Orders for 186 airliners worth nearly $10.8 billion were announced yesterday at the Farnborough air show, with most of the firm orders going to Boeing and Embraer. Boeing is expected to announce more orders today. The largest order, for $2 billion, was American Eagle's buy of 75 firm, along with 75 options, for the Embraer ERJ-135, the 37-seat regional jet. The order doubled the ERJ-135's orderbook, and was one of four billion-dollar-plus orders placed yesterday.
The U.S. Navy has awarded Raytheon an $11 million contract to work on the low-cost Direct Attack Munition Affordable Seeker intended as a terminal guidance unit for Global Positioning System, inertial navigation system-guided weapons. DAMASK is being developed by the Naval Air Warfare Center weapons div. at China Lake, Calif. Raytheon, under the new contract, will provide uncooled focal plane array technology to the program through April 2003.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has approved Teledyne Ryan to replace the passive flapper fuel control system with active flappers on the Global Hawk unmanned aerial vehicle. DARPA and TRA have been aware of a possible asymmetric fuel distribution problem for some time and instrumented the fourth flight of Global Hawk to observe fuel distribution. Once enough data were gathered the flight was stopped five hours and 48 minutes into the eight hour 18 minute mission.
Eurofighter has defined a series of improvements to its Typhoon fighter that are aimed at making it more attractive to export customers and improving its capability for the partner nations. The "continuous technology insertion" (CTI) program will start early in the 2000s, according to David Hamilton, Eurofighter marketing executive for British Aerospace.
NASA accepts U.S. Node from Boeing NASA ACCEPTED the "Unity" pressurized node that will be the first U.S. element attached to the International Space Station after an acceptance review board approved the action last week, the U.S. space agency reported Friday. Boeing built the pressurized connector at Marshall Space Flight Center and equipped it with two pressurized mating adaptors fabricated at its Huntington Beach, Calif., facility.
U.S. Defense Secretary William Cohen has set up a special advisory panel to examine security issues and risk from the increasing globalization of the defense industry. The panel on National Security and the Globalization of Business and Industry will be headed by retired Army Brig. Gen. Peter M. Dawkins, the chairman and CEO of Diversified Distribution Services, Inc., a unit of the Travelers Group. One of the main issues will be the impact of U.S.-owned defense contractors overseas and foreign ownership of U.S.-based suppliers.
The special House committee investigating the national security implications of Chinese launching of American satellites apparently has not looked into Motorola's Iridium satellite program despite House Space Subcommittee Chairman Dana Rohrabacher's (R-Calif.) charge that the Iridium program helped China gain MIRV technology (DAILY, Aug. 13). Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Calif.), chairman of the special panel, says "Motorola has not been at a hearing," although the committee has had 60 hours of closed hearings in the last month.
Large laser arrays may be the answer to a couple of tricky space technology questions that could come up in the 21st century. Researchers studying a robotic science mission to Alpha Centauri believe that a huge light sail pushed by laser light beamed from Earth would be a promising propulsion technology to pursue for the interstellar mission. The same lasers might serve to protect Earth from collisions with wayward asteroids and comets.
Rep. Neil Abercrombie (Hawaii), second ranking Democrat on the House National Security Committee's research and development subcommittee, considered in a close contest for reelection because of the recession in Hawaii caused by a dropoff in trade with Asian nations, got a break recently. The Republican who had been running neck and neck with Abercrombie in the polls dropped out on Aug. 26 due to complications growing out of pneumonia.
Airbus Industrie said a 100-seat aircraft project with China has been dropped. It said that an after a study with Aviation Industries of China, Alenia and Singapore Technologies, it was "jointly concluded that no solid common basis was found for further developing this new aircraft." AVIC and Airbus have "therefore agreed to develop their cooperation by discussing a new project."
NASA's new Fastrac rocket engine is set for its first hot-fire test in mid-October at Stennis Space Center. The low-cost liquid oxygen/kerosene engine was shipped to Stennis early in August, and is in preparation for a static test program scheduled to last through August 1999. The 60,000 lbst. engine for the X-34 flying testbed and other small launchers was built using a simplified design that let non-traditional manufacturers supply components, which have already been tested (DAILY, Aug. 7).
In last few months, The Pentagon has witnessed some big changes - Indian and Pakistani nuclear tests and the launching of new missiles by Iran and North Korea, for instance - but there has been no change in the lengthy time to acquire new systems. As Paul J. Hoeper, the U.S. Army's acquisition chief, puts it, "The time between surprises is now shorter than the time between decisions."
The close-range unmanned aerial vehicle the U.S. Marine Corps is looking to develop should cost no more than $200,000 in production and have a shrouded rotor system for safety reasons, according to Lt. Col. Jim McMain, section head for the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab's technology div.
The U.S. Marine Corps will conduct an urban warfare demonstration as the last East Coast experiment in the two-year Urban Warrior program. The experiment will take place at Camp Lejeune, N.C., between Sept. 12 and 16, and at Charleston, S.C., on Sept. 19. U.S., British and Dutch marines will be inserted into an area to find a simulated biological weapon. An urban warfare advanced warfighting experiment is planned for next March on the West Coast.
Thiokol has developed a 2.75-inch rocket motor for use on the Hydra 70 air-to-ground rocket and other applications, the company announced yesterday at the Farnborough air show. The motor already has been tested in a ground-launched application with the Hydra M255 flechettes warhead. Six rockets were fired from an Avenger ground vehicle in an Army demonstration earlier this year, Thiokol said. Later this year the Army will fire the 2.75-inch motor from an Apache helicopter. The motor is to be fully qualified in 1999.
Disregarding the economic crisis in Russia, China is negotiating a deal to purchase advanced Su-30 multi-purpose fighters. The deal, which could reportedly include more than 20 Su-30s valued at $30-$35 million apiece, could give Russia more money than the $540 million just transferred by China via the International Monetary Fund. Purchase of two-seat Su-30 fighters could further boost the combat capabilities of China's air force, which would become the third in Southeast Asia (after Japan and India) to possess heavy two-seat fighters.
The Army, however, is making a push for its own Fast Track acquisition authority. To accelerate the process of getting programs from advanced technology demonstration into engineering and manufacturing development, the service is looking to do more risk reduction early on and forgo the program definition and risk reduction phase, Hoeper says. In the future scout vehicle program, this is expected to save four years.
Wind tunnel tests at NASA Marshall suggest that two separate flyback boosters operating independently would work better as a Space Shuttle upgrade than a single "catamaran" structure holding the two liquid-fueled boosters together during liftoff and flyback. The U.S. space agency is working with Boeing to study the Liquid Flyback Booster (LFBB) concept as an alternative road to space if the Lockheed Martin single-stage VentureStar reusable launch vehicle doesn't pan out.
The Australian army will lease for one year four of the U.S. Marine Corps' Dragon Drone unmanned aerial vehicles to assess the utility of the close-range system. The Marine Corps will take the four Dragon Drones - derivatives of the Exdrone UAV - to Australia for a two-week demonstration. Those vehicles will then remain in Australia for the year-long demonstration, according to Lt. Col. Jim McMain, section head for the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab's technology div.
