The five biggest aerospace companies agreed informally last week to share laboratories and even staffers when working on projects with tight deadlines.
President Clinton's February declassification of more than 800,000 spy satellite photos doesn't mean they'll all be available anytime soon, according to NRO Chief Jeffrey Harris. He says an NRO/CIA "declassification review" of photos and documents will begin in October and won't be completed until September 1996. The imagery will then be shipped to the National Archives, where it will have to be indexed and catalogued before being made available to the public.
NORTHROP GRUMMAN will make 26 new F-5E/F aircraft wings for the U.S. Air Force under an $18.7 million contract to support the RF/F-5 Structural Upgrade Program.
The Marine Corps won't "be a big player in anybody's scenario" for information warfare, says new Commandant Gen. Charles Krulak, adding that IW is an area the Marines "probably need to do a little more in." Even so, IW doesn't rate near the top of the USMC's priority list. Marine involvement in information warfare will never be much above the tactical level, he says, adding, "We win battles. We don't win wars."
Daimler Benz Aerospace is studying an option to move struggling Fokker's operations to a low-wage country. Fokker trading was temporarily suspended on the Amsterdam Stock Exchange last week due to uncertainty about the company's financial condition. DASA owns 51% of Fokker.
VITRO SERVICES CORP., Austin, Tex., will support the U.S. Air Force Space Command's Instrumentation Radar Support Program (IRSP) under a six-year, $35 million contract. The subsidiary of Tracor Inc. said its facility in Fort Walton Beach, Fla., will provide logistics, engineering services, radar system overhauls, component repairs, and radar modification support for IRSP's 146 precision tracking instrumentation radars at 28 test ranges around the world.
In the last week of September, NATO officials should be ready to brief the NATO expansion document, says Bob Hunter, U.S. ambassador to NATO. Starting the second week of October, NATO will brief individual nations that are interested in joining the alliance. Results will go to ministerial meetings in late November or early December.
A series of unrelated anomalies has left the bulk of the U.S. space launch fleet grounded and payloads stacking up. On the upper end of the scale, the Space Shuttle, Titan IV heavy-lift and Delta II medium-lift rockets have all had to delay launches for repairs and investigations. The Atlas is the only primary U.S. launcher that is not grounded.
The team that developed the strategy for meeting the AF's near-term Link 16 needs within MIDS "tried to find what was everybody's second-best solution," says team chairman Martin Meth, DOD industrial capabilities and assessment director. The major question that the group faced was "how do you do it as soon as possible and maintain the benefits of the MIDS architecture and modularity?" he explains. "Nobody was dissatisfied" with the ultimate solution.
Lockheed Martin got a foot in the door of the lucrative Chinese satellite market with the signing Friday of its first contract to built a commercial satellite for a Chinese entity. Company Chairman and CEO Daniel Tellep traveled to Beijing to sign the contract, where he proclaimed that the deal would "help form the foundation for a long and fruitful relationship between China and Lockheed Martin."
U.S. Army and Air Force officials have been asked by Congress to evaluate whether they can rely on the Navy's cooperative engagement capability data network for data transfer, but some program officials aren't entirely clear what CEC would provide. The difference between CEC and a Link 16 capability "is one of the fundamental Air Force questions," says one program official. That question "needs to be answered before we go to the netted data link," he adds.
A competitor to Orbital Sciences Corp.'s Orbcomm satellite messaging system is up in smoke, at least temporarily. CTA Inc. is now evaluating what to do with its GEMnet electronic messaging service after the satellite that it was to operate on, GEMstar-1, was lost in Tuesday's launch failure of the Lockheed Launch Vehicle (LLV- 1).
Williams International may have landed a bigger coup than initially expected when its WTS34-16 turboshaft engine was selected for a design study to become the Joint Tactical Hunter unmanned aerial vehicle's lightweight, heavy fuel engine solution (DAILY, Aug. 17, page 251). Even though the Tier II UAV, or Predator, doesn't have a heavy fuel engine requirement, if the UAVs remain in service following completion of the Advanced Concept Technology Demonstration it will undoubtedly be fitted with one. Industry and Defense Dept.
Asked about his research and development priorities, Krulak says he would "really like" to give platoon commanders a USMC version of the Army's 21st Century Land Warrior head-to-toe uniform that optimizes communication and situational awareness. Krulak suggested integrating a display screen, Global Positioning System and transmitter into a soldier's flak jacket "to give him a clear picture of the battlefield."
The Air Force doesn't yet know how many Class 2 Joint Tactical Information Distribution System terminals it will buy until a Multifunctional Information Distribution System unit can be derived for the F-15, says Brig. Gen. John Hawley, Air Force acquisition director for fighter, command and control, and weapons programs. The AF, which agreed last week to join the MIDS program (DAILY, Aug. 18, page 257), now will have to work with Air Combat Command and user commands "to determine what the requirement will be," Hawley says.
The all-composite Strato 2C research aircraft set a new unofficial altitude record for piston-powered aircraft, flying at 60,867 feet during flight testing Aug. 4. Strato 2C, built by the German company Burkhart Grob, Tussenhaussen- Mattsies, is powered by two specially-modified Teledyne TSIOL-550 400hp six-cylinder liquid-cooled engines that drive two 19-foot, five-bladed propellers, Burkhart Grob said in a statement. Einar Enevoldson, chief test pilot and former NASA test pilot, flew the five-hour mission.
Angry over French plans to resume nuclear testing, Bob Carr, premier of the Australian state of New South Wales, wants to lock out French-German helicopter-maker Eurocopter's Ecureils from an upcoming helo sale. Carr could hear soon from Prime Minister Alan Keating on whether he could ban Eurocopter from the competition for three police helicopters. Eurocopter says only that it's watching the situation very closely. Dassault's AlphaJet has already been bumped from Australia's trainer competition over the testing issue (DAILY, Aug. 2, page 165).
Managers from DOD, NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) are preparing high, medium and low-cost architectures for the next generation of U.S. polar-orbiting weather satellites, which will "converge" military and civilian capabilities to save money, the head of the interagency office managing the new program said Friday.
U.S. and Russian officials plan to meet this fall to work out the specifics of an agreement to exchange spy satellite data that can be used for civil purposes, National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) Director Jeffrey Harris said Friday. In remarks prepared for an address at Litton's Itek Optical Div. to commemorate the 35th anniversary of the first successful mission of the Corona reconnaissance satellite program, Harris said the exchanges with Russia could "lay the groundwork for declassification of Corona's follow-on systems."
Daniel R. Mulville will take over as NASA chief engineer Sept. 1, replacing David H. Mobley, the agency announced last week. Mulville has been deputy chief engineer at agency headquarters since last year. In his new post he will report to Administrator Daniel S. Goldin and be responsible for reviewing the technical readiness and execution of all agency programs.
The U.S. Marine Corps plans to outfit every big-deck amphibious ship with fixed-wing aircraft-initially six AV-8B Harriers and eventually Joint Advanced Strike Technology aircraft, according to new USMC Commandant Gen. Charles Krulak. Having the short take-off/vertical landing, or STOVL, and strike fighter capability on amphibious vessels "will be critical to us in the future," Krulak told reporters yesterday during a breakfast in Washington.
Sharply recovering operating profits at Hawker Siddeley Canada Inc. helped slow net losses for the first half of 1995, a performance that would have been even better if it weren't for new spending on the Orenda Division's new aviation V-8 engine program.
For younger generations who have witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, it's hard to imagine the fear caused by the USSR's orbiting of the tiny Sputnik satellite on October 4, 1957. Newsweek ran a nine page cover story in which fears were raised of a satellite-based missile attack on the United States. Rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, then chief of development of the U.S. Army's guided- missile center, said that a missile fired from a satellite would have almost "line of sight" accuracy.
The cameras that flew in Corona satellites were based on cameras developed for a top secret U.S. Air Force effort to overfly the Soviet Union with balloons, according to Walter J. Levison, who worked on the program at Boston University's Physical Research Laboratories as an Air Force liaison and later as assistant director.
General Electric's GE90 large commercial turbofan program topped 15,000 cycles this month, hitting the mark several months early, GE reported yesterday. Program engineers had set a goal of reaching 15,000 cycles on the basic GE90 configuration-certified in February at 84,700 lbst.-by the time the engine enters service on British Airways Boeing 777s in December.
