New guidelines spelled out in May by Foreign Secretary Robin Cook banning some sales of British military equipment to repressive regimes have resulted in serious delays for arms exports from the government departments concerned. Admitting this in Parliament early this week, Assistant Defense Secretary John Spillar apologized to the House for earlier denials that he had received representations from industry about delays. He also admitted that the delays could seriously damage the U.K.
Russia's Foton-11 satellite completed a 14-day microgravity research mission last month, with both the Foton recovery vehicle and an experimental German reentry capsule landing safely in Russia. Foton-11 was orbited by a Soyuz-U launcher from Plesetsk Cosmodrome on Oct. 9 and landed Oct. 23. The 6,200-kilogram satellite carried three French experiments, two from Germany and two by the European Space Agency.
SILKAIR, the regional arm of Singapore Airlines, ordered three Airbus A319s, five A320s and placed options for 10 aircraft from the A320 family. The twinjets will replace the airline's six 737-300s, all of which are less than 10 years old. The aircraft will be powered by International Aero Engines' V2500 powerplants and will be delivered starting September 1998. Airbus said SilkAir will consider the A321 when it considers the options.
Problems manufacturing the necessary cables has put Russia two more months behind schedule building its Service Module for the International Space Station, and so far NASA hasn't seen any evidence that the lost time can be recovered and the critical Station element launched before February 1999. NASA engineers are already in Russia examining the workaround plans developed there to recover from the slip, but U.S. space agency managers probably won't have a clear idea of the exact schedule impact until a general design review scheduled for January in Moscow.
The Swedish Armed Forces yesterday received four of six S-100B Argus early warning planes in a delivery ceremony in Uppsala, Sweden. The fifth is set for delivery next year, and the sixth in 1999. The modified Saab 340 aircraft carry the Ericsson Erieye radar system, but all the processing done on the ground. A digital tactical radio system called Taras links the aircraft and to the ground processing, Sweden's Defense Material Administration said yesterday.
The U.S. Air Force plans to begin the Small Bomb System program next year with three contractors, and then incrementally downselect to one for the engineering and manufacturing development phase. The three contracts for the concept exploration phase are expected to be awarded early next fiscal year, according to Lt. Col. Charles Fellows, who manages the SBS program for the AF. The service was unable to fund SBS in fiscal year 1998, so most of the program office's time will be spent getting ready to launch the program quickly in FY '99.
Dunlop Aviation will develop wheels, carbon brakes and brake control systems for Dornier's new DO328Jet. Dunlop said an agreement was signed at its Conventry, England, factory during a visit by leaders of the German project team. The DO328Jet, a derivative of the DO328-110 turboprop powered by two Pratt & Whitney PW306B turbofans, is slated to begin flight trials in early 1998. Certification as a 30-34 seat regional transport is planned by February 1999.
A bill introduced in the U.S. House would halt the sale of surplus arms until the Defense Logistics Agency can fix problems in its surplus arms sales program. Rep. Fortney (Pete) Stark (D-Calif.), sponsor of the bill, charges that misclassification of surplus arms has led to such situations as selling F-117 stealth fighter parts at 16 cents a pound. Stark, who introduced the "Arms Surplus Reform Act of 1997" last month with 17 cosponsors, said Pentagon surplus can mean "a cheap, nearly untraceable supply" of weapons parts that cost the U.S.
The U.S. Army has identified a field of 21 candidate warfighter rapid acquisition programs (WRAPs) totalling $94.2 million in fiscal 1998 which it will narrow to meet its funding limit of approximately $39 million. The Army has $100 million in FY '98 for WRAP programs, but needs $61 million of those funds to continue the FY '97 initiatives. The WRAP programs are designed to allow the Army to jump start modernization programs it deems critical for its digitization effort without having being hamstrung by the Pentagon's extensive budgeting process.
NASA and its prime International Space Station contractor, Boeing, are beginning to apply lessons learned from the string of near-catastrophes on Russia's Mir orbital station to the design of International Station components being built here and elsewhere. In the Saturn IB fabrication building at Marshall Space Flight Center that Boeing has converted to Station fabrication, plans are being made to add fireproof partitions at intervals along the four "standoffs" that carry wires and plumbing the length of the U.S. Laboratory Module taking shape here.
Dow-United Technologies (Dow-UT) Composite Products Inc., Wallingford, Conn., announced it has developed and patented a new process that enables the manufacture of complex composite aerospace components. The process increases the quality of composite aerospace components at the point where two or more sections are molded together, the company said. Under the process, unidirectional carbon fibers, pre-treated with resin, are molded into three dimensional shapes required to fill gaps between sections of composite components.
The U.S. Air Force is finalizing a new program for outsourcing that it hopes will save about $1 billion and be implemented as part of the fiscal year 2000 budget, Brig. Gen. Larry Northington, the AF's director for manpower, organization and quality, said Monday at the Pentagon. The effort would go a long way toward achievement of the Quadrennial Defense Review's target of $2.4 billion in savings for outsourcing and privatization. The $1 billion would be on top of about $600 million savings from outsourcing and privatization already in AF plans.
Annual procurement spending in the 2004-2015 period will have to grow to $77 billion to buy all the systems that the Defense Dept. wants, the Congressional Budget Office told a Senate committee yesterday, according to sources. Procurement in fiscal 1998 amounted to roughly $45.4 billion, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff have never attained their goal in the Clinton Administration years of reaching $60 billion. Barring a sudden and unlikely windfall of funds, the long-term procurement plan would appear to need substantial cuts.
VENEZUELA is looking to buy two Lockheed Martin F-16s to replace two aircraft it lost since it bought 24 F-16s in 1983. The country has requested price and availability information for the new planes and the State Dept. has authorized Lockheed Martin to respond, a State Dept. official said yesterday. The review was the first to use the new interagency committee set up earlier this year to review arms sales to Latin America. Because Venezuela already owned F-16s, the decision doesn't foreshadow a U.S.
Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineers believe the Mars Pathfinder mission demonstrated that planetary exploration can be accomplished without the billion-dollar probes of the past, and many of them are already applying the low-cost lessons of Pathfinder to new robotic explorers. Controllers at JPL haven't heard from Pathfinder since Oct. 7, and yesterday they conceded it has probably succumbed to battery failure and the Martian chill.
The U.S. will continue aid to Israel in fiscal 1999 at the same level that is being provided this fiscal year, Defense Secretary William Cohen told reporters yesterday. The Clinton Administration, as part of the FY '99 budget submission next year, will request $1.8 billion for foreign military assistance, Cohen said at a Pentagon press conference with Israeli Defense Minister Yitzhak Mordechai. Israel, the U.S.'s largest military aid recipient, stands to receive $1.8 billion this year.
Russia has been forced to slip the fielding of its SS-X-27 intercontinental ballistic missile until about the middle of next year largely because of a lack of funds, Gen. Eugene E. Habiger, commander of the U.S. Strategic Command, told reporters yesterday. Habiger, who has just returned from a five-day trip to Russia, noted that a recent test of the system was successful, so no obvious technical show-stoppers stand in the way of deployment. The date of initial deployment has slipped a total of about two years.
The Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is about to release a draft solicitation to develop a Mach 6 - 8 cruise missile that could be launched from aircraft and ships. The Affordable Rapid Response Demonstrator (ARRD) program calls for design, development, fabrication, integration, ground and flight test of a missile designed for long range precision strike, DARPA said in a Nov. 4 Commerce Business Daily notice. The missile would be powered by a scramjet.
The U.S. Air Force has bought 21 MiG-29 fighters; more than 100 AA-11 "Archer" air-to-air missiles, and other missiles from Moldova in a deal that will keep the weapons out of Iran's hands and give the U.S. its first detailed look at some of the systems. The MiG-29s, particularly the nuclear-capable MiG-29Cs, "were on [Iran's] shopping list," Defense Secretary William Cohen said yesterday. Iranian arms merchants approached the Moldovan government to purchase the planes, he added during a Pentagon briefing on the sale.
Mir's Russian crew removed and stored an aging solar array yesterday in preparation for a second spacewalk later this week to install a replacement. Cosmonauts Anatoly Solovyov and Pavel Vinogradov lashed the outmoded array from the Kvant module to the side of the Mir core module in a spacewalk that lasted a little more than six hours. They were scheduled to don their spacesuits for a second excursion outside on Thursday to install a new solar array delivered by the Space Shuttle Atlantis and prepositioned on the Shuttle docking module.
Cry-X Inc., a biotechnology startup spun off from the NASA-backed Center for Macromolecular Crystallography here, is developing business plans and hardware for a commercial protein crystal unit on the International Space Station that would charge pharmaceutical companies "user fees" to create tiny building blocks for drug research in space. Drugs designed from protein crystals grown on the Space Shuttle and Russia's Mir are nearing the first phase of human trials, according to Larry J.
Boeing Co. received an extension to a deadline for responding to European Commission questions on its newly confirmed sale of jetliners to Delta Airlines. Boeing said the EC's "detailed questions required an articulate response from people who are currently absent," according to an EC source. The response was due Oct. 30. The new deadline is Nov. 10.
