Lockheed Martin officials say overseas sales will continue to be the backbone of its F-16 production, expecting to win more than 50% of the international tactical fighter business during the next 20 years.
The Japanese FS-X program hasn't been a one-way technology transfer path from the U.S. to Japan, according the Lockheed Martin officials who say they are closely looking at leveraging composite manufacturing techniques into future U.S. programs. J.B. Bailey, who works composites for Lockheed Martin's Tactical Aircraft Systems unit in Fort Worth, Tex., tells The DAILY that "there is good technology that we have acquired." Precisely what will be used hasn't been determined yet, he notes, but some might find its way into Joint Strike Fighter work.
NASA will take "a number of months to conclude" the transition of management responsibility from headquarters to field center directors, Administrator Dan Goldin tells Congress. To ensure that nothing falls between the cracks, particularly safety, "each of the associate administrators is in the process right now of writing letters of delegation to the different field centers to be lead centers," Goldin says.
After months of interagency wrangling, the Clinton Administration has decided to switch off the military-quality "Selective Availability" mode on the Global Positioning System and make a uniform signal available free of charge to support the burgeoning market for civilian GPS applications, Vice President Gore announced Friday.
Comanche team members Boeing and Sikorsky are in line for a year-end contract for work beyond the current concept demonstration phase. The letter of instruction will be released early this month, says the Army's aviation program element officer, Paul Bogosian.
The model for a Defense Communications System Architecture should be the Internet, says former Gen. James McCarthy, now retired and serving on a DSB task force to review military C4I operations in Bosnia. All those interested in future systems and requirements could visit sites on a "Defense Internet System" to work issues and problems, he says. Meanwhile, on the battlefield, McCarthy says a soldier should someday be able make up to 35 clicks on a computer screen to get situational awareness and intelligence information.
When a U.S. Air Force F-16 pilot was shot down over Bosnia last year, there was a near "catastrophe" because military operators in the field didn't know how to leverage C4I space equipment that could have helped rescue him sooner, Lt. Gen. Howell Estes said here Friday.
The U.S. Army expects about $500 million in savings through the life of the AH-64D Apache Longbow helicopter program from a multi-year buy and commercialization of production practices, Army program manager Col. Stephen Kee said. MYP and commercialization will save about $130 million during the five-year buy, but the savings would increase to half a billion dollars over the program's life, Kee said here last Wednesday during the annual symposium of the Army Aviation Association of America (Quad-A).
U.S. threats to withdraw from Russia's Mir space station program (DAILY, March 29) may be coming just as the aging facility is about to turn a profit. Protein crystal growth for drug development has long been considered an area where microgravity can be turned to commercial ends, but space limitations on the U.S. Space Shuttle have cut its utility. Now NASA hasdeveloped a dewar for use on Mir that boosts the number of crystals produced from "a few hundred" at most to between 10,000 and 20,000, according to Dr. Harry C.
As reliance on space sensors for the movement of battlefield awareness data grows, the two biggest challenges are how to narrow the flow of information so it's usable when it reaches soldiers, and how to accomplish that without security breaches, U.S. Air Force officers said Thursday at an American Defense Preparedness Association conference here.
A former head of U.S. Space Command, Gen. Donald Kutyna, now Loral Corp. vice president for advanced space systems, says over the length of his military career he saw about 20 different space communications architecture studies (Cont. p. 3) - about one every year. The Pentagon is in the midst of another such study now. Each participant thinks his architecture will be "the final, the definitive one...and it never is," Kutyna remarks. The only thing certain about the future architecture for space, he says, is that "it will use commercial satelites."
The Army would like the Marine Corps to consider the RAH-66 Comanche to replace its AH-1W helicopters, but so far discussions are only preliminary, Army under secretary Joe Reeder said yesterday. "All the services have to neck down the types of aircraft" they fly, Reeder said here at the annual Army Aviation Association of America (Quad- A) symposium. "Ultimately, the services will have to fly the same helicopter," he added.
Funding for the Joint Strike Fighter, slated for completion in fiscal year 2025 as recently as December, is now planned to continue through fiscal 2030. The JSF program office said in the request for proposals for the concept demonstration phase, released last Friday, that low rate production would run from FY '09 to FY '13, and that multi-year buys are planned between FY '14 and FY '28, and between FY '28 and FY '30. The draft RFP released in December said production would be terminated in FY '25 (DAILY, Dec. 19, 1995).
Having finalized the first stage of an evaluation of the Joint Emitter Targeting System (JETS), the U.S. Navy will now take a closer look at how it will work in the first few weeks of combat, a Navy official said. Marine Corps Col. Nolan Schmidt, who heads up electronic warfare for Naval Air Systems Command, said in an interview that no technical approaches were ruled out in the first phase of the cost and operational effectiveness evaluation (COEA). Early indications are that JETS will be an affordable system, he said.
The crew of the Space Shuttle Atlantis began preparations yesterday for a return to Earth tomorrow after two U.S. astronauts installed orbital environment experiments on Russia's Mir space station Wednesday, giving NASA some experience in the sort of work that will be necessary to build and maintain the International Space Station.
CHINA WILL RESUME launching its Long March 3B rocket next year, a Beijing newspaper said yesterday, attempting to orbit a satellite built by Lockheed Martin for the Chinese government. The large new booster's manifest has lost three payloads in the wake of last month's failure with Intelsat 708 aboard (DAILY, March 26), but China Daily reported the 3B variant will be used to launch China Star-1 for state-owned China Oriental TelecomSatellite Co. Ltd., and Apstar 2R for Hong Kong's Apt. Satellite Corp. Ltd.
THE FIRST REPLACEMENT Navstar Global Positioning Satellite was launched Wednesday aboard a McDonnell Douglas Delta II booster. Liftoff of the Air Force mission came at 7:21 p.m. EST from Cape Canaveral Air Station, Fla., McDonnell Douglas reported, and the satellite reached its transfer orbit. The latest GPS platform will replace one of the 24 satellites already on orbit that has suffered degraded performance. Beginning in 1989, the Delta II has launched all of the GPS satellites, and McDonnell Douglas is under contract to continue launching replacements through 2002.
Loss of its Russian partner would make it "very difficult" for NASA to build the International Space Station within the $2.1 billion annual spending cap set by Congress, Administrator Daniel S. Goldin conceded on Capitol Hill yesterday, even with a "pretty mature" design for U.S.-built replacement hardware already in hand.
Raytheon yesterday named FlightSafety, Hughes, Loral and McDonnell Douglas to compete for the Ground-Based Training System portion of the Joint Primary Aircraft Training System, or JPATS, program. As winner of the overall JPATS program, Raytheon Aircraft is conducting the source selection for the ground trainers, and plans to start talks with the four companies this spring before finalizing the request for proposal "in the April-May 1996 time frame," Raytheon said in a prepared statement.
The 100 principal contractors who received the most in direct awards from NASA in fiscal year 1995 are listed below. Overall, the contractors listed received a little more than 88% of NASA's total awards for the fiscal year. Nineteen of the contractors are small businesses, and 17 were considered disadvantaged when their contracts were awarded. Awards Contractor (Thousands) Percent Total Awards To Business Firms $10,311,491 100.00
A senior member of the House Appropriations national security subcommittee yesterday suggested adding $212 million to the RAH-66 Comanche armed reconnaissance helicopter program to bring it into the U.S. Army inventory three years earlier than planned, but Army Chief of Staff Gen. Dennis J. Reimer expressed misgivings about the proposal.
With less than a year to go before first flight of the first engineering and manufacturing development V-22 tiltrotor aircraft in December, Textron Bell Helicopter says it may be able to beat the projected date. "I'm going to predict we're going to fly early," Bell's program director Jack Gallagher told The DAILY during an interview here. He didn't say when he expects the flight, only that it won't be later than early December.
Assuming big budget boosts, the risk of deploying a national missile defense system early in the next decade would be "moderate," according to the director of the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization. Lt. Gen. Malcolm O'Neill told the Senate Armed Services Committee Monday in response to a question that with "substantial increases" in funding, an NMD system could be operating by 2003, and that the effort would be a "moderate risk."
McDonnell Douglas senior VP Don Kozlowski yesterday sought to defuse congressional disappointment with the size of the savings in the multi-year C-17 procurement proposal, noting that the buy was limited to 80 aircraft rather than the much larger orders in past multi-year contracts. The C-17 multi-year before Congress offers a 5% saving - just under $900 million - and several lawmakers have criticized that figure and insisted on more savings, given that typical multi-year buys save 10% or more.
