Director of Central Intelligence John Deutch told the House Intelligence Committee that the authority of the DCI should be increased. He said the changes would be "marginal," because the "DCI has most of the authority he or she needs."
NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) are in the final stages of preparing for launch an Atlas IIAS rocket that would place an experimental satellite at the neutral gravity point between the Earth and sun. The Lockheed Martin-built launcher is slated for liftoff on Nov. 23 between 1:54 a.m. and 3:24 a.m. EST from Cape Canaveral Air Station, Fla., Lockheed Martin said yesterday. It would be the tenth Atlas launch from the Cape this year. One launch this year took place at Vandenberg AFB, Calif.
FAA gave a green light yesterday to a Boeing/General Electric proposal to modify fan tip clearances on GE90 turbofans powering 777 widebody twins due for delivery to British Airways and program executives hope to have the aircraft ready to go before the end of the week.
C-17 Globemaster III airlifters have flown 120 sorties so far with only one airplane-caused mission delay as part of U.S. support for NATO's Bosnia operations, Air Force and industry officials said yesterday.
PRATT&WHITNEY said All Nippon Airways has chosen the PW4090 engine for its ten Boeing 777-300 airliners. The sale is worth about $200 million to P&W, the United Technologies company said yesterday. Deliveries of the 777- 300 are slated to begin in 1998.
Preparations for the International Space Station by two partner nations will dominate the next Space Shuttle mission, set to lift off from Kennedy Space Center, Fla., on Jan. 11, 1996. The primary objective of STS-72 aboard the Shuttle Endeavour will be retrieval of Japan's Space Flyer Unit (SFU), a 7,000-pound space exposure experiment that includes important Station elements. Once the SFU is safely in the cargo bay, the five-member crew plans two spacewalks to test hardware developed to help astronauts assemble the Station in orbit.
ORBITAL SCIENCES CORP. said yesterday it has completed the acquisition of MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates, a leading supplier of commercial space remote sensing ground stations. OSC, based in Dulles, Va., said it exchanged about 4.1 million shares of its common stock for all of the outstanding stock of the Vancouver, B.C., company. Also, MDA employees received options for about 328,000 shares of OSC common stock.
AIRPORT SYSTEMS INTERNATIONAL INC., Overland Park, Kans., will supply navigation aids to Turkey worth about $900,000. Keith S. Cowan, president and chief executive officer, said "VOR systems manufactured by Airport Systems will be installed at four fixed locations within Turkey. We will also be supplying a mobile system to be used for site testing and emergency operations."
AlliedSignal's two newest auxiliary power units - the 131-9[D] on Delta Airlines' Douglas MD-90s and the 331-500 on United's Boeing 777 widebody twins - have racked up thousands of initial service hours without an unplanned, engine-caused removal.
Canadian ground controllers at Saint Hubert, Quebec, south of Montreal, expect to have the first Radarsat image in hand within three to five weeks, according to a Canadian Space Agency official. Antennas and other deployables on the synthetic aperture radar platform checked out last week following the satellite's Delta II launch to polar orbit Nov. 4 (DAILY, Nov. 7, page 221), and CSA controllers were optimistic its electronic systems would come on line quickly.
Extrapolating these lines suggests where defense contractors could usefully employ their resources, and the most interesting lines of all are the DOD spending rates for computer services (about double between 1990 and 1994 to more than $3 billion a year) and engineering and architectural services (up from slightly under $2 billion to more than $2.5 billion over the same period) - and there's no end in sight to these trends. Why? Because those are the primary activities DOD is contracting out.
DEFENSE DEPT. notified Congress Friday that Israel has requested two Hughes AN/TPQ-37 Firefinder counter-battery artillery radar sets and related training and spares at an estimated cost of $50 million. The Army is managing the transaction.
The Senate late Thursday gave final congressional approval to the $243 billion fiscal 1996 defense appropriation that President Clinton promised to veto because it's $6.9 billion more than he requested. The Senate's approval, by a vote of 59 to 39, followed the House's 270-158 endorsement earlier in the day.
An Ariane 44P booster lifted the European Space Agency's Infrared Space Observatory into an elliptical orbit Thursday night after a week-long delay while technicians checked out the booster's on-board computer. Liftoff from the European spaceport at Kourou, French Guiana, came at 8:20 p.m. EST Thursday and placed the 5,500-pound spacecraft on its way to a 500 by 71,800 kilometer orbit inclined 5.25 degrees to the Equator, according to Arianespace, the European launch consortium.
Contractors who lost out in the U.S. Navy's competition for the radio-frequency subsystem of the Integrated Defensive Electronic Countermeasures will get a second chance at the potentially billion dollar program, but not until after the turn of the century. Lockheed Martin's Sanders unit beat out Northrop Grumman, Westinghouse and Raytheon for engineering and manufacturing development and two full production lots.
High-performance computers, already well established in simulation, command and control and computer-aided engineering, are moving down the Pentagon food chain. Dr. Anita K. Jones, director of defense research and engineering, ticked off some emerging applications for a recent hearing of the House Basic Research Subcommittee: modeling and simulation for training, battlefield medical technology, rapid response planning and logistics, and design and cost optimization of weapon systems.
After more than a decade of urging by the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, airworthiness regulators have adopted new rules designed to protect against engine rotor burst in helicopters.
Ranking Senate Armed Services Democrat Sen. Sam Nunn (Ga.), in supporting the $7 billion congressional increase over President Clinton's fiscal 1996 defense request, says the force structure today is much smaller than five years ago, but "busier than it has ever been. The fact is we simply cannot keep on reducing the defense budget the way we have been. The people are wearing out. The equipment is wearing out...." Nunn's remarks were inserted in The Congressional Record during the Senate's debate on the fiscal 1996 defense appropriations bill.
ITT AND WESTINGHOUSE on Nov. 21 are slated to deliver the first of Finland's AN/ALQ-165 Airborne Self Protection Jammers. Finland last year signed a letter of intent to buy 46 ASPJs, for its F/A-18 fighters. The ceremony is slated to take place at ITT Avionics's headquarters in Clifton, N.J. The delivery will mark the first ASPJ export, ITT said. Switzerland also has bought ASPJs for its F/A-18s, and South Korea is negotiating to buy the system for its F-16s.
Or, looked at another way, the dollar share of services within total DOD procurement increased from 27% in 1980 to 37% in 1994 (the last year covered by the report). And, since service contracts tend to be smaller than hardware awards, the actual number of contract actions for services passed hardware contracts in about 1993. They nearly doubled over the 1980-94 period - from 65,000 to 120,000 - while annual hardware actions slid down to just above 100,000.
Tucked away in last week's GAO report on DOD civilian acquisition employment (DAILY, Nov. 17, p. 281) is documentation of the across-the-board shift from products to services. As measured in constant 1996 dollars, contract awards for services rose $10 billion from 1980 to 1994, while awards for products tumbled $74 billion from their 1985 peak.
The U.S. Army and the United Arab Emirates are renewing an effort to install Advanced Threat Radar Jammers (ATRJs) in UAE Apache helicopters. Several senators balked last year when Congress learned of the U.S. Army plan, citing concerns about co-development and selling the system before it had completed all its tests.
The Joint Requirements Oversight Council provides the best opportunity for regional commanders-in-chiefs to voice their views on the Pentagon budget, at least according to Adm. Richard Macke, commander-in- chief of U.S. Pacific Command. The JROC provides even better input than the Integrated Priority List maintained by DOD, he says. Macke also tells reporters he doesn't expect great changes to the JROC following departure early next year of Adm. William Owens, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But, he says, "you may see some tweaking."
Appropriations conferees funded NASA at $13.813 billion for fiscal 1996, cutting $75 million from the agency's Mission To Planet Earth (MTPE) instead of the almost $339 million the House bill would have cut. To preserve funding for the MTPE's Earth Observing System (EOS) program targeted by authorizers and appropriators in the House, the conference took $20 million from the National Science Foundation and another $33 million from science, aeronautics and technology accounts.
