Secretary William Cohen and his German counterpart, Rudolf Scharping, met Tuesday to discuss the future of the tri-national Medium Extended Air Defense (MEADS) program, but made no formal decision about its future. The U.S. partners in MEADS, Germany and Italy, have supported the program and have been urging the U.S. to continue funding it, but the Pentagon hasn't said what its contribution will be in the coming years.
Irvine Sensors Corp.'s President and CEO, James D. Evert, says the Costa Mesa, Calif., advanced microelectronics company was in "pretty deep trouble" in February 1997 when he took the reins. But, Evert said in a telephone interview, shutting down a money-losing facility and belt-tightening in other areas have helped him achieve his first priority, turning things around.
NASA's role in International Space Station operations begins today as the clock starts counting down to the launch early Thursday morning of the Space Shuttle Endeavour on the first Station assembly flight. If all goes as planned, the countdown will begin at 7 a.m. today for a launch at about 3:49 a.m. EST Thursday, depending on final tracking data on the U.S.-funded, Russian-built Zarya module launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome Nov. 20.
NASA has assembled a team from three of its field centers to tackle a potentially messy problem on the U.S. portion of the International Space Station - leaks in the cold plates used to cool Station electronics. The plates have been manufactured, but NASA has identified five different ways the obscure but critical components can fail on orbit - porous braze joints, low-cycle fatigue, over pressurization, stress corrosion and manifold buckling in proof-pressure testing.
The U.S. Air Force now expects to take delivery of its first C-130J sometime in the spring. Delivery has been repeatedly delayed to allow completion of FAA certification. The first C-130J has been delivered to the U.K. and the U.S. and Australian air forces are next. However, the USAF officials predict it will be a couple of months before they get their plane.
Continental has ordered 10 767-200ERs, which will complete its widebody fleet plan. The aircraft will have the same updated interior as the 26 767-400ERs the carrier already has ordered. They will have the same common type ratings as the carriers 757s. Deliveries are to begin in 2000. "The 767-200ER allows Continental to complete its fleet plan in 2005 with the same number of widebody seats as at the end of this year," said Gordon Bethune, chairman.
The U.S. Air Force sees cost of the F-22 meeting projections as it gets ready to award the first production contract for the fighter next month. "We are very encouraged that our Lot 1 proposals came in better than we had projected," Brig. Gen. Michael Mushala, the AF's F-22 program manager, said yesterday during an interview at the Pentagon.
The U.S. Navy plans to use the international Sea Sparrow program as a guide for improvements to the Evolved Sea Sparrow Missile and to cut the costs of other development programs, Rear Adm. Ron Rempt, the Navy's deputy assistant secretary for theater combat systems, said in a recent interview.
Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.) has charged that Super Hornet program officials failed to disclose timely information on the F/A-18E/F wing drop problem, and asked Defense Secretary William S. Cohen to hold up fiscal 1999 funding to the contractor team. Feingold earlier this month won a very close race for re-election, and in a letter to Cohen released yesterday, he served notice that he, as the Super Hornet's most persistent critic in Congress, won't be backing off.
NASA's Galileo Jupiter probe sent itself into a safe mode over the weekend just six hours before its 10th close encounter with the Jovian moon Europa, robbing scientists on Earth of one chance to examine the frozen surface of the tantalizing body. Automatic resets in a portion of Galileo's control and data subsystems apparently triggered the safing event, which occurred at 12:34 a.m. EST Sunday. Galileo was still about two hours outside the intense radiation field surrounding Jupiter when it went into safe mode.
The BFGoodrich-Coltec announcement Monday of a plan to merge may have been lost in the flood of Wall Street transactions that day, but from an aerospace and defense perspective, the $2.2 billion deal will have "an impact much larger than size of deal would indicate," one industry analyst said. Jon Kutler, head of Quarterdeck Investment Partners, Los Angeles, said it "is one of the first major transactions among the first tier subcontractor base. It's like what happened on prime level - he who acts first tends to act best."
Russian flight controllers placed the International Space Station's lone module in its final orbit yesterday, commanding a one-minute, 56-second burn of one of the Zarya control unit's two engines to achieve an almost circular orbit. After the engine firing - the fifth since Zarya was launched last Friday - the spacecraft reached an orbit measuring 251 by 240 statute miles. From that orbit it is expected to drift to a roughly 242-statute-mile orbit for its planned Dec. 6 rendezvous with the Space Shuttle Endeavour on the first Station assembly mission.
Companies will have a role in planning defense contracts as well as fulfilling them under new guidelines on creating and managing partnering arrangements between the U.K. Ministry of Defense and its suppliers that were launched last week by John Spellar, parliamentary under secretary of state for defense, and Peter Agar, deputy director general of the Confederation of British Industry.
BFGoodrich Aerospace -- Aerostructures - Nacelles, pylons and thrust reversers, military aerostructures, structures for high temperature composites and re-engineering programs. -- Sensors and Integrated Systems - Air data computers, sensors, fuel and utility measurement and management systems, ice protection systems, actuators, lighting systems, collision avoidance systems, weather mapping systems, electrothermal heaters and spacecraft processors. -- Landing Systems - Wheels and brakes, landing gear and evacuation slides.
Zimbabwe reportedly has agreed to a $55 million arms deal with Russia, according to press reports out of Harare over the weekend. Deliveries of the first equipment for the Air Force of Zimbabwe (AFZ) from this deal, including unspecified new combat aircraft, Mil Mi-25 attack helicopters, and reconnaissance aircraft, plus associated weapons, reportedly started in early November.
The Pentagon's new East Asia/Pacific security strategy, released Monday, notes the importance of cooperative theater missile defense activities with Japan and Australia, but Defense Secretary William Cohen said there still has been no decision on which program Japan might join.
Controllers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory were continuing to diagnose a problem with the xenon ion engine on NASA's Deep Space 1 probe yesterday, after recovering the spacecraft from a self-induced safe mode. Plans called for transmitting an engine-start signal to the spacecraft late yesterday, in the expectation that it would generate a new flow of data that engineers could use to analyze why the xenon-fueled electric propulsion system shut itself down after operating only four and a half minutes in its first test (DAILY, Nov. 20).
Consolidation of the European aerospace and defense industry "appears to be gaining momentum," driven by low levels of global defense spending, more intense competition in exports and governments more willing to explore consolidation, according to Moody's Investors Service.
Alliant Techsystems named Paul David Miller chairman of the board of directors and chief executive officer, effective Jan. 1, 1999. Miller, 56, currently heads Litton Marine Systems and is president of Sperry Marine Inc. He joined Litton in 1994 after a 30-year career in the U.S. Navy. Before joining industry, he headed U.S. Atlantic Command.
The General Accounting Office has discovered several flaws in the Pentagon's Milstar secure satellite communication system which it says could undermine the ability of the National Command Authorities to perform critical command and control missions. The problems could make it difficult for senior leaders to confer during a ballistic missile attack, and to recall or redirect strategic bombers, the GAO said in "Military Satellite Communications: Concerns with Milstar's Support to Strategic and Tactical Forces" (NSIAD-99-2).
The U.S. Air Force on Friday expanded the Global Hawk unmanned aerial vehicle flight test program with first flight of the second air vehicle at Edwards AFB, Calif. The second prototype flew for about three hours in a check-out flight to determine the vehicle's airworthiness. The high altitude endurance UAV reached an altitude of 50,000 feet. The second prototype will be used primarily for payload testing. Initial missions will be flown without a payload to validate performance.
