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.
LOCKHEED MARTIN Aeronautical Systems, Marietta, Ga., said J.E. "Ed" Phillips has been named vice president-operations, replacing Bill Bullock who moved to Fort Worth, Tex., as executive VP of the company's Tactical Aircraft Systems unit. Phillips joined Lockheed in 1960, and was most recently director of operations for the F-22 Team Program Office.
LAUNCH DATE for the next mission of the Space Shuttle Atlantis to dock with Russia's Mir space station will be Nov. 11, with liftoff at about 7:56 a.m. EST. NASA reported yesterday. It will be the second Shuttle/Mir linkup.
Aircraft power requirements, and thus the potential problems of heat dissipation, are rising in direct proportion to the increasing workload being placed on the electrical subsystems of high-performance aircraft. Heat dissipation is the number one cause of electronics failures, yet advanced avionics, such as ECM and radar, thermal and other sensors, are essential in high-threat combat environments.
Boeing, McDonnell Douglas and their engine suppliers emerged as the big winners from yesterday's confirmation of Saudi flag carrier Saudia's huge 61-aircraft fleet replacement order. The White House said the Saudis signed their final agreements on the deal Wednesday night (DAILY, Oct. 26, page 157), and claimed its total value came to some $6 billion. Industry and banking sources continue to say that the figure actually tops $7 billion.
Loral Command and Control Systems beat out four other competitors for the U.S. Air Force's Theater Battle Management Core Systems (TBMCS) program, intended to fuse information for battle commanders. Loral Command and Control, based in Colorado Springs, beat teams led by Lockheed Martin, SAIC, Hughes Aircraft, and Loral Defense Systems-Eagen.
Texas Instruments will supply an electro-optical subsystem (EOS) to help give the E-3 AWACS a theater ballistic missile monitoring role. TI received a $16.9 million subcontract from AWACS prime contractor Boeing Defense&Space Group as part of the $43.5 million Extended Airborne Global Launch Evaluator, or EAGLE, program, managed by the U.S. Force's Electronic Systems Center and funded by the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization.
Boeing beat Wall Street's consensus guess on third-quarter profits yesterday by 22% thanks to lower taxes and R&D spending, but Chairman Frank Shrontz warned that the Machinists' union strike will cut deeply into fourth-quarter jetliner deliveries, taking a bite out of profits.
The House and Senate Intelligence Committees conferenced Tuesday but didn't have enough time to iron out all the differences in their fiscal 1996 bills, including whether or not the National Reconnaissance Office should be required to procure a new generation of small satellites. Meeting on Capitol Hill, conferees proposed several options to resolve the issue, which has not only divided the two panels but also House Intelligence Committee Chairman Larry Combest (R-Texas) and his Democratic counterpart, Rep. Norman Dicks (Wash.).
VITRO SERVICES CORP., a subsidiary of Tracor Inc., will continue operation and maintenance of range and test facilities at Eglin AFB, Fla., under a two-year, $90 million contract from the U.S. Air Force. The company said it has served as the Eglin operation and maintenance contractor since 1952, except for a five-year period in the mid 1980s.
U.S. AIR FORCE Space and Missile Systems Center, Los Angeles AFB, Calif., said the draft request for proposal for Air Force Satellite Control Network (AFSCN) Command and Control Segment sustainment is available. It said in an Oct.
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center is polling industry for information on a variety of off-the-shelf satellite attitude determination and control and power subsystem components as a way of holding down costs on its planned series of MIDEX medium-sized Explorer spacecraft and other space probes. The U.S. space agency has asked industry for information on components already developed for other spacecraft as a way of setting requirements for the MIDEX series of "frequent, high-end space science missions at the lowest possible cost."
Pratt&Whitney's defeat of General Electric in a bid to add thrust- vectoring capability to the F-16/VISTA variable stability research plane not only gives P&W's pitch-yaw/balanced beam nozzle, or PY/BBN, entree to a long-term thrust-vectoring research effort, but also significantly expands the test envelope available to the VISTA project.
COLEMAN RESEARCH CORP. will continue to provide support to the U.S. Army Space and Strategic Defense Command for Army Space, NMD and TMD planning, integration, and mission execution, the command said in an Oct. 16 Commerce Business Daily notice.
Hughes Aircraft has delivered the first airborne computer for the F-22 program, according to a recent Air Force announcement, and is scheduled to deliver 34 more over the coming year. The computer, designated the common integrated processor (CIP), represents a departure from the conventional "federated" avionics architecture, in which each functional subsystem (radar, communications, navigation and identification, EW, etc.) has its own processor. Instead, the CIP provides a single, integrated system for all signal and data processing.
TRACOR APPLIED SCIENCES is working under a $29.5 million U.S. Navy contract to provide technical services in support of shipboard and shore-based Navy and Marine Corps Air Traffic Control and Landing Systems (ATC&LS). The contract, the fifth consecutive award to Tracor in this area, means the company "will remain the Navy's primary ATC&LS support contractor for the next five years," said K. Bruce Hamilton, president of Tracor Applied Sciences. Work is being carried out by Tracor's Electronic Systems Division at Patuxent River, Webster Field, and St.
JOHN M. KLINEBERG, the former director of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, has been named executive vice president of Globalstar programs at Space Systems/Loral. In that capacity he will oversee development, production and launch of the company's planned 56-satellite constellation of low-Earth orbit communications relays. Klineberg took a buyout offer to leave NASA (DAILY, March 22, page 430).
The Orion Atlantic partnership signed a contract Tuesday with Europe's Matra Marconi Space for the construction and on-orbit delivery of its second satellite, Orion 2. The spacecraft will be located over the Atlantic Ocean and will provide private communication network and video distribution services to the eastern U.S., South America, Europe, Middle East, Africa, and areas of the former Soviet Union, Orion said. The company said the spacecraft will be launched in the first half of 1998 on a Lockheed Martin Atlas rocket.
Fearing the death of Europe's Future Large Airlifter, or FLA, development effort, Aerospatiale chief Louis Gallois wants a budget-cutting French government to commit up-front to FLA before the end of the year. Of the eight nations involved, only Germany has so far put up its money - 4.3 billion marks, or $3 billion, by 2009. "It is time, and even urgent, to become involved in the pre-development phase," Gallois said.
The U.S. Air Force plans to award a contract by the end of fiscal 1996 for a technology demonstration of an advanced, space-based tactical surveillance system that could leverage commercial capabilities. The Warfighter-1 demonstration is to be divided into two parts, technology validation and concept of operations, with a launch date of no later than the fourth quarter of 1999, according to announcements in the Oct. 25 Commerce Business Daily.
MRJ Inc., a Fairfax, Va.-based engineering, consulting and systems integration firm, has received a $39 million NASA contract to support the U.S. agency's National Aerodynamic Simulation Facility at Ames Research Center. Under the five-year contract, MRJ experts in high-performance computing, networking, mass storage and visualization will help NASA provide research services to scientists across the nation, the company said.
NATO countries should jointly buy an airborne ground surveillance system and let member countries contribute additional assets, a committee of the alliance has concluded. A NATO official said yesterday that the panel decided last week on a "minimum essential NATO-owned and -operated core capability, complemented by interoperable national assets."
NASA's Office of Aeronautics plans to measure the chemistry of supersonic transport exhaust again after a test with an Air France Concorde last year revealed an unexpectedly high level of sulfur particles in the exhaust plume.
An Evans&Sutherland head-tracked projector has been incorporated in the full mission F-16 mid-life update (MLU) research flight simulator inaugurated last Friday at the National Aerospace Laboratory in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, the company reported yesterday.
