Rotary Rocket Co. (RRC) unveiled its entry in the reusable launch vehicle market yesterday, a single-stage rocket with an aerospike engine that will use a "novel but proven" recovery system based on autorotation, according to Gary Hudson, the company's president and CEO. The Roton will launch as a rocket, but after releasing its payload in orbit and reentering the atmosphere the vehicle will deploy rotors and land as an unpowered helicopter.
More than 100 House members are expected to sign a letter that Rep. Jack Metcalf (R-Wash.) intends to send European Commission President Jacques Santer today stating their belief that the U.S. Federal Trade Commission's approval of the proposed Boeing/McDonnell Douglas merger should stand and no foreign body should control the decisions of two U.S. companies, a Metcalf aide said yesterday. "We expect to have in excess of 100 members" signing the letter, the aide said.
A PRODUCTION REPRESENTATIVE V-22 tiltrotor completed its first flight last Thursday, the Bell Boeing industry team building the V-22 Osprey said Sunday. The aircraft, only the second production representative system to have been built, flew for about an hour and a half and reached speeds of up to 150 knots. The flight took place at Bell Helicopter Textron's Flight Research Center airfield, Ft. Worth, Tex. The third production representative aircraft is expected to fly in August.
National Forge Co., Irvine, Pa., is being awarded a $6,653,811 firm-fixed- price contract to provide for 163 BLU 113a/b cases which, when filled, become the warhead for the GBU-28 Paveway III Laser Guided Weapon System. Contract is expected to be completed September 1998. Contract funds will not expire at the end of the current fiscal year. There were 15 firms solicited and one proposal received. Solicitation began April 1997; negotiations were completed June 1997. Ogden Air Logistics Center, Hill AFB, Utah, is the contracting activity (F42603-97/C-0262).
Russia's top spaceflight officials yesterday formally relieved Mir's three-man crew of the job of reconnecting power lost when the Spektr module was smashed by a runaway supply capsule, leaving the job of restoring lost power and finding the leak that depressurized Spektr to a fresh two-man crew set to launch Aug. 5.
McDonnell Douglas Corp., St. Louis, Mo., is being awarded a $6,500,000 cost-plus-fixed-fee contract to provide for integration of the Band 1.5 hardware into the AN/ALQ-135 Internal Countermeasures Set applicable to the F-15 aircraft. This effort includes aircraft design, integration design, test, evaluation, and associated contractor support. Contract is expected to be completed September 1999. Contract funds will not expire at the end of the current fiscal year. Solicitation began April 1997; negotiations were completed October 1997.
The nine Northrop Grumman B-2 bombers Congress is considering adding to the Pentagon's now-scheduled inventory of 21 of the planes would be delivered in the Block 30 configuration. "My understanding of what Northrop has proposed is the same as a Block 30 airplane," Col. Jay Jabour, director of the AF's B-2 Systems Program Office, said during an interview here. He was quick to add the AF's official position that while the B-2 is "a fine airplane," it can't afford any more.
EUGENE SHOEMAKER, a renowned planetary scientist and a discoverer of the Shoemaker-Levy comet that plowed into Jupiter in July 1994, died Friday in a two-car accident near Alice Springs, Australia. He was 69. An expert in meteor impact craters, Shoemaker took part in science missions from Ranger to Clementine.
The upswing in the commercial aircraft market and inclusion of the defense and space operations of Rockwell propelled Boeing's 1997 second quarter revenues to $9.3 billion, up from $6.3 billion in the same quarter a year ago, the company reported yesterday.
As part of its battlelab initiative, the U.S. Air Force is considering moving ahead with a program using unmanned aerial vehicles to improve security at military installations. The AF has been considering using a UAV to watch over military bases for some time, but a program didn't emerge until last week when the AF UAV Battlelab at Eglin AFB, Fla., in partnership with the Force Protection Battlelab, Lackland AFB, Tex., asked industry for a near-term demonstration.
The U.S. Air Force is beginning to look at upgrades it may want to make to its fleet of B-1B bombers beyond those planned and funded under the Conventional Munitions Upgrade Program (CMUP). The AF by 2007 plans to have completed a series of modifications as part of CMUP. "We are now looking at the next logical thing to do," Lt. Col. Paul M. Stipe of the B-1 System Program Office said in an interview here.
Chrysler Technologies Airborne Systems, Inc., Waco, Texas, is being awarded a $8,850,366 face value increase to a firm fixed price contract to provide for conversion of the C-141 Class IVB modification contract from fixed- price-incentive to a firm-fixed-price contract. Their program provides for kits to incorporate the following subsystems into the C-141 aircraft: a digital Automatic Flight Control System (AFCS), a Control Display System (CDS), and a Ground Collision Avoidance System (GCAS). Contract funds will not expire at the end of the current fiscal year.
Paintless aircraft technology, expected to see its first production aircraft use on the Joint Strike Fighter, is being flight tested on three types of aircraft, Lockheed Martin and 3M said in a joint statement. The two companies began large-scale flight testing in late April with an S-3 operated by U.S. Navy squadron VS-32 at Cecil Field, Jacksonville, Fla. The aft one-third of the aircraft is coated with the paint replacement film, the companies said Thursday.
Lockheed Martin Corp., Marietta, Ga., is being awarded a $146,700,000 face value increase to a firm-fixed-price contract to provide for three C-130 aircraft for the Marine Corps. Contract is expected to be completed October 1999. Contract funds will not expire at the end of the current fiscal year. There was one firm solicited and one proposal received. Aeronautical Systems Center, Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio, is the contracting activity (F33657-95/C-2055, P00006).
BOEING OFFER: Boeing offered European Commission negotiators a "10-year moratorium" on exclusive-supplier deals with airlines as a concession for EC acceptance of the McDonnell Douglas acquisition, according to Rep. Norm Dicks (D-Wash.). The catch: current 20-year agreements with American, Delta and Continental would remain, and Boeing would be free to offer exclusivity deals in "campaigns in which another aircraft manufacturer offers one first." Boeing did not offer to allow American, Delta and Continental to become launch customers for Airbus Industrie's A3XX.
The U.S. Air Force has given the F-15 program office instructions not to specify how much equipment it will buy for its fighters, but rather to try to equip as many as possible with funding provided for different upgrades. Traditionally, the AF has specified how many fighters it wants to buy or equip with a subsystem. But on May 28, a directive was issued telling the F-15 office to buy "as many as we can" of all equipment slated for procurement, said Dan Murray, who heads the F-15 program at the Aeronautical Systems Center here.
House National Security research and development subcommittee chairman Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.), concerned that the U.S. isn't doing enough to protect against the admittedly slim possibility that its commercial and military communications infrastructure could be knocked out by electromagnetic pulses from a high altitude nuclear explosion, has asked the Director of the Central Intelligence to outline the intelligence community's assessment of EMP threats.
READY TO GO: Seven B-1B bombers will be available for operational use around fiscal year 1999. At that time, this small number of the planes will be capable of dropping the Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) and will feature the AN/ALE-50 towed decoy as an interim countermeasure, AF officials say. The full-up B-1Bs with Block F countermeasures enhancements will be capable of carrying other types of precision munitions, as well as using a fiber-optic towed decoy. These bombers should be capable of defeating threats until 2010.
ATTACK ASSESSMENT: The U.S. Air Force will run an exercise exploring political reactions to such non-traditional attacks on the U.S. as an attack on the banking system or communications satellites, AF Chief of Staff Gen. Ronald Fogleman says. He says the exercise will be a precursor to the service's fiscal 1997 global engagement wargame later this year. By 1998, Fogleman wants the exercise to be coupled directly to the wargame.
RESET: Logicon rescheduled a stockholder meeting to vote on its merger with Northrop Grumman to July 29. The meeting, which had been slated for July 17, was postponed after a request from the SEC to include information about Lockheed Martin's planned acquisition of Northrop Grumman in the proxy statement.
The U.S. Air Force has decided how to provide its F-16 fighter with the Link 16 waveform datalink, a capability likely to be fielded by 2002. After a lengthy analysis, "we thought the best approach was MIDS" - the Multifunction Information Distribution System - said Col. Larry Cooper, director of the F-16 System Program Office here. The other system to provide Link 16 was the Integrated Modular Avionics implementation. The selection followed a detailed analysis of cost, risk and schedule, Cooper said in an interview.
RETURN ON INVESTMENT: Faced with the prospect of having as much as $420 million taken by Congress from the $2.1 billion fiscal '98 request for the F-22 program, USAF acquisition chief Arthur Money warns of the long-term consequences of such a cutback. For every dollar that is taken out of the program now, he says at an Air Force Association symposium in Dayton, Ohio, about $8 will have to be added later. He also says a $420 million cut will slip F-22 production by two years.
INSPECTIONS to determine the cause of a nitrogen tetroxide leak in the thrust vector control system of a Titan IV booster at Vandenberg AFB, Calif., continued Friday, the Air Force said. The leak prompted delay of a satellite launch.
