Buoyed by the success of Britain's increasingly aggressive export promotion strategy, U.K. Trade Minister Richard Needham says his government plans to do even more, including taking advantage of electronic technology to put British trade officers in remote bases around the world directly in touch with British executives hoping to export. Needham tells a luncheon audience of U.S. and British business executives that the commercial network now in place, built jointly by British industry and government, rivals anything the U.K.
The U.S. Air Force has launched a month-long effort to plan its generic hypersonic research now that the service has withdrawn from the joint DOD/NASA Hypersonic Systems Technology Program (HySTP), according to a top AF acquisition official. Jim Mattice, deputy assistant secretary for research and engineering, told The DAILY Friday that the service will also seek input from the requirements community before Secretary Sheila Widnall decides on the $20 million-a-year AF hypersonic research effort.
The director of NASA's Space Station program gives abehind-the-scenes look at the agency's negotiations with Boeing Co. for Station's prime contract. Boeing came in Dec. 1 proposing it receive $6.6 billion for the work, Wilbur Trafton tells members of the space and aeronautics panel. NASA proposed paying $5.2 billion. Ultimately, the two signed a contract for $5.63 billion.
Trafton says he's confident in NASA's Russian partners despite reports that 70% of that nation's operating spacecraft are beyond their warranty period (DAILY, Feb. 15, page 237). "The companies that we are dealing with are pretty solid," he says. The director of the Khrunichev works has assured NASA that it has second- and third-tier Station contractors lined up-and has promised to inform NASA at the first sign of trouble, Trafton says.
Debt-watcher Standard&Poor's lowered its outlook on Fairchild Corp. from stable to negative, blaming poor performance in the company's aerospace fasteners business. In the process the rating agency affirmed junk-bond ratings on the corporation's subordinated debt, rated B-minus, with an implied senior rating of B-plus. Fairchild's total debt stands at about $540 million, S&P said.
Indonesia's state-owned IPTN aircraft company expects to decide in April between Mobile, Ala., and Macon, Ga., as the headquarters for its hoped-for U.S. joint venture to assemble and sell 70-seat N-250 turboprop commuter aircraft, IPTN President B.J. Habibie said this week. "These two places have been shortlisted...by our consultant from 26 locations in the United States," which included Phoenix, Ariz., and Portland, Ore., Habibie said.
John R. Dailey, acting NASA deputy administrator, heads the secret "red team" that prepares recommendations for Administrator Daniel S. Goldin on how the space agency can be radically restructured to cut costs. A Goldin spokeswoman says Dailey produced a list of recommended changes after "an informal series of meetings held over a short period of time with different senior management officials," whom she declined to identify. Goldin ordered the "red team white paper" after the White House ordered another $5 billion cut from the agency's five-year budget (DAILY, Feb.
Ada 95, the newest version of the Defense Dept.'s preferred programming language, was released with the publication of its standard reference manual following unanimous approval of revisions by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).
Financially troubled French enginemaker SNECMA will get yet another annual capital injection from the government this year, top officials say, and the only question is how much. Plans for the injection, along with another billion francs or so in research and development aid, raised eyebrows both in the U.S. and in France, but Defense Minister Francois Leotard says that "legitimacy of the recapitalisation is not in question." SNECMA executives think they need 10 billion francs to make their balance sheet as healthy as U.K.
Fogleman also is sounding the warning bell on modernization deficiencies, saying, "If this [FY '96] budget has a hole in it, it's really in the fact that we have made this decision to cut modernization back so far in order to fund readiness. I don't say that was a bad decision, but I say if you had to make that trade-off...the next place to spend more money is not necessarily on readiness. It probably ought to go to modernization."
NASA has cut its Space Shuttle launch rate from eight to seven flights a year as a cost cutting measure, and does not plan to outfit a second Shuttle to dock with Russia's Mir space station, according to the space agency's latest mixed-fleet manifest.
Senate Armed Services Chairman Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.) has apparently mollified restive senior Republicans on the committee by giving subcommittee chairmen greater authority to set their own agendas and, in two instances last week, allowing them to chair full committee hearings. The sensitive issue of whether Thurmond, 92, was up to the job of running the committee surfaced recently when Newsweek magazine reported that Republican Sens.
U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Ronald Fogleman says he's just as baffled and frustrated as industry is about the latest delay in the Joint Primary Aircraft Training System (JPATS) competition. "We just need to get on with awarding the contract, for crying out loud," he says to reporters at a Washington breakfast. "I don't understand why it's taking the acquisition people so long to do the obvious, but nonetheless they tell me they've got reasons."
Top U.S. Army aviation officials, including program executive officer Maj. Gen. Dewitt Irby, started visiting Conventional Systems Committee members in Washington late last week in preparation for the RAH-66 Comanche's March 9 CSC review. In addition to making their case for the Office of the Secretary of Defense to restore $120 million to the scout helicopter's fiscal 1995 budget, the officials are briefing committee members on their accelerated prototype plan to build as many as 10 rotorcraft, according to sources.
Fogleman cautions that a slip in F-22 procurement could cause problems for the Joint Advanced Strike Technology program or other proposed AF buys. The Air Force has so "delicately timed" when it starts buying the F-22-in order to get past the procurement spike before it begins buying JAST-that if there's a glitch in the "game plan, we could find ourselves in a real disaster in the tacair business out there," he says.
Martin Marietta and Lockheed Corp. are expected to continue to separately pursue work on the U.S. Air Force's new Space Based Infrared System (SBIRS) early warning program even though bids for the first phase of the effort aren't due until after they are scheduled to complete their merger.
ROBERT W. CLARKE, who shepherded NASA through the delicate negotiations that brought Russia into the International Space Station program, is leaving the agency this week, sources said Friday. Clarke, a Russian- language specialist who served in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow and other Foreign Service posts, joined the space agency in 1993 as associate administrator for policy coordination and international relations. Most recently he served as special assistant to the administrator for international affairs.
NASA's planned X-34 small reusable launch vehicle (RLV) prototype, which the agency hopes will lead to a cheap way to launch small satellite payloads of 1,000-2,000 pounds, "most probably has to be lifted by an aircraft," says John Mansfield, chief of NASA's RLV efforts. "All the ideas we've seen so far involve lifting the vehicle and launching it off an airplane," Mansfield tells members of the House Science Committee's space and aeronautics panel. "You can only make this kind of vehicle so big," he says.
Even though Goldin has already announced that more than 700 personnel will be trimmed from NASA headquarters by the end of the century under his people-before-programs budget cutting policy, most of the restructuring will come at the field centers. Dailey's white paper has been closely held in Goldin's office and by the center directors, but Wisniewski's memo may contain some hints to its contents in the form of "straw person" transition teams to ease the restructuring process.
Wednesday's launch of the Progress M-26 cargo capsule opened an ambitious schedule of Russian missions to the Mir space station this year, but the plan's viability is threatened by the general Russian economic turmoil. The cargo supply ship was launched from Kazakhstan's Baikonur Cosmodrome by a Soyuz-U booster (DAILY, Feb. 16, page 249). It was the first launch by Russian Space Forces crews since they were formally transferred to the payroll of the civilian Russian Space Agency (RSA).
RAYTHEON CO., Electromagnetic Systems Div., Goleta, Calif., will receive a U.S. Navy contract for AN/ALE-50 hardware and technical data, according to a Feb. 1 Commerce Business Daily notice from Naval Air Systems Command. It said, "The hardware includes approximately 280 ALE-50 decoys and approximately 80 mass models which will support the developmental testing, TECHEVAL and Operational Testing requirements for the F-14 and F-18 aircraft."
The U.S. Air Force's Flight Training Systems program office ordered its final lot of Beech T-1A Jayhawk trainer aircraft, along with a Jayhawk simulator from McDonnell Douglas, in a $131 million firm-fixed price contract option, the service said yesterday.
The director of NASA's International Space Station program told members of Congress yesterday he's forming a high-level team to look at ways to commercialize the orbiting laboratory. Wilbur Trafton's comments came one week after House Science Committee Chairman Robert Walker suggested Station initially serve as a laboratory for space-based commercial processes and later as living quarters for astronaut/workers in a "space industrial park" (DAILY, Feb. 10, page 213).
Training and operator deficiencies are responsible for five of 11 Hunter short-range unmanned aerial vehicle accidents between 1991 and 1993, the Defense Dept.'s Inspector General has concluded.
Five high-ranking retired military officers blasted the GOP's National Security Revitalization Act, claiming that it would "impose onerous and unnecessary restrictions" on the president's ability to place U.S. forces under the control of other nations' military leaders for U.N. operations.
