The U.S. Air Force's Special Operations Command supports the Marine Corps' call to accelerate production of the V-22 tilt rotor aircraft, a move that could cut as much as three years from the aircraft's delivery schedule and save money in the long run, but that would require the lifting of a $1 billion annual spending cap.
U.S. teams working on proposals and business plans for NASA's reusable launch vehicle (RLV) effort may not spend federal funds on foreign development of flight hardware under new guidelines set by Administrator Daniel S. Goldin for the X-33 and X-34 programs.
House Budget Committee Chairman John R. Kasich (R-Ohio), who exploded in anger when he learned that the Republican leadership wanted to placate the large Republican freshman class by putting Rep. Mark Neumann (R-Wis.) on the Budget Committee, relented Thursday and announced that Neumann would be on the committee after all. Neumann was removed from the House Appropriations national security subcommittee after voting against the fiscal 1996 defense appropriations conference report, which the House rejected. His removal triggered protests from fellow Republican freshmen.
The single proposed agency that would combine the imagery collection, dissemination and distribution activities of eight separate agencies (DAILY, Sept. 13, p. 394) will likely also include the Defense Mapping Agency. Thus, what would have been the National Imagery Agency will now be the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, a Pentagon official says. NIMA could begin its consolidation effort as early as next month, the official says.
The U.S. Air Force restored two SR-71 Blackbird aircraft, tankers, sensors and support equipment for less than half the anticipated cost, according to the service.
McDonnell Douglas expects to take delivery of a Russian aluminum lithium liquid oxygen tank for the DC-XA flying testbed in mid- November. For a time, welding problems threatened to keep the Russian hardware off the single-stage-to-orbit subscale prototype, and NASA was laying plans to retain the original LOX tank from the DC-X flight test series (DAILY, Oct. 5, page 32).
F-22 pilots gave the aircraft's Pilot-Vehicle Interface (PVI) a "thumbs up" following tests completed last month at the Marietta, Ga., facility of prime contractor Lockheed Martin. The tests, designated Part-Task Simulation #5 (PTS 5), continued a series of cockpit exercises begun in 1992. PTS 5 also was the first test in developing the F-22 Full Mission Simulation (FMS) system to support PVI and avionics design and development.
Information on the aircraft eventually to emerge from the Joint Attack Strike Technology Program - the Joint Strike Fighter - is being provided to a number of European countries. Rear Adm. Craig Steidle tells reporters that JAST briefings have been provided to Germany, France, Spain, Italy and The Netherlands. Whether they will get involved hasn't been determined yet, he says. Britain is already part of the JAST program office.
Rep. C.W. (Bill) Young (R-Fla.), chairman of the House Appropriatons national security subcommittee, says he hopes to work out language on the issue of abortion this week that would be acceptable to both House and Senate conferees on the $243 billion fiscal 1996 defense money bill. The House rejected the compromise bill on Sept. 29 primarily because of the opposition of anti-abortionists. Young said last Wednesday that "there does appear to be movement" on resolving language differences.
HUGO B. POZA has been named executive vice president of Lockheed Martin's Sanders unit, succeeding Richard A. Reed, who will retire on Dec. 31 after 34 years with the company, Lockheed Martin said. It also said that Ehtisham U.A. Siddiqui from Lockheed Martin Control Systems Co. in Binghamton, N.Y., will succeed Poza as vice president and general manager of Sanders' Avionics Div., effective Nov. 6.
PanAmSat Corp., the first private provider of global satellite communications services, is expecting to receive a license next month to offer international satellite-based video services directly to customers in Japan.
The intelligence community needs a well-designed program in which its leaders can meet directly with industry officials to give better insights into its key requirements, which could "in turn lead to commercial products that are more tailored to those requirements," Edward R. McCracken, chief of Silicon Graphics Inc., tells the House Intelligence Committee.
NASA launched the Space Shuttle Columbia Friday on the seventh attempt in three weeks, boosting seven astronauts to orbit for a 16-day microgravity mission. Liftoff of the oldest U.S. spaceplane came at 9:53 a.m. EDT as the clouds that have blanketed Florida for several days broke long enough for the launch. Clouds forced a record-matching sixth slip in Columbia's launch Oct. 15, and range conflicts kept the Shuttle on the pad for most of last week (DAILY, Oct. 17, page 93; Oct. 19, page 117).
Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineers Friday sent a series of troubleshooting commands to the Galileo spacecraft Friday in an effort to determine whether its malfunctioning tape recorder can be salvaged. If it can't, the project to survey Jupiter and its moons will be able to recover about half of the anticipated data by storing it in the spacecraft's computer memory, NASA reported Friday. All of the data from Galileo's atmospheric probe should be saved, an as many as 300 images of the planet and its moons.
International teams for the $3 billion Medium Extended Air Defense System program were established Friday at a Pentagon ceremony that saw the two U.S. competitors paired with European counterparts. The action followed the U.S. Army's choice last week of Lockheed Martin and a Hughes/Raytheon team, known as H&R Co., as the U.S. contractors for the Corps SAM program, known internationally as MEADS (DAILY, Oct. 13, p. 77).
McCracken's concerns haven't gone unnoticed. The need to become more accessible to industry was a driver behind the National Reconnaissance Office's decision this year to declassify its headquarters structure and the names of officials filling top positions. NRO, which was officially acknowledged in 1992, was also listed in the Pentagon phone directory for the first time this year.
TRW Chairman and CEO Joseph Gorman is unequivocally committed to retaining his company's defense and space business and growing it by grabbing a larger share of the declining defense market, increasing non- defense contracts, and keeping an eye out for strategic acquisitions.
Dr. Chiaki Mukai, the first Japanese woman to fly in space, already is planning a follow-up to her July 1994 flight. Mukai tells the House Science Committee that experiments she ran on the second International Microgravity Laboratory (IML-2) Shuttle mission suggest that weightlessness cuts production of a bone-producing protein by 90%, while a substance that causes bone absorption increases tenfold. When the International Space Station is up and running, she says, Japan plans to conduct long-term tests of a chemical that "enhances" bone production as a countermeasure.
Textron Marine&Land Systems teamed with U.K.-based Vickers to compete for the U.S. Army-Marine Corps joint lightweight 155mm howitzer competition. The initial memorandum of agreement names Textron as the prime contractor, Textron said. Its Cadillac Gage unit will offer the VSEL- designed Ultralightweight Field Howitzer (UFH).
MISSION CONTROL-MOSCOW has formally notified its three-man Mir crew that they won't be coming home until Feb. 29, 45 days later than planned because of problems preparing a Soyuz booster for their replacement (DAILY, Oct. 16, page 84). On Friday, Germany's Thomas Reiter became the second West European to walk in space, joining Sergei Avdeev in a five-hour, 16- minute spacewalk to service external experiments as part of the European Space Agency's Euromir '95 mission.
The House and Senate intelligence committees are scheduled to conference tomorrow on their fiscal 1996 bills, and one major area that will have to be agreed upon is whether or not the National Reconnaissance Office should shift its budget to procure a new generation of small, inexpensive satellites. The issue has divided House Intelligence Chairman Larry Combest (R-Tex.), who favors small sats, and his Democratic counterpart, Rep. Norman Dicks (D-Wash.), who is against such a major change to NRO's architecture plans.
Discovery of a planet orbiting a nearby star in the constellation Pegasus doesn't eliminate the need for a New Millennium optical interferometry mission to look for planets outside the solar system, even though the epochal discovery was made and confirmed with ground-based telescopes. The new planet is an "oddball" that so perturbs its star that the effect can be spotted from the earth's surface, NASA Administrator Daniel S. Goldin quickly pointed out to House Science Chairman Bob Walker (R-Pa.) last week.
Senators yesterday approved a $13.8 billion NASA authorization bill, setting the stage for a showdown over the Earth Observing System (EOS) in conference. Sen. Larry Pressler (R-S.D.), chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee that reported the NASA authorization, listed the Mission to Planet Earth as "NASA's most important and relevant program" and fully funded the EOS request at $1.36 billion.
ALLIANT TECHSYSTEMS' Global Environmental Solutions unit is studying technologies to dismantle rocket motors of Ukrainian SS-24 ICBMs, and recover materials for non-military use. Alliant said GES, based in Minneapolis, is doing the work under a seven-month, $1 million contract from the U.S. Defense Nuclear Agency. Work will be performed in Magna, Utah, and at the former SS-24 production site in Pavlograd, Ukraine. GES President Larry J.
