PRESIDENT CLINTON yesterday nominated Deputy Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet to be the new DCI. He acted after Anthony Lake pulled his nomination for the job on Monday.
HUGHES STX Corp. has won a contract worth about $10 million to develop a satellite ground processing system for the China Center for Resources Satellite Data and Applications. The system will handle data generated by the China Brazil Earth Resources Satellite under joint development by China and Brazil. It will be installed in Beijing.
ZHANG TONG, president of China Great Wall Industry Corp., drowned Tuesday during a visit to the European space launch facility at Kourou, French Guiana, according to Agence France Presse. He was 62. Zhang, whose organization builds China's Long March space launch vehicle, was swept away by a wave while sitting on a seaside rock on an island near Kourou and could not be revived after he was rescued, AFP reported. He had spent Monday touring the space center where Europe launches its Ariane rockets, according to the report.
TEXTRON MARINE&LAND SYSTEMS and VICKERS SHIPBUILDING AND ENGINEERING LTD. won a $36.9 million contract from the U.S. Navy for the engineering and manufacturing development phase and options for initial production of the Ultralightweight Field Howitzer. Production options are worth $110 million, and the total program value could exceed $1.5 billion.
NASA has launched a search for Space Shuttle missions to fill a gap that likely is developing in the manifest as International Space Station assembly is delayed for lack of Russian funding, even as it prepares the last Spacelab mission, a testbed for Station science operations. William Townsend, acting associate administrator for Mission to Planet Earth, told reporters Tuesday the U.S. space agency has launched a search for gap-filling missions in case Station first-element launch slips from November until the middle of next year (DAILY, Feb. 25, 27).
LOCKHEED MISSILES&SPACE, Sunnyvale, Calif., has finished construction and assembly of NASA's Lunar Prospector spacecraft, and has started functional and environmental tests of the 660-pound satellite. Launch is scheduled for Sept. 4 on the new LMLV-2 vehicle. With a total cost, including launch, mission operations and data analysis of $63 million, the probe is designed to map the moon's surface composition and gravity from polar orbit over a one-year period.
The Seattle Professional Engineering Employees Association (SPEEA) filed an unfair labor practice charge with the National Labor Relations Board against Boeing Tuesday seeking to delay the proposed joint venture between Boeing Enterprises Inc. and FlightSafety International. The proposed joint venture would combine the two companies' pilot and maintenance training programs into a new company called FlightSafety Boeing Training International (DAILY, March 12).
NOTIFICATION of planned NASA procurements is now available via e-mail at no cost to companies that register on the agency website at http ://procurement.nasa.gov/maiallist.html There is no charge for the service, which will automatically inform companies of competitive acquisitions for $25,000 and more.
To hedge against Russian developments, the Dept. of Defense should initiate a design competition for an advanced attack submarine, according to a former Pentagon research chief. John S. Foster Jr., head of Defense Research and Engineering from 1965 to 1973 and now in private industry, advocated this approach in testimony Tuesday to the House National Security Committee's procurement panel.
INTEL AND SOCIETE EUROPEENE DES SATELLITES (SES) have joined forces in a venture that will deliver multimedia content to personal computers in Europe via satellite. European Satellite Multimedia Services S.A. (ESM), based in Luxembourg, plans to launch a satellite based on the SES Astra platform that will allow broadband satellite delivery to PCs at speeds the venture describes as "hundreds of times faster than with conventional telephone modems." SES will be majority stockholder, and other investors are expected to join the ESM venture soon, Intel and SES said.
Existing theater missile defense (TMD) systems can protect some troops in the field, but a multi-layer defense is needed for total protection, top U.S. military commanders told the Senate Armed Services Committee yesterday. Gen. John H. Tilelli, commander of U.S. Forces Korea, said he needs both Navy Upper Tier and Lower Tier systems for an adequate defense against ballistic missile attack in his theater of operation.
Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.), chairman of the House National Security procurement subcommittee, told U.S. Navy witnesses yesterday that if future competition to build the New Attack Submarine is abandoned, he's not sure that both Tenneco's Newport News Shipbuilding and General Dynamics' Electric Boat should both be kept in business.
Without a fiscal 1998 funding boost from Congress, the U.S. Army would have to interrupt the Comanche helicopter test program for six months, increasing the already significant pressure for perfect flights, program officials said yesterday at Sikorsky Aircraft's flight test facility here. Clarence Hutchinson, flight test director for the Boeing/Sikorsky industry team developing the RAH-66, told reporters that the hiatus would begin around April 1998 and run through September 1998.
NASA has picked two proposals for small, cheap Earth-study satellites under its Earth System Science Pathfinder (ESSP) program, plus a backup project if the two it picked overrun their tight budgets. Scientists backed by the U.S. space agency will use satellites to map the density and height of most of the world's forests and the subtly changing shape of the earth over time, all at a cost less than $150 million.
The U.K.'s Ministry of Defense has been exploring options to the Royal Air Force's requirement for 45 Future Large Aircraft (FLA), as the multi-nation program faces budget problems. The new transports would replace about 30 RAF Lockheed Martin C-130Ks in 2004, but the French and German governments haven't allocated research and development funding for the FLA in current defense budgets.
Lockheed Martin and TRW have completed integrated ground testing of several components of the space-based laser (SBL) missile defense system. The Feb. 20 test at TRW's Capistrano Test Site near San Clemente, Calif., involved generating a megawatt-class chemical laser beam and feeding it through a four-meter diameter beam expander and beam projection system, the companies reported. The test ran for about one-half second, the full planned duration, in a chamber that simulated the vacuum of space.
Congressional appropriators won't mark up the Pentagon's $2 billion fiscal year 1997 supplemental budget request until at least the week of April 7, a Senate Appropriations Committee aide told The DAILY. While lawmakers had hoped to complete work on the supplemental before leaving for a one week recess beginning Friday, more work is needed to identify offsets to pay for the supplemental, the aide said.
McDonnell Douglas completed the first flight of its AH-64D Apache Longbow in Mesa, Ariz., Monday, the company announced. The aircraft, the first of 232 to be remanufactured from the AH-64A configuration under a five-year, $1.9 billion U.S. Army contract, flew for 30 minutes, reaching forward speeds of 45 knots and sideward flight of 20 knots. McDonnell Douglas Helicopter Systems production test pilots Walt Jones and Jerry Keyser were at the controls.
CORRECTION: An article in the March 14 issue of The DAILY (page 388) misidentified Gilbert F. Decker as the secretary of the Army. He is assistant Army secretary for research and development and acquisition.
The Supreme Court sent Litton Systems Inc.'s patent infringement suit against Honeywell Inc. back to appellate court for further consideration, granting a Honeywell petition, Honeywell said Monday. Litton accused Honeywell of patent infringement under the doctrine of equivalence relating to the ring laser gyroscope technology used in commercial aviation.
The Senate Armed Services Committee sent the Senate Budget Committee a memo requesting that the fiscal year 1998 budget resolution include a defense spending level high enough to accommodate a $2.9 billion boost to the president's request for budget authority, and a $4.3 billion hike in outlays. SASC Chairman Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.) sent the request to Budget Committee Chairman Pete Domenici (R-N.M.) on Friday (DAILY, March 14).
The Severodvinsk class of Russian attack submarine, soon to go to sea in first copy, "likely will be at least as quiet - and perhaps quieter - than the Seawolf, America's best ever," Lowell Wood, visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, Stanford University, and member of the director's technical staff, University of California Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, told the House National Security procurement subcommittee yesterday.
BELL AND BOEING delivered the first production-representative V-22 Osprey to the Naval Air Warfare Test Center, Patuxent River, Md., on Saturday, the industry team said yesterday. The ferry flight from Bell's facility at Fort Worth, Tex., lasted 4.3 hours and covered 1,075 miles. It included stops in West Memphis, Ark., and East London, Ky. The aircraft was piloted by Marine Corps Maj. Bill Wainwright and Bell Boeing's Tom MacDonald.
The chairman of the House Appropriations national security subcommittee says adding to the fiscal 1998 Clinton Administration defense budget to maintain the B-2 bomber industrial base would be "a whole lot more difficult" now than two years ago, when the panel tapped National Reconnaissance Office accounts to boost the program. "I'm just not sure where the money would come from," subcommittee chairman Rep. C.W. (Bill) Young (R-Fla.) told The DAILY in an interview. "But we're still early in the budget process." Supporters favor adding $350 million.
