Orbital Sciences Corp. has joined Rockwell International, its one-time partner on NASA's X-34 small reusable space launch vehicle program, in concluding that a marketable launcher can't be built to NASA's requirements, leaving the U.S. space agency pondering its dwindling options for keeping the program alive.
The McDonnell Douglas-led Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) team kicked off the public campaign for its entry yesterday by unveiling plans for a mostly common, expandable weapons bay, a possible solution to the one area of disagreement remaining among the three services - internal weapons carriage.
The contractors competing for the Joint Advanced Strike Technology program are engineering their proposals to ensure the program isn't derailed over disagreement among the U.S. military services about internal weapons carriage.
C-17 airlifters flew nearly half of all Bosnia-related cargo during a recent one-week period, and only the smaller C-130 flew more missions, according to the Operation Joint Endeavor statistics compiled by the U.S. Air Force's Air Mobility Command and released Thursday. Weekly data through midnight (GMT) Wednesday show that even as the operational tempo of the missions has slowed dramatically from the initial build-up stages, the C-17 has remained the workhorse aircraft type (DAILY, Feb. 5).
Virtually none of the $493 million B-2 bomber add-on in fiscal 1996 can be used to preserve the subcontractor base for renewed production, congressional opponents of additional B-2 production said Friday. "Nothing can be done anymore" to siphon funds to subcontractors to preserve the base for building more bombers, since the program already has bought more than its fill of spares and support items, one source said.
The U.S. Marine Corps next month will use 10 of its BQM-147A Exdrone unmanned aerial vehicles in a live fire exercise which will include first use of the system as an artillery spotter.
Look for some fur to fly when U.S. and Russian officials sit down in Houston next month to renegotiate terms of cooperation on the International Space Station over who will be in charge of the orbiting lab. U.S. Station Director Wilbur Trafton triggered a tempest in the Russian press last month when he said a U.S. astronaut will "always" be Station commander, under a longstanding agreement between Administrator Daniel S. Goldin and Yuri Koptiev, head of the Russian Space Agency (DAILY, Feb. 1).
Rockwell International, meanwhile, is putting $1.2 billion into what it calls a "megafab," two silicon wafer fabrication modules capable of producing 30,000 8-inch wafers - with feature sizes soon to 0.25 microns - a month. The goal is to meet more of its own needs for multimedia and wireless communications products and to be less dependent on the merchant market.
Lockheed Martin is putting production equipment from a former Lockheed ballistic missile plant in Texas on the auction block. Michigan-based auctioneers Norman Levy Associates - which oversaw the dismantling of Grumman facilities in Long Island, N.Y. - will put 12,000 lots of industrial machinery up for sale during a six-day public selloff at the Abilene, Tex., plant, beginning April 15. It sits on 25 acres, and the land and buildings are also for sale.
NASA MANAGERS Friday scheduled a Feb. 22 launch for the Space Shuttle Columbia on the third flight of Italy's Tethered Satellite System, with a 12.5-mile deployment and retrieval of the experimental spacecraft planned during the 13-day mission. Liftoff on time at 3:18 p.m. EST would produce a landing back at Kennedy Space Center, Fla., at 7:32 a.m.EST on March 7.
The U.S. Navy plans to deploy its Airborne Self- Protection Jammer-equipped F-14Ds for the first time this May. Although the system is still in operational testing, Navy Capt. Bob Riera, the F-14 program manager, tells The DAILY that initial results were encouraging enough to begin planning for the deployment.
Hoping to build on a recent Royal Thai Navy order for six S-76 helicopters - the first S-76s sold for dedicated naval missions - Sikorsky Aircraft is touting combinations of existing systems that can be fitted to the aircraft to make it a multi-mission, multi-sensor platform capable of operating from small ships.
The U.S. Army and Israel are cooperating in development of laser weapons to counter short-range rockets of the type used by Hezbollah terrorists, and the program scored a first Friday when a rocket was destroyed in a test at White Sands Missile Range, N.M., the Army said. The service's Space and Strategic Defense Command said the program, called Nautilus, evaluates lasers for potential use as tactical air defense systems. The Army's continuous megawatt-class Mid-Infrared Advanced Chemical Laser was used in Friday's test.
Litton Industries last week moved to acquire its fifth company in less than a year, Sperry Marine, Charlottesville, Va., manufacturer of both commercial and military shipboard navigation systems. Purchase price was put at about $160 million in a transaction with an investment partnership headed by former Navy Secretary John Lehman.
Bell Helicopter is nearly ready to unveil details of its plans for a new light twin helicopter, Bell chief Webb Joiner said Wednesday. Bell originally planned to offer a twin-engine version of its new 407, but Joiner said that further study showed the 407T would have been too range-limited. "We felt the 407T was going to end up being a me-too type of aircraft," Joiner said, adding that the key to a successful light twin is good single-engine capability as well as long range.
The feedback of safety findings into the design and development of new aircraft is a tenuous process at best, Brig. Gen Orin Godsey, chief of flight safety for the U.S. Air Force, said at a Pentagon news briefing last week. For example, although logic would seem to dictate that a twin-engine aircraft would be safer than a single-engine plane, he said this has not been the Air Force's experience. Single-engine aircraft are cheaper to buy, easier to operate and maintain, and Godsey said there has been no difference in their safety records.
DUAL-USE CHIPS: Among the defense contractors with inhouse semiconductor capability, Raytheon is grooming its monolithic microwave integrated circuits (MIMICs), originally developed under ARPA sponsorship for the next-generation land- and sea-based military radar systems, and for dual- use space-based global communications, cellular telephone and wireless local area networks (LANs). The company has qualified its 0.25-micron pseudomorphic high electron mobility transistor (PHEMT) process and digital versions of the MIMIC chips.
Something to consider the next time you hear about the huge potential of the recently opened Russian aircraft market - Russian airlines bought 34 planes and helicopters last year, less than a tenth of 1992's spending level. Viktor Gorlov, the number two civil aviation official in the Transport Ministry, says Russian airlines need new, efficient aircraft - official estimates suggest 60% of the existing fleet will have to be junked in the next four years - but they don't have the money to pay for them.
Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.) says his House National Security R&D subcommittee plans hearings in the first quarter of this year on Russia's central command structure and the potential for a breakdown in control of the Russian nuclear arsenal. Russia "today militarily is more destabilized than it ever was under Communist leadership," Weldon says. "Central command is not what it was."
Koptiev, getting heat from the nationalist press over the "sellout" of sensitive spy satellite data in a preliminary exchange at the latest Gore-Chernomyrdin summit in Washington, says the U.S. data will help Russia's military clean up its polluted bases. Vice President Gore and Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin swapped sanitized line-drawing images of Eglin AFB, Fla., and the Yeysk Air Force Base in southern Russia (DAILY, Jan. 31).
The Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Joint Project Office plans to see the light-weight, heavy fuel engine development on the Hunter UAV through to critical design review, but with the Hunter program canceled, the engine work will stop then, a UAV official says. Work on the Williams International engine may be restarted because the Predator UAV program is still searching for an HFE.
The U.S. Navy last week delivered its first LANTIRN pods to NAS Patuxent River, Md., for testing on F-14s. The program is still on track for operational deployment in June with VF-103.
F-22 contractors are publicly raising doubt about the low-observable features of the fighter. A new advertisement from Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Pratt&Whitney says "When the first F-22 rolls off the assembly line, it will send an unmistakable signal to the rest of the world."
Weldon says the subcommittee will also investigate the sale of Russian military technology. "We are going to pursue issues that we want answers to, like the transfer of this [missile] technology to Iraq and why it occurred and how it occurred," he says.
Rockwell International late Friday pulled out of NASA's troubled X-34 small reusable launch vehicle program, driving what may be the final nail in the project's coffin. Rockwell said a review of the program after its partner, Orbital Sciences Corp., scrapped the original X-34 design last month (DAILY, Jan. 30), led to the decision to pull out of the United Space Lines venture set up to build the X-34.
