House Science Committee Chairman Robert S. Walker (R-Pa.) announced Friday that he would not run for re-election next year, leaving Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.) next in line for the chairmanship. Walker offered no specific reason for not seeking re-election after ten terms in the House. "I just think it's time for me to move on," he said.
Human-generated space debris may take a back seat to natural meteoroids as a threat to Earth-orbiting spacecraft in the next few years. Scientists in the physics dept. at the University of Western Ontario predict that the annual Leonid meteoroid storm is due for a dramatic increase in intensity before the end of the century, perhaps by a factor of 10,000, based on its past behavior.
The U.S. Air Force's Wright Laboratory is setting up a home page on the World Wide Web for the Tri-Service Technology Development Strategy for Avionics. The aim is to encourage dialogue in the avionics community. The address is: http://www.aa.wpafb.af.mil/tstda/tstdal.html. Would-be users might need to be patient, however, because the introductory page still wasn't up and running as of Friday.
The U.S. Air Force awarded contracts of $264 million to Rockwell International to privatize all the depot-level maintenance and repair activities on missile and aircraft inertial guidance systems at Newark AFB, Ohio, and $19 million to Wyle Laboratories for metrology and calibration services there. The Air Force will close the base effective Oct. 1, 1996.
Harold J. Johnson, the General Accounting Office's associate director for international relations and trade issues, tells the House International Relations Committee that the Cooperative Threat Reduction program with the four nuclear states of the former Soviet Union has had "a limited impact" apart from the return of hundreds of nuclear warheads from Ukraine to Russia.
Investigators looking into the fatal May 10 crash of an F-117 aircraft in New Mexico were too hard on the plane's cockpit layout, one former F-117 pilot says. Their report was critical of several cockpit factors, including the angle and distance between attitude indicators. Pilot head movement required to monitor both, it said, could result in disorientation, which it assumed caused the crash (DAILY, Nov. 2, p. 200). "It's not a great cockpit," the former pilot says, but it is "a good cockpit."
Rep. Norman Dicks (D-Wash.) sees little likelihood that the fencing of the $493 million B-2 appropriation in the fiscal 1996 defense authorization conference report is likely to lead to a reprogramming request by Defense Secretary William J. Perry that would wipe out the funding. "I'm not thrilled about it, and yet we can work with it," says Dicks, a senior Democrat on the House Appropriations national security subcommittee. Disapproval of an Administration reprogramming by the panel would kill it.
The U.S. Navy still hasn't decided what to do with the strategic nuclear submarines it will decomission early next century under the START agreement. Adm. Henry Chiles, head of U.S. Strategic Command, tells reporters that the issue "needs to be studied for several years." Options include mothballing or converting to such conventional missions as carrying cruise missiles or special operations forces. Conversion "is going to be an expensive proposition," he says.
The Defense Dept. on Thursday backed off its original suspension of the "rule of two" program of set-asides for small disadvantaged businesses (SDBs) by proposing changes in the Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement that would, among other things, give the SDBs some help in competing for subcontracts.
NASA is set to release a draft of the cooperative agreement notice (CAN) that will govern the design, fabrication and flight test of its X-33 reusable launch vehicle testbed, with a Single-Stage-To-Orbit (SSTO) approach required. A CAN synopsis released on the Internet this week indicates the full document could be posted as early as today. Written comments will be due Jan. 22, 1996, with a final CAN expected out by April 1, 1996. Proposals will be received on or about May 14, 1996.
New Zealand's Ministry of Defense has narrowed the field of competitors to replace its frigate-based Westland Wasp helicopters, leaving Kaman and Westland to vie for the award. Contractors were notified Tuesday by the government that Kaman's SH-2G Super Seasprite and Westland's Super Lynx were short-listed for best and final offers. Eliminated from the competition were Sikorsky and Eurocopter, industry officials say.
The Boeing/Sikorksy RAH-66 Comanche helicopter team is continuing to work toward first flight and plans to fit Aircraft No. 1 with its rotor blades in the next couple of days, Jim Morris, the contractor program manager, said yesterday. "We're getting close," he told The DAILY. First flight had been planned for late November, but that wasn't a contract requirement. Testing and preparations for the flight should be finished soon, he said, but he also noted that Comanche is a development program and that problems couldn't be ruled out.
Ukraine will be allowed as many as 20 commercial space launches through 2001, the majority of them through its partnership with Boeing, under a bilateral trade agreement with the U.S. signed yesterday in Vienna.
Russia completed deployment of its Glonass navigation satellite constellation yesterday with launch of the 24th Glonass satellite from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan atop a Proton booster. According to Russian press accounts, the new "Uragan" platform was on its way to its operational orbit at 19,100 kilometers altitude with a boost from the DM-2 upper stage on the heavy Proton-K launch vehicle. Originally intended solely for military use, the Glonass system has been available for civilian use since March. It is similar in function to the U.S.
The U.S. Army yesterday announced that a Motorola-led team has won the competition for the next-generation ground station to handle battlefield intelligence from airborne sensors, including the Joint STARS aircraft. The Army's Communications and Electronics Command, Ft. Monmouth, N.J., awarded Motorola about $53.6 million to supply the Common Ground Station (CGS). Potential contract value, if all seven one-year options are exercised, is about $267.6 million.
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has dropped its inquiry into possible anti-trust problems with the Rockwell-Lockheed Martin joint venture that NASA has picked to run Space Shuttle operations, the venture's head said yesterday. Kent M. Black, chief executive of United Space Alliance, said the Rockwell-Lockheed Martin joint venture received a letter from the FTC late Wednesday informing it that the inquiry had been closed. The investigation came to light during congressional testimony by NASA last month (DAILY, Nov. 13, page 245).
The fiscal 1996 defense authorization compromise bill has structured the new attack submarine program so that the winner of the competition for the lowest price would build the first sub in a new class, and would be in a strong position to wind up building them all, congressional sources agreed yesterday. The new class has been estimated to cost as much as $60 billion.
Japan's National Space Development Agency (NASDA) and the Australian Space Office signed an agreement yesterday for use of the Woomera Airfield in South Australia for free-flight tests of Japan's Automatic Landing Flight Experiment(ALFLEX).
LOCKHEED MARTIN AND ROCKWELL have been given the go-ahead for a $30.2 million sale of Hellfire II anti-armor missiles to the Royal Netherlands Air Force, Lockheed Martin announced yesterday. Earlier this year, the two companies formed the Hellfire System Limited Liability Co. to market the missile internationally. The contract with the Dutch was signed in October, but was on hold for a congressional review period that ended Dec. 1. All missiles will be delivered by the end of the year, Lockheed Martin said.
Deeply buried targets are a "serious issue" and the Pentagon is trying to address the concern in a new study, according to the head of U.S. Strategic Command. Adm. Henry G. Chiles said the Defense Dept. is increasingly faced with hardened underground targets, including sites for the production and storage of weapons of mass destruction. He told reporters during a breakfast meeting in Washington on Wednesday that he is "concerned about the deeply buried situation in the world."
The Pentagon says Thrust Two of the MAFET program (DAILY, Dec. 14, p. 414) "includes a range of contracts targeted at specific, well-defined problems in the areas of fabrication, devices and circuits, packaging and passive components, millimeter wave test, and multi-chip assemblies." It lists the contractors as follows:
HUGHES AIRCRAFT and The Carlyle Group yesterday concluded the transfer of Magnavox Electronic Systems Co., Ft. Wayne, Ind,., Hughes said yesterday. Hughes announced in September it would by Magnavox for $370 million in cash (DAILY, Sept. 12, p. 387). Magnavox has about 3,000 employees with facilities in Ft. Wayne, Mahwah, N.J., and Torrance, Calif.
Machinists union workers at Boeing Co. voted Wednesday by an overwhelming margin to accept a new four-year contract and end their 69-day strike. The union said 21,383 of the 32,500 employees cast ballots, with 18,604 voting for the new agreement and 2,799 voting against it. The agreement limits the amount of subcontracting, increases wages, and does not include cuts in health insurance the company had proposed earlier.
A phased reduction of nuclear weapons will require a corresponding emphasis on new technology conventional weapons - particularly active defenses against tactical ballistic missiles and cruise missiles - Gen. Charles A. Horner (USAF, Ret.), former commander of the Air Force Space Command, told a Washington news conference yesterday sponsored by the Henry L. Stimson Center.
