China's Long March rocket, grounded since a January accident, isn't scheduled to resume flying until late September at the earliest, sources said yesterday. The latest Long March schedule envisions launch of the Asiasat 2 satellite at that time, followed by the Echostar 1 direct broadcast satellite (DBS) in November.
DOD is awaiting approval by acquisition executive Paul Kaminski of an integrated project team for the MilSatCom architecture. It then will begin to finalize the design. "We are looking at five different [MilSatCom] architectures right now," Valletta says. (Continued) By Oct. 23, the final architecture will be submitted to Kaminski for approval. The five architectures include separate acquisitions for EHF, UHF, and SHF frequencies, as well as combinations thereof, Valletta says.
How much will Ball Aerospace be affected by parent company Ball Corp.'s move to split off part of its operations into a joint venture that will be controlled by a French firm? Zilch, according to a Ball corporate spokesman, who says Ball will split off only its glass manufacturing operations. Ball had considered a sell-off of its space and communications operations last year, but changed its mind when the operation began winning new contracts-many of them apparently classified.
Moody's Investors Service is reviewing the Aa3 long-term debt rating of certain guaranteed subsidiaries of Daimler-Benz AG for possible downgrade, and it assigned a counterparty rating of A3 to British Aerospace Public Ltd. Co. (PLC).
Tony Valletta, DOD's C3I acquisition chief, says he sees C3I receiving greater attention in the Defense Dept. and shaking the image of subservience to weapon systems. Over the last year, funds initially intended for weapon programs were instead spent on new C3I requirements, he says. "That's something I've never seen before," he tells an EIA-sponsored conference in Washington.
Don't expect any cooperation between the U.S.' JASSM development and the U.K.'s Conventionally Armed Standoff Missile (CASOM) procurement. "We aren't working anything active with the U.K.," Schulte says. By the time Britain downselects, the Pentagon program "could be off and running," he adds. If, however, the same company were to win JASSM and CASOM contracts, "both sides might get some lift out of that," he says.
Last week's historic docking between the Space Shuttle Atlantis and Russia's Mir space station wasn't only a milestone in relations between the Cold War superpowers, it marked a thaw in the often- chilly relations between the Russian Space Forces and their civilian counterparts as well. At a post-docking press conference Yuri Koptiev, head of the Russian Space Agency, admitted the space forces contributed to the mission. Col. Gen.
Politics played some role in Lockheed Martin's decision to centralize all satellite operations at its Sunnyvale, Calif., facility and close two Astro Space plants in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. "If they had canceled us out, there would not have been a large [Lockheed Martin] facility in California, and I do not think they would have allowed that to happen," says a source at the Sunnyvale facility. Why? Because the company wants all the congressional support it can get, and California's 52 seats in the House are key to that.
Attention-grabbing U.S. technology at the Paris Air Show earlier this month obscured the reality that while U.S. military technology is superb, very little of it applies to the export markets-where a lot of future sales will be, contends Merrill Lynch aerospace analyst Byron Callan. "Unnoticed by many were offerings that could be far more applicable to global defense markets than B-2 bombers," Callan told clients in a post- Paris report Merrill circulated this week.
The Senate Armed Services Committee has directed the Secretary of Defense to submit a plan providing for production of the RAH-66 Comanche helicopter by fiscal year 2001, three years earlier than planned. The directive was made public Friday in a SASC press release on the committee's markup of the fiscal 1996 authorization, which concluded Thursday night. The panel marked to the $264.7 billion congressional budget resolution ceiling, $7 billion above the request.
For the second time in four months, Boeing is cutting back jetliner production rates, even though orders for all three major airframers are rebounding nicely. It means that despite a bulging new order book and the ramping up of the long-awaited 777 widebody twin, Boeing will remain stuck at 17.5 planes per month until at least 1997, just as management had forecasted early this year (DAILY, Feb. 3, page 173).
LARRY LYNN, deputy under secretary of defense for advanced technology, was formally appointed to head the Advanced Research Projects Agency on June 28. Paul G. Kaminksi, DOD's under secretary for acquisition and technology, said during a Pentagon briefing that Lynn would continue to oversee Advanced Concept Technology Demonstrations through the FY '96 planning cycle, after which a replacement would be found. Tom Perdue, assistant deputy under secretary of defense for ballistic missile defense, will act as Lynn's deputy in managing the ACTDs.
The Joint Direct Attack Munition program office will reissue a draft RFP for a JDAM radar. The first draft, released in February, was retracted because of funding cuts. The office will host an industry day July 7 to outline its revamped acquisition approach. One officer says an affordability study will be part of the concept exploration/demonstration program. Funding for the effort will run from FY '96 through FY '98. Value of the contract is estimated to be around $1.4 million.
The MilSatCom architecture "will be commercial, NDI, off-the-shelf, as much as possible," Valletta says. There may be some cost trade-offs up front, he concedes, but he says DOD intends to leverage commercial systems already available and those that will become available in the future.
Politics weren't the sole reason Sunnyvale beat out the Astro Space plants, however. Astro Space's reputation has fallen on hard times in recent years, with several highly publicized failures of satellites it built, ranging from NASA's Mars Observer to AT&T's Telstar 402. And the Sunnyvale and Denver facilities each have both satellite and launch manufacturing capability--while Astro Space doesn't.
UNITED DEFENSE LP was set to sign an agreement with Taiwan Friday "to formalize the pursuit of business opportunities by the cooperative efforts of both parties." The agreement will be signed in Santa Clara, Calif., by United Defense President and CEO Thomas Rabaut and Yang Shih-Chien, senior vice minister of economic affairs for Taiwan.
The House has sharply cut economic aid to Turkey in the fiscal 1996 foreign operations appropriations bill because of abuses of the Kurdish population, but military assistance remains untouched. By a vote of 246 to 155, economic aid was cut from $46 million to $21 million. Left untouched are the bill's provisions for $320 million in foreign military financing. FMF funds would complete U.S. funding commitment for the Peace Onyx I/II F-16 acquisition by Turkey.
Lockheed Martin corporate officials have pulled the plug on reviving their Lockheed Standoff Missile (LSOM) for the Joint Air-to- Surface Standoff Missile contest, a company spokesman says. LSOM, which was an early competitor for the now-canceled Tri-Service Standoff Attack Missile competition, "is hanging in limbo again," the official said. The contractor's Electronics and Missiles Group in Orlando, Fla., will take the lead on the JASSM bid.
The Defense Dept. needs to find a safe, effective way to share data on information warfare or risk exposing the vulnerabilities of the U.S. information infrastructure, according to an American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics panel.
The Pentagon must develop a single information warfare policy that is consistent with national policy, an American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics working group recommends. After several months of studying information warfare, the 25-member Decision Support Working Group also called on the Pentagon to distribute its policy as widely as possible, and to fully integrate IW into military operations.
The Defense Airborne Reconnaissance Office will sponsor a Capitol Hill presentation on July 13, showing off its fiscal 1996 budget items. The 11 a.m.-3 p.m. event, which also will involve the services, will be for the benefit of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
The U.S.' ever-shrinking trade surplus is starting to shrink faster, the latest Commerce Dept. data compiled by the Aerospace Industries Association shows. First-quarter 1995 figures reported yesterday reveal that the aerospace industry's trade surplus fell by $515 million in the three months since 1994 ended, a 9% decline that left the industry's total trade surplus at $5 billion.
