The joint U.S. Navy and U.S. Air Force AGM-154 Joint Stand-off Weapon (JSOW) recently completed its first successful flight integrated on an F- 16, JSOW prime contractor Texas Instruments said yesterday. The test last month was conducted at Eglin Air Force Base, Fla. An F- 16 flying at 5,000 feet and 420 knots fired a JSOW 11 nautical miles from its target. The JSOW flew the preplanned waypoints to the target where it dispensed its submunitions. JSOW carried 145 BLU-97 Combined Effect Bomblet submunitions as its payload.
Negotiators for McDonnell Douglas and about 6,700 striking Machinists expect to resume talks this morning after making what union leaders described as moderate progress in sessions last week. Union leaders said both sides were closer together on three issues, but wouldn't elaborate on the specific progress that was made. "We are closer than we were," said Gerald Oulson, president of the International Association of Machinists District 837. "We had 10 miles to go. Now it's 9.8."
PRECISION CASTPARTS CORP., Portland, Ore., said it will buy Astro Punch Corp., Santa Fe Springs, Calif., for $6.5 million. Astro Punch, a designer and manufacturer of cold heading tools for the aerospace and commercial fastener marketplace, will become part of Precision Castparts' Speciality Products Div. John Prosser, president of PCC Specialty Products, Inc., said SPD's Reed-Rico business and Astro Punch "are currently strong in different geographical locations, and we will complement each other's strengths.
President Boris Yeltsin has authorized design activity for development of a "multifunctional space telecommunications system of the Russian Federation," which appears to be a counterweight to the 840-satellite Teledesic system currently planned in the U.S. Yeltsin's edict, signed on July 30 and released Aug. 6, assigns responsibility for developing the system to Kompomash Corp., a consortium of some three dozen Russian space companies led by NPO Kompozit and NPO Energomash.
F/A-18 Hornet prime contractor McDonnell Douglas Aerospace is offering senior government officials in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland the opportunity to fly the aircraft in an attempt to bolster its chances of winning fighter competitions slated to be decided in Central Europe in the next few years. MDC said it will lease one of the U.S. Marine Corps' Aviano, Italy- based F/A-18Ds for about 10 days. McDonnell Douglas test pilot Gary
Mars exploration could become the space science equivalent of the Space Station, a high-visibility effort that devours funding which might otherwise be spent elsewhere, if NASA mounts a big push for evidence on Mars to back up the electrifying finding that a Martian meteorite may contain fossilized life forms (DAILY, Aug. 7). Administrator Daniel S. Goldin said at the outset that if the scientific community decides more money should go into the search for confirmation of the meteorite data, it will have to come from somewhere else in the NASA program.
The crash last Wednesday of a U-2R reconnaissance plane near Oroville, Calif., that killed the pilot and one person on the ground was the fourth fatal accident for the aircraft in the last five years. The crash occurred at about 5:17 p.m. EST, 17 minutes after Capt. Randy D. Roby departed from Beale AFB, Calif., on a routine flight. Roby ejected but was found dead, strapped into his ejection seat with the parachute deployed, an Air Force spokeswoman said.
Engineers working on Mars exploration for NASA are more concerned about present-day life on Mars than on the fossilized life forms posited last week. Recent Mars exploration planning has devoted a lot of time to preventing potentially dangerous "back-contamination" of Earth by living organisms in samples of Martian soil and rock, a problem rendered more urgent as NASA contemplates advancing its planned robotic sample- return mission (DAILY, Aug. 8, 9). It would be relatively simple to sterilize samples by heating them to kill any living organisms. But, says Donna L.
The U.S. could be more competitive in the international arms market if Congress repeals an existing law that increases the price of U.S. military equipment when sold to foreign customers, according to the Presidential Advisory Board on Arms Proliferation Policy.
One sign of how seriously the U.S. Air Force is taking the long-range planning effort is the level of attention being given to it by Chief of Staff Gen. Ronald Fogleman. He set up the organization last year with the goal of providing alternatives for the future AF at this October's "Corona" meeting of four-star AF generals. Fogleman has set aside a full week before Corona to thoroughly review the planners' findings, says Clark Murdock, the chief's deputy special assistant for long-range planning.
Russia's government has approved an industry proposal to develop a new space launch vehicle fueled by liquid natural gas as a way to cut environmental pollution from kerosene-fueled rockets. Dubbed Riksha, the new rocket was proposed by the Kompomash Corp., a consortium of some three dozen companies in the Russian missile and space industry. It was backed by the Russian Space Agency and the Ministry of Defense Industry.
An Ariane 44L launcher with four liquid-fueled strap-on boosters lifted two large European satellites to orbit late Thursday after a delay while a pyrotechnic booster separation device was replaced. Liftoff from the European launch facility came at 6:49 p.m. EDT, and the Arianespace launch consortium reported both satellites were deliver ed to their proper geostationary transfer orbits. They were Italsat F2, a 1990-kilogram telecommunications platform built by Alenia Spazio for Telecom Italia, and France's Telecom 2D.
SIR FRANK WHITTLE, the first to design and patent a gas turbine engine, died late Thursday night at the age of 89 at his home in Columbia, Md., following a long illness.
The Ballistic Missile Defense Organization is leading a joint engineering team in conducting a kinetic kill vehicle (KKV) technology assessment. The team plans to assess the potential of various technologies, including those under development for the Lightweight Exoatmospheric Projectile (LEAP), Theater High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system, Atmospheric Interceptor Technology (AIT) and Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle (EKV) programs. BMDO wants to complete its study and make recommendations in 1998.
Competitive House races and retirements could lead to as many as 17 vacancies on the National Security Committee, more than 30% of the panel's 55 seats, an analysis by The DAILY has revealed. If this happened, it would be the third straight Congress in which the committee has gone through substantial change. The 1992 congressional elections and the House bank scandal that year created a wave of retirements and led to 17 new members in 1993 on the House Armed Services Committee, as the panel was known until the Republicans took over in 1995.
Elderly KC-135 tankers are growing ever-harder and more expensive to support, and the General Accounting Office believes this gives the Air Force an opportunity to consider a dual-use aircraft when it begins replacing C-5A Galaxy transports beginning in 2007.
RAYTHEON ELECTRONIC SYSTEMS won a $620 million contract to provide 213 Digital Airport Surveillance Radar systems to the U.S. Air Force, the Pentagon said Friday. Raytheon beat three other competitors to replace existing radars at civilian and military airfields. Most of the work will be performed at Raytheon Canada, in Waterloo, Ontario, and at Raytheon Electronic Systems in Marlborough, Mass.
Britain's National Audit Office singled out the U.K.'s share of the four-nation Eurofighter 2000 project - now 1.25 billion pounds ($1.93 billion) over budget - as one of the worst examples of cost escalation in its latest review of 25 major arms procurements. The quoted increase in Eurofighter research and development costs is 124 million pounds ahead of the rate of inflation, NAO noted, bringing the overall U.K. Eurofighter program cost to 15.4 billion pounds, or $23.86 billion.
Although the Pentagon is eyeing consolidation of signal intelligence platforms, it might not be easy. The U.S. Air Force's chief for information dominance, Col. Dave Nagy, says "it's nice to consolidate," but that the different attributes of the aircraft involved could make that hard. Looking at a notional tradeoff of the Navy's EP-3 and the Air Force RC-135 Rivet Joint, Nagy says, "I just don't see how you can afford sufficient numbers of Rivet Joint" to do the missions of both services.
The U.S. Army is trying to sort out how it will solve the so-called "Year 2000" computer problem, says Lt. Gen. Otto Guenther, the Army's director of information systems for C4. Computer codes that now use only the last two digits of a year will, on the first day of 2000, show the date as Jan. 1, '00 - the year 1900, an error that is expected to shut down many systems. Guenther says the Army can still only estimate what a fix might cost. He also says, however, that an easy fix using one solution for all systems isn't likely.
The U.S. Army is closely evaluating the lessons it is learning about its command, control, communication and computer systems operating in Bosnia, and is beginning to take steps to address the issues, a senior officer said.
