Orbital Sciences Corp. managed to get its Pegasus XL booster to work on the third attempt Friday, orbiting an Air Force experimental satellite and potentially clearing a logjam of small satellites that has built up as one small booster after another failed over the past year.
The Senate today is slated to continue debate on an omnibus budget package containing supplemental funding for military operations in Bosnia and $70 million to allow the transfer of 12 F-16 fighters to Jordan.
The Dept. of Defense has tasked the Joint Warfighting Center to develop a doctrine for information warfare, Vice Adm. Arthur K. Cebrowski, the Joint Staff's director for command, control, communications and computer systems, said Friday. The job will be led mainly by the Joint Staff's operations directorate, or J-3, Cebrowski said. The effort will part of the Joint Staff's annual overall look at doctrine, and a first draft should be finished in the fall.
The Defense Dept. is closely looking at recommendations to reform the intelligence community and plans to release its own set of recommendations soon, Deputy Defense Secretary John White told reporters last week. Two reviews of the U.S. intelligence apparatus have caught the highest level of attention in the Pentagon, and White said "we are working through them."
In yet another display of outrage over the Administration's ballistic missile defense (BMD) policy, 27 Republican senators have sent President Clinton a letter vowing to rewrite DOD's fiscal 1997 defense budget to reflect the missile defense priorities contained in the FY '96 defense authorization bill.
The experience of using global broadcast satellites in Bosnia will help the Defense Dept. develop a concept of operations for direct broadcast data, according to Pentagon acquisition chief Paul Kaminski. He tells the conference that DOD wants to develop the conops before it enters the next global broadcast system phase.
The U.S. Navy had to cut the procurement of E-2Cs and AV-8B Harriers by two aircraft in its fiscal year 1997 budget request due to fiscal constraints, and has decided to rephase the programs. The Navy continues to plan to buy 64 McDonnell Douglas-built Harriers and 32 Northrop Grumman built E-2Cs, but has altered its acquisition schedule, a Navy spokesman said Thursday in response to questions.
House defense appropriators aren't satisfied with the projected savings the Pentagon claims it can obtain from extending the C-17 multiyear buy from five to seven years. Most members of the House Appropriations national security subcommittee support the C-17 and multi-year contracting as a way to save, Subcommittee Chairman C.W. "Bill" Young said on the House floor Thursday.
Rolls-Royce has reported 1995 pretax profits of 175 million pounds, up from 101 million pounds the year before. The profit included 30 million pounds from Allison Engine Co., acquired March 24, 1995. Sales increased to 3.6 billion pounds from 3.2 billion including 377 million contributed by Allison. Backlog stood at 6.2 billion pounds at yearend compared to 5.9 billion pounds with the inclusion of Allison more than offsetting a fall in the commercial aircraft engine backlog.
U.S. SPACE COMMAND predicted a capsule from China's FSW-1 5 Earth imaging satellite will reenter the atmosphere this week and could reach the surface. Launched Oct. 8, 1993, the satellite failed to reenter as planned eight days later and has been out of control ever since. Space Command said the capsule, which has a 1.5-square-meter radar cross section, should reenter by Wednesday, but could not predict last week exactly where the capsule would come down.
Two powerful House subcommittee chairman Friday warned the No. 3-ranked official in the Russian government that funding delays in Moscow threaten congressional support for the U.S.-Russian partnership on the International Space Station.
The Pentagon can't get savings from privatization if the 60/40 rule - restricting outsourcing of more than 40% of service depot maintenance work - remains on the books, Defense Secretary Perry tells congressional defense appropriators. The Administration wants to repeal the regulation, but there's "much resistance" within the Pentagon, Perry says. In each case where it's considered, potential savings and readiness will be top priorities, he says.
Russia's budding commercial space launch industry will stick with a March 28 liftoff date for the first Proton booster carrying a Western satellite, the Hughes-built Astra 1F. The date was thrown into question last month when a Proton failed to put a Russian military satellite in its proper orbit (DAILY, Feb. 22), but engineers are confident the problem that caused the failure is understood (DAILY, March 4).
DYNCORP, Reston, Va., reported it has won an $8 million subcontract from Cessna Aircraft Co. to provide logistics support services and to perform organizational maintenance on the U.S. Army's new C-XX medium range jet transport. Flight Safety International is also on Cessna's team (DAILY, Jan. 29). Cessna will supply 35 modified Citation Ultras under a $157 million program.
STANDARD MISSILE CO., McLean, Va., has been awarded $126.7 million for low rate initial production of 45 SM-2 Block IV missiles for fiscal years 1995 and 1996, the Pentagon said last week. The Hughes-Raytheon joint venture will also supply section level spares, upgraded test sets, shipping containers, booster assemblies, batteries and handling equipment.
United Airlines has experienced electrical and other problems that interrupt its Boeing 777 service, according to reports filed with the FAA. Although the carrier last week refused to give out the dispatch reliability of the aircraft to date, it reportedly was getting less than 95% reliability three months after entry into service. In contrast, the Airbus A340 and the A330 were at 98.3% and 98.6% dispatch reliability after three months in service. The 777A and the A330 are direct competitors, as are the 777B and the A340.
House National Security Committee sources say the panel wants to mark up the fiscal 1997 defense authorization by the end of April or early May, in line with House leadership plans to end the session by Oct. 1 to allow more time for election year campaigning. Hitting the target will require the committee and its subcommittees to move at an unusually fast pace. Consider that the budget was sent to Congress last Monday, about a month behind the usual schedule, and is still not complete. Consider also that there are a number of issues that members want to scrutinize closely.
The Defense Dept. has tasked the U.S. Army to come up with new metrics to better quantify the advantages of its modernization program, Deputy Defense Secretary John White said last week. "It's much more difficult to measure and articulate the payoff on investment in ground forces," so the modernization program faces a constant problem, White said during a breakfast in Arlington, Va., Thursday, sponsored by the Institute for Land Warfare.
Combest also advocates easing or doing away with tenure limits for members of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees. The tenure limit, stating no member can serve more than six consecutive years on the panel, was intended to prevent congressional overseers from developing "too cozy a relationship" with the intelligence community. "Tenure limits seek to obviate this," Combest said.
The long-awaited White House space policy is lurching toward daylight, with a final draft being circulated to the agencies that took part in its creation for "concurrence." In the works for most of last year as a way to pull together various presidential space memoranda, the policy document got snagged in the budget "train wreck" that kept shutting down the government (DAILY, Dec. 4, 1995). Now NASA has its final budget numbers, tentatively set for release March 18, against which the wonks can "calibrate" the space policy.
The Pentagon is paying about $50,000 for each global broadcast satellite receiving unit in Bosnia's Operation Joint Endeavor, says Robert Davis, the Pentagon's space chief. Most of the cost, about $30,000, is directly linked to cryptography, he says during a space conference. A commercial direct broadcast receiving capability in the U.S. costs about $700, he says - but also uses a smaller antenna and comes without the crypto add-on.
The secretaries of the U.S. military services on Friday offered wish lists largely devoid of major systems to a House National Security Committee that is poised to add funding for big ticket items to the Pentagon's $242.6 billion fiscal 1997 budget. Navy Secretary John H. Dalton offered some advice with his list: "If you increase, then advance the weapons requests and [do] not put in new ones.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Larry Combest (R-Tex.) opposes creation of a joint congressional intelligence committee. The main argument in its favor is that by reducing the number of members and staff with access to intelligence information, the chance of leaks will be lessened. When he released his proposal to restructure the intelligence community, Combest said he strongly disagrees that Congress is the major source of leaks.
NASA will soon announce plans to commercialize the data generated by its planned Earth Observing System of satellites and other sensors, but it remains unclear just who will analyze the mountains of data the system is expected to produce.
A C-141 Starlifter from the U.S. Air Mobility Command flew 2,800 pounds of explosive-detection equipment to Tel Aviv, Israel, on March 5, filling President Clinton's promise that day that the U.S. would help Israel in the wake of several terrorist bombing attacks.
