The U.S. Marine Corps is looking to buy commercial transport aircraft to replace the aging CT-39Gs Sabreliners it uses for operational support airlift. The initial order will be for up to two aircraft. The Marines want a two-pilot, six passenger, fixed-wing, multi-engine commercial transport aircraft that could be delivered within 18 months, Naval Air Systems Command said in a July 8 Commerce Business Daily solicitation. The projected aircraft utilization rate is 75 flight hours per aircraft per month with three sorties per day.
HOMESTEAD AFB, Fla., is attracting attention as a potential spaceport for reusable space planes that would use its runway to return to Earth after orbiting small satellites. Space Access LLP and Kelly Space&Technology have both proposed operations at the base south of Miami, which the Air Force is leaving. Space Access would use liquid hydrogen to propel launch vehicles that take off like conventional transport aircraft, while Kelly's proposal calls for towing its launch vehicle with a Boeing 747 to ignition altitude to reduce takeoff weight.
Lockheed Martin said it has begun installing the inlet duct on its two X-35 Joint Strike Fighter Concept Demonstrator Aircraft. Installation in the CDA assembly tool is taking place at Lockheed's Skunk Works facility at Palmdale, Calif., where the two demonstrator aircraft are being assembled. The inlet duct is a four-piece, fiber-placed graphite-epoxy composite structure built by Alliant Techsystems at Magna, Utah, Lockheed Martin said.
Norway won't buy C-130Js, at least not this summer. A Norwegian military official said the procurement decision, which was deferred earlier this year, has been put off again for affordability reasons. To address the cost concerns, he said, Lockheed Martin has now proposed leasing the planes to Norway. A Lockheed Martin official would say only that the company has adjusted its C-130J offer to Norway to deal with the country's fiscal concerns.
Lt. Gen. Lester Lyles, director of the Pentagon's Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, may have signalled what is happening to the Medium Extended Air Defense System (MEADS) program in the U.S. Lyles said last week that the Pentagon is "fully committed" to the Theater High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) program even though it has failed five intercept attempts in a row. He said he hoped the Airborne Laser will join the fold of theater missile defense programs. But for MEADS, Lyles could only say that "perhaps" it will be a future TMD system.
Two contracts for work on the F-22 fighter program awarded to Lockheed Martin by the U.S. Air Force (DAILY, July 6) have a potential value of up to $2.1 billion, the company said. The contracts, awarded June 30 for advanced procurement and program support for two F-22 production representative test vehicles (PRTV), are worth a total of $70.7 million. They include options for the two PRTVs and six initial production F-22s.
A key committee of Russia's Federation Council, which is roughly equivalent to the U.S. Senate, still believes it will be necessary to promote private investment in space activities if Russia is to continue having a domestic space research program. But the Council's Committee on Economic Policy has rejected a draft bill designed to regulate Russian commercial space on grounds its provision are "questionable and devoid of implementation mechanisms," according to the Itar-Tass news agency.
Russia used a Zenit rocket early Friday to launch the Resurs 01 Earth remote sensing satellite and six smaller piggyback satellites provided by foreign researchers. Liftoff of the delayed mission from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan came at 10:30 a.m. Moscow time (3:30 a.m. EDT), putting the Resurs platform in a sun synchronous polar orbit at an altitude of about 850 kilometers (527 miles).
Australia plans to continue its use of U.S. space-based early warning missile launch data through the likely acquisition of a ground station to receive information from the projected Space-based Infrared Systems (SBIRS). Australia has relied on missile warning data from the U.S., currently being provided by the Defense Support Program. As the U.S. transitions to SBIRS in coming years, Australia plans to follow under a program called JP 2057.
The U.S. Navy has identified a requirement for another Ultra High Frequency Follow-On (UFO) satellite that would have the same capability as the UFO satellites being launched this year. The Navy plans to buy the additional satellite on a sole-source basis from UFO-maker Hughes Space and Communications, El Segundo, Calif., the Navy's Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR) said in a July 13 Commerce Business Daily notice.
Kenneth J. Szalai, director of NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards AFB, Calif., since 1990, will retire from the agency Aug. 1 and become president and chief operating officer of IBP Aerospace Group Inc., which specializes in acquiring Russian flight hardware. Szalai joined the staff at Dryden in 1964, and as a research engineer was principal investigator on the first digital fly-by-wire aircraft, the F-8 DFBW. His deputy, Kevin L. Petersen, will take over as director on an acting basis while NASA seeks a replacement.
E-mail is likely to be the preferred means of personal communications with Earth for astronauts and cosmonauts aboard the International Space Station according to Astronaut Andy Thomas, just back from more than four months on Russia's Mir orbital station. Thomas says e-mail messages can be read at leisure without disrupting orbital operations, and they can be kept and reread again and again.
SPACEDEV has signed an agreement to acquire Space Innovations Ltd., of Newbury England, for an undisclosed sum as it continues its efforts to develop commercial deep-space probes. The British firm specializes in designing and building small satellites and satellite payloads, and posted sales of about $2.2 million in 1997. It will become a wholly owned subsidiary of San Diego-based SpaceDev, which has plans to send a probe to an asteroid and sell the data to NASA and other buyers, and ultimately to mine asteroids for their minerals.
The International Space Station could wind up with a Ukrainian Research Module if preliminary discussions under way bear fruit. With Russia so strapped for cash that it's having trouble getting its early Station elements in orbit, the prospects for delivery of the four small Russian research modules scheduled late in assembly is problematic at best. Ukraine has offered to build a research module for the Russians as a way into the Station project, and is holding talks with Moscow to that end. NASA hasn't gotten directly involved yet, although top officials from the U.S.
A UH-1N weapon system trainer built by Raytheon Systems Co., Lexington, Mass., has been accepted by the U.S. Naval Air Warfare Center's Training System Div., and is being used to train Marine pilots to fly the UH-1N, Raytheon said. The 24-foot, dome-on-motion simulator, installed at MCAS Camp Pendleton, Calif., provides two-man flight crews with full flight operations and weapon systems training, according to Raytheon. It said aircrews will view computer generated data base scenes over a 220-degree-
DIRECTV avoided loss of service to its more than 3.7 million customers when a spacecraft control processor aboard the DBS-1 satellite failed July 4. A spare processor took over control of the Hughes HS 601 spacecraft when the primary processor failed, and the satellite continued to operate normally. DirecTV said it will switch programming to the DBS-2 and DBS-3 satellites, colocated with DBS-1 at 101 degrees West longitude, if the remaining processor on DBS-1 should fail.
BALL AEROSPACE&Technologies Corp. will build the QuickBird 1 Earth remote sensing satellite under a contract with EarthWatch Inc. that also includes an options for a second spacecraft. The satellite will be based on Ball's BCP 2000 bus, and will carry a Ball High Resolution Camera capable of a 0.82-meter panchromatic resolution and 3.2 meters in multispectral. The Boulder, Colo., spacecraft house has now sold four BCP 2000s in the past six months.
The U.S. Army plans to create a medium weight strike force with armor heavier than that of its light forces but more mobile than its heavy units. "It's a bridging force," one Army official said. The service will spend this summer deciding exactly what the new force should look like. It hopes to achieve two objectives, the official said. One is to help define the so called "Army After Next." The other is help identify areas where science and technology investments should be made.
TRW INC. has completed thermal vacuum testing on NASA's Advanced X-ray Astrophysics Facility (AXAF), completing the final phase of environmental testing before it delivers the orbiting x-ray observatory for launch on the Space Shuttle Columbia in January 1999. The month-long test at TRW's satellite integration and test facilities in Redondo Beach, Calif., uncovered a mechanical problem with the CCD Imaging Spectrometer on the spacecraft, which TRW believes can be fixed in parallel with upcoming electrical testing.
BOMBARDIER AEROSPACE took delivery of the first PW150A engine from Pratt&Whitney Canada on July 2. The company said it intends to use the powerplant, designed for high-speed turboprops of the 50- to 80-passenger-seat class, on its de Havilland Dash 8Q-400 aircraft.
The next test of troubled Theater High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile will be in the fall at the earliest, Lyles reports. Given problems in the program and the failure in May, the Army and BMDO won't be able to test the missile again before the end of the summer as they hoped, he says. He also says program officials are still planning to keep the 2006 deployment date. Others, however, say they expect the date to slip by at least a year.
The U.K. ministry of defense plans to issue a request for information that could lead to the purchase of a new aerial refueling capability. The need for more aerial tankers was highlighted in Britain's Strategic Defense Review, released last week. The tankers could augment or replace TriStar and VC-10 tankers. The SDR also said that all 10 U.K. attack submarines will be equipped with the Raytheon-built Tomahawk cruise missile, not just seven as initially planned.
Orbital Sciences Corp., Dulles, Va., has received about $1 billion in new orders for its space and ground infrastructure systems product lines during the first half of 1998, a jump of more than 80% over the same period in 1997, the company announced yesterday. Orbital said it now expects its firm backlog to be about $1.3 billion and its total backlog to reach $3.5 billion as of June 30.
NORTHROP GRUMMAN's Electronic Sensors and Systems Div. won a $6.75 million contract from the Canadian government for a Track Management System for Canadian Navy Iroquois class destroyers.
