The FAA will meet its July 1999 target for initial operating capability of the Wide Area Augmentation System, an FAA official said, but added that achieving full operational capability as a sole means of navigation in late 2001 "is not going to be easy." The official, Carl McCullough, product lead for Global Positioning System programs, told the RTCA Spring Forum in Washington last week that FOC will require additional satellites and ground stations, and "may not be affordable."
Top Boeing officials said yesterday that they believe the production recovery plan they launched nine months ago has been successful, yielding two delivery records - 61 airplanes in June and 139 in the second quarter. Now, they said, the company can focus on lowering costs and increasing productivity. Still worrisome, however, are problems with Asian economies, which have led to the storage of 19 airplanes, said Chairman Phil Condit.
Members of the Council of the European Space Age took the first steps toward a European system of satellite-based navigation for civil users, a small commercial launch vehicle based on the solid-fuel boosters developed for the Ariane 5, and upgrades to the Ariane 5 designed to make it more competitive in the international launch market.
Raytheon Systems Co. received five U.S. Army contracts with a total value of $47.1 million to support the Patriot air defense system. The company said the first two awards, valued at about $23.7 million, are contract modifications to a fiscal year 1998 engineering services contract that provide additional level-of-support in the areas of system and software engineering, quality assurance, configuration management, system testing, program management and logistics to AMCOM, Saudi Arabia, Japan and the Netherlands.
RAYTHEON SYSTEMS CO.'s Sensors and Electronics Systems unit, El Segundo, Calif., won a $70 million U.S. Navy contract for low rate initial production of 20 ALR-67(V)3 electronic countermeasures systems, plus spares, for the F/A-18E/F aircraft. The Pentagon announced the award, from Naval Air Systems Command, on June 30.
The U.S. Air Force's battlelabs, which marked their first birthday yesterday, are making a contribution to the service, according to Col. Ronald Kurjanowicz, head of the AF's Battlelab Integration Div. Kurjanowicz, in a briefing at the Air Force Association in Arlington, Va., said, however, that their efforts have created some problems. The challenge facing the Air Force, he said, is what to do with the innovations the labs create. "When the labs come in with something that works," he said, "it threatens people's programs."
Russia's ground-based Strategic Rocket Forces orbited a Molniya-3 communications satellite from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in the North of Russia early yesterday, as the Russian Navy was making final preparations for the first launch of an orbital payload from a submarine at sea.
Titan Corp., San Diego, agreed in separate transactions to acquire two companies, Delfin Systems and VisiCom, and completed its acquisition of Horizons Technology Inc. The acquisitions of Delfin and VisiCom are the fourth and fifth this year for Titan, which provides information technology and electronic systems and services for government and commercial customers.
BRITISH ARMY's new Challenger 2 tank has been delivered to its first regiment in Germany, according to the U.K. Ministry of Defense. It said that when deliveries are complete, all armored regiments of the British Army will be equipped with the new tank. The next step in the program is for the Army to begin full field training, the MOD said. This, it said, will culminate in battlegroup deployments in live-firing exercises at the British Army Training Unit, Suffield, Canada, next year. The first regiment, according to the MOD, will be ready to deploy in late 1999.
The site NASA picked to land its Mars Pathfinder probe was once the scene of a violent flood of massive proportions, but once the water receded about 2 billion years ago there has been little erosion beyond what the wispy Martian winds could accomplish. At a press conference Monday to mark the first anniversary of the July 4, 1997, Pathfinder landing, project scientists said wind erosion has whittled away the rocks only an inch or two since the primordial flood deposited them.
An analysis by the General Accounting Office of the Pentagon's 1997 Quadrennial Defense Review has prompted the agency to list ways that a future review could be improved.
If the Space Based Infrared System Low (SBIRS Low) cannot accommodate all the requirements that various users are pushing onto the program, it may be possible for the SBIRS High component to take up some of the slack, according to officials of the SBIRS program office and the USAF Space&Missile Systems Center.
Aerospatiale acquired the capital of Sycomore, a data management engineering company specializing in information technology. Sycomore will be added to ISTI, a division of Aerospatiale's Space&Defense sector. Sycomore reports annual sales of $11.5 million and employs 47 engineers.
Flight testing of the Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS- B) cockpit air traffic monitoring system began last week using a small aircraft and will be extended to cargo transports in October, according to Steve Alterman, president of the Cargo Airlines Association. IIMorrow, Salem, Ore., which is developing ADS-B technology for the association, equipped its corporate aircraft with multiple data links for the test, conducted at its facilities in Salem.
The U.S. Air Force's Advanced Extremely High Frequency (EHF) next generation satellite communications program will require state-of-the-art digital processing able to provide several times more capacity than the current Milstar system. The objective of Advanced EHF program is to achieve more capacity and performance than current communication satellites while cutting the size of the satellite in half, Edwin C. Hudson, director of satellite communications for TRW, told The DAILY at the company's facilities here.
Engineers from the European Space Agency and Matra Marconi Space, prime contractor on the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) spacecraft that went silent last week, working with counterparts at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, believe there is a chance the spacecraft may recover as its position relative to the sun shifts in the coming weeks.
Thermal protection system material for the X-33 reusable launch vehicle prototype has completed testing on a NASA F-15B research aircraft at Dryden Flight Research Center, Calif. The metallic Inconel tiles, soft Advanced Flexible Reusable Surface Insulation tiles and sealing materials held up well at speeds up to Mach 1.4 and altitudes as high as 36,000 feet in the six-flight test series, which was designed to demonstrate that the TPS tiles and material were durable above the speed of sound.
Lockheed Martin has begun testing clutch, fan and gearbox rigs of the "LiftFan" system for its Joint Strike Fighter candidate, the company announced yesterday. The tests, being conducted at Rolls-Royce Allison's Indianapolis facility, began May 8 on the clutch rig, followed by the fan rig on June 10 and the gearbox rig on June 19. Lockheed Martin has contracted with Rolls to build the LiftFan for the STOVL propulsion system of the X-35 JSF concept demonstrator.
Lockheed Martin Telecommunications, the business unit established to pull together the satellite and launch service capabilities of pre-merger Lockheed and Martin Marietta, expects dramatic growth in the satellite services and operations sectors and has set up its business strategy accordingly. Claude Burgio, president of the unit for the past eight months, told the Washington Space Business Roundtable yesterday that mass market services just emerging today will comprise some 62% of the satellite marketplace by 2007.
Boeing demonstrated a pneumatic bomb rack that it said provides a more affordable and effective alternative to current pyrotechnic bomb racks. The rack uses gas-driven pistons, but pure, dry air as its energy source instead of hot, erosive gases produced by explosive cartridges, Boeing said. The rack has one-third the parts and two-thirds the weight of current racks, said Tad Jakubowski, weapon carriage systems team leader in the Boeing Phantom Works.
The White House Office of Management and Budget is awaiting a decision from the Justice Dept. before deciding what to do about the line item vetoed programs in the fiscal 1998 defense appropriations act now that the Supreme Court has struck down the line item veto, OMB sources said yesterday. A Justice Dept. spokeswoman said, "We are reviewing it right now. It's complicated." The spokeswoman said she could not say when Justice would be able to advise OMB of the consequences of the Supreme Court decision.
A U.S. F-16 fighter fired a High Speed Anti-Radiation Missile (HARM) at an Iraqi missile site yesterday, the Pentagon said. Officials said the action was taken after the radar at the site, near Basra in Iraq's southern no-fly zone, locked on to a flight of British Tornado jets. The F-16 had been accompanying the Tornados. Iraq said that the radar had not locked on to the British planes, and that the HARM missed its target and hit a reservoir. The incident occurred around 9:30 a.m. local time. The aircraft returned to their bases.
The U.S. Air Force's Electronic Warfare Operational Shortfall Study (EWOSS) has identified a host of upgrades that must be made to existing electronic warfare systems, but none are expected to be major budget issues, said Lt. Gen. George Muellner, the AF's top acquisition officer.
DRS TECHNOLOGIES, Parsippany, N.Y., has won a $2.8 million U.S. Air Force contract to produce additional 8mm Color Airborne Video Tape Recorder (CVTR) systems and provide support for the A/OA-10 ground attack aircraft.
