MCDONNELL DOUGLAS AEROSPACE, St. Louis, yesterday received a $23 million modification to a previously awarded contract for FY 1995 production of 12 T-45 training systems. The contract was awarded by U.S. Naval Air Systems Command.
House-Senate conferees on the fiscal 1996 foreign operations appropriations compromise bill have decided to continue for another year the present prohibition on selling shoulder-fired Stinger missiles to Persian Gulf nations. The Senate version had language removing the prohibition but it lost out in conference.
Republican defense authorization conferees made a push Friday to get the fiscal 1996 conference to approve language recommended by Senate Republican Leader Robert Dole (Kan.) calling for mandatory deployment of a multiple-site national missile defense by 2003, but backed off after a warning from Senate Armed Services ranking Democrat Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) that it probably wouldn't survive the Senate, congressional sources said.
The Italian navy wants to double the size of its carrier fleet by adding a second small light aircraft carrier, but the decisions to build and to equip the ship are complicated by a tight modernization budget, an Italian Navy official says.
ENCORE COMPUTER CORP., Fort Lauderdale, Fla., is working under a $2.4 million contract from Lockheed Martin in Orlando, Fla., for the Mission Training Support System (MTSS) program. Encore said the systems will be delivered this quarter and will be deployed at Kirtland AFB, N.M., and at Lockheed Martin in Orlando.
Top Defense Dept. officials are putting together a counterproliferation council that will address a broad range of issues including policy formulation and acquisition. The new "policy review forum" is intended to guide counterproliferation policy, which is still "in the formative stages," Deputy Defense Secretary John White told the second annual counterproliferation conference at the National Defense University in Washington. The new forum will be a "reflection of our concern with counterproliferation," he said Friday.
A U.S. venture aiming to establish the world's first satellite digital radio broadcasting service has received $650 million in financing that will allow it to build its system. Washington-based WorldSpace, Inc., said yesterday that France's Alcatel Espace has started construction of the three geostationary satellites, which will broadcast digital audio, text and multimedia information directly to hand-held automotive or home radio receivers costing less than $100 each. The satellites will provide coverage over Asia, Africa and the Caribbean.
Analyzing the threat from weapons of mass destruction, Deutch terms chemical weapons "the weapon of choice." Nuclear weapons are too money- intensive, he says, and biological armament "really has very little military utility when you get right down to it," he says.
A comparison of the nation's top two helicopter firms offers an interesting insight into alternative strategies evolving in the aerospace industry. Boeing/Sikorsky, the leader, is stressing core competencies and doing as much as possible in-house. Sales are holding at around $2.2 billion a year and employment has slipped modestly from around 13,800 to 10,300. McDonnell Douglas is taking the opposite approach, farming out as much as possible, and stressing its role as a system integrator.
Launch dates have been set for two satellites delayed by technical problems in the past. Canada's Radarsat Earth resources platform is set to lift off from Vandenberg AFB, Calif., on Nov. 3, now that its Delta II launch vehicle has been recertified following its failure to put a Korean satellite in the proper orbit in August (DAILY, Sept. 5, page 346). And the Global Geospace Science Polar spacecraft is down for a Dec.
The U.S. Navy is gearing up to expand the capability of its anti- submarine warfare S-3s to allow them to conduct over-land surveillance by upgrading the aircraft's radar capability. Rear Adm. Brent Bennitt, the Navy's Air Warfare Director, last week signed a draft operational requirements document that calls for adding a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and moving target indicator (MTI) capability to the S-3s. S-3s currently operate the Texas Instruments-built APS-137(V)1 inverse SAR (ISAR).
INFORMATION SYSTEMS CO. of Martin Marietta Technologies Inc., a Lockheed Martin company based in Orlando, Fla., won a U.S. Army contract Oct. 23 potentially worth $500 million. Core teammate in the effort is Science Applications International Corp. Under the five-year contract, the companies will perform the Advanced Distributed Simulation Technology II (ADST II), which involves the linking of dissimilar virtual, constructive, and live simulations into a single synthetic environment.
A White House policy on the Global Positioning System is due out of the White House next month, addressing for the first time at the presidential level "the GPS program, its use, its management, its relationship to the international community, aircraft control, all those issues," DalBello says. Although "a few extraordinarily tough issues" remain to be resolved in the multi-agency GPS group that has been holding regular Tuesday meetings for several months, DalBello says the government will stay with the program, which means a steady supply of satellites for the U.S.
The Central Intelligence Agency is concerned about North Korea's development of new ballistic missiles, but "the worst case scenario one could imagine" is if Pyongyang exports half its missiles and retains the other half, says John Deutch, the director of central intelligence. Deutch also points out the North Korean Nodong-1 missile, with a range estimated to be in excess of 600 kilometers, will probably be fielded next year.
The Defense Dept. is using "exotic technologies" in its counter-proliferation efforts, says William B. Shuler, DOD's deputy assistant secretary for atomic energy in charge of the counterproliferation mission. Those technologies and special operations are particularly suited for heavily shielded targets, he said last week during the second annual counterproliferation conference at National Defense University. SOF and special weapons "help us defeat the targets without blowing them up," he says.
Unmanned aerial vehicles play a significant in counter-proliferation, but Kaminski says they have to be viewed in a "system context." A large number of payloads are being developed for the counterproliferation mission whose designated platform was the beleaguered Hunter Joint Tactical UAV. But that won't affect Kaminski's decision on whether to cancel the program as the Joint Requirements Oversight Council has suggested. He expects to make that decision shortly.
NASA's Office of Space Access and Technology will brief industry Nov. 17 on agency efforts to improve the reliability of commercial space launches it buys through the use of stiffer qualification standards.
Excited by the successful advances growing from the long-running Integrated High Performance Turbine Engine Technology, or IHPTET, initiative, the U.S. is planning to embark on the same kind of focused long-term research for rocket engines.
NASA HAS POSTPONED a planned industry briefing on its draft request for proposals for a single Space Shuttle operations contractor because it needs more time to prepare the draft RFP. The U.S. space agency had planned to release the draft at the November 8 briefing (DAILY, Oct. 26, page 157). A new date probably will be set "in about a week," a spokesman said Friday.
U.S. NAVAL AIR SYSTEMS COMMAND plans release of a formal RFP on about Nov. 30 for procurement of P-3C trainer devices for the Anti-Surface Warfare Improvement Program (AIP). It said in an Oct.
U.S. enginemakers involved in introducing Russian rocket technology to the U.S. market see no impact to their programs from a new NASA policy prohibiting the use of federal funds to develop engines overseas for the U.S. agency's Reusable Launch Vehicle (RLV) effort.
The Hypersonic Vehicles Office at NASA's Langley Research Center is studying ways to apply new technology to a long-range reconnaissance plane that could be based in the continental U.S. and achieve Mach 10 on missions worldwide using dual fuel airbreathing propulsion. James L. Hunt, manager of the Systems Analysis Office within Langley's Hypersonic Vehicles organization, told The DAILY in a telephone interview that the vehicle under study could also serve as a space-access platform, orbiting payloads with the addition of an upper stage.
Fiscal 1996 defense authorization conferees have not settled on language on the ticklish issue of ballistic missile defense, mainly because of competing pressures on the Republican majority, congressional sources said yesterday.
The U.S. Air Force is pushing its Airborne Laser (ABL) over kinetic energy anti-ballistic missile designs both within the Air Force and the other services, according to Air Force Secretary Sheila Widnall. Speaking with The DAILY yesterday during a flight to an ABL demonstration here, Widnall said that, although the kinetic approach is "technically doable," she believed that "at this point our resources would be better spent pushing this technology [ABL]," which she described as being at the leading edge.
Deciding how best to manage the space launch industry's "transition" from the Cold War to a global market economy is the main stumbling block to completion of the Clinton Administration's space policy, according to a top White House space policy advisor.
