Responding to concerns of military ineffectiveness, NATO leaders have decided that an air strike must be carried out "to a point where it has an effect," rather than be stopped just minutes after the attack begins, Robert Hunter, the U.S. ambassador to NATO said yesterday. "We have decided that we don't want to be in the business of being called upon and turned off in five minutes," Hunter told reporters at a Washington breakfast briefing.
Lockheed Martin's Sanders unit is working under an initial $26 million contract on a cooperative U.S.-U.K. logistics upgrade program for the AN/SSQ-108 Outboard system, which provides countermeasures detection and analysis for U.S. and Royal Navy destroyers. The upgrade will allow system components to handle current and future threats with a sustainable logistical design, Sanders said.
EUROPEAN SPACE AGENCY said its Ulysses spacecraft, the first probe ever to fly over the poles of the Sun, climbed to its maximum latitude of 80.2 degrees over the Sun's northern pole on July 31. Ulysses is carrying nine scientific instruments provided by research institutes in Europe and the U.S.
The U.S. Air Force is looking at a long list of pre-planned product improvements (P3Is) it would like to apply to its E-8C Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System (Joint STARS) aircraft, but it still has to come up with the money. "There is several P3Is out there," an AF official told The DAILY, but "right now there's no funding for them."
Williams International has been selected to perform a design study to provide the light weight, heavy fuel engine for the Hunter Joint Tactical Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, replacing a team of RPI/Lockheed Martin.
Boeing, recovering nicely in the jetliner market, saw customer financing requirements fall 16%-about $500 million-in the first half of 1995, after several quarters in which customers demanded more and more help. Financing requirements at McDonnell Douglas, whose recovery is less certain, nearly tripled to over just over a billion dollars in the same period.
The chance of a catastrophic Space Shuttle launch failure has dropped dramatically since the January 1986 Challenger disaster, although the solid rocket motor nozzle joints currently hanging up the launch schedule remain a weak link, according to a new risk study prepared for NASA by Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC).
Efforts by congressional Republicans to sharply curtail federal support for science and technology will "severely cripple industry-led technology programs," President Clinton's assistant for economic policy warned last week. At a White House meeting last Thursday with 300 industry leaders- including executives from the aerospace industry-Laura D'Andrea Tyson said historical trends suggest that federal cuts in research and development will result in industry funding less R&D on its own, not more as Republicans have suggested.
COMPUTER SCIENCES CORP. said it is working under a subcontract from SEMCOR Inc. to support the U.S. Air Force's Aeronautical Systems Center at Eglin AFB, Fla. SEMCOR, which specializes in acquisition management, systems engineering, and systems integration support to both government and industry, received a Technical and Acquisition Management Support (TAMS) contract from the AF. CSC said it will support the procurement function, which is the responsibility of the AF Materiel Command.
The C-17 flunked only one of 12 key test areas during last month's Reliability, Maintainability and Availability Evaluation, and that failure- false indications from the built-in-test system-was expected and is covered under existing warranties, preliminary RM&AE data show.
A Predator unmanned aerial vehicle lost during operations over Bosnia- Herzegovina this week was making the first operational reconnaissance flight with a new Ku-band satellite link for upgraded imagery. Albania-based Predators have been temporarily grounded after two of the UAVs crashed, and a review of the crashes is underway.
Unisys Corp., McLean, Va., has been picked to negotiate for a quality assurance and engineering support contract at Goddard Space Flight Center, Md., NASA said. The cost-plus-award-fee contract, with a two-year base period and one three-year option, is potentially worth about $100 million. Work will include quality assurance for flight hardware, software and mission integration, involving support for electronic parts, materials and packaging engineering.
Both F-15 pilots and three officers from the AWACS crew involved in the April 1994 Black Hawk helicopter shootdown over northern Iraq have been disqualified from various duties for at least three years, according to an Aug. 11 Air Force report on the incident. The F-15 pilots won't be able to fly, while the AWACS officers won't be allowed to perform duties that involve aircraft control in air operations.
August 11, 1995 Loral Corporation Loral Corporation, Defense Systems-Eagan, St. Paul, Minnesota, is being awarded a $6,363,203 face value increase to a cost plus fixed fee contract for sustaining engineering and maintenance of the Advanced Planning System to accommodate a new Joint Service Air Tasking Order format. Contract is expected to be completed
McDonnell Douglas Helicopter Systems has picked AlliedSignal Aerospace to provide color liquid crystal displays for the Army's Longbow Apache helicopter in a contract worth more than $300 million. AlliedSignal said its Government Electronic Systems unit in Teterboro, N.J., will handle the work, providing the first multipurpose displays (MPDs) for the advanced attack helicopter in the spring of 1996.
Boeing Defense&Space Group, prime NASA contractor on the International Space Station, has entered agreements with two Russian firms with key roles to play in building the orbiting facility. Meeting in Moscow yesterday Boeing officials and their counterparts at Russia's Khrunichev works signed a $190 million agreement for delivery of the Functional Energy Block (FGB), a "space tug" that will be the first element of the International Station when it is launched atop a Russian Proton booster in November 1997.
Aircraft from the U.K.'s Defense Test and Evaluation Organization took part in simulated air refueling exercises recently to study the Airbus Industrie A310 commercial airframe as a possible aerial tanker to replace the VC-10.
High winds at altitude and an unexplained drop in hydraulic pressure in two rocket nozzles scuttled back-to-back attempts to launch EER Systems' Meteor commercial experiment carrier over the weekend.
Hopping on the Pentagon's "system of systems" bandwagon, McDonnell Douglas plans by the end of the year to consolidate all of its technology development units under a single, integrated organization, MDC officials told The DAILY yesterday. The new unit will be called the Advanced Systems and Technology- Phantom Works, elevating the name of MDC's well-known advanced engineering unit to cover an organization of about 3,000 employees and including technologists from Huntington Beach, Calif.; Long Beach, Calif.; Mesa, Ariz.; San Diego and St. Louis.
Kaman Aerospace Corp. has won a $690,000 U.S. Navy contract to demonstrate the feasibility of using its commercial K-MAX "aerial truck" helicopter to resupply Navy ships at sea.
