BREAKING IN: Arlington Capital Partners, a Washington, D.C.-based private equity fund, has acquired Science & Engineering Associates, Inc. (SEA) of New Orleans, which the company says will double its size and enable it to "break into the Department of Defense" information technology market. The acquisition was made by Arlington's ITS Services unit, which is headed by Phil Odeen, the former chairman of TRW Inc.
Jan. 28 - 29 -- Shephard's "Air Power 2004." Royal Lancaster Hotel, London. To register call +44 (162) 860-4311 or go to www.shephard.co.uk. Feb. 1 - 3 -- NDIA 2004 Tactical Wheeled Vehicles Conference, "Current Force to Future Force," DoubleTree Hotel & Monterey Conference Center, Calif. Contact Angie De Kleine, (703) 247-2599, email [email protected] or go to www.ndia.org.
ASAP: NASA's revamped Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP) will meet for the first time this week to begin the gradual process of taking over responsibility for safety oversight from the Stafford-Covey Task Group, which will dissolve after the shuttle returns to flight. The new panel is a "different cast of characters" with no prior background or association with NASA, according to NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe.
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover (MER) "Spirit" is stuck in a loop in which it periodically resets its computer as a result of a problem that may be hardware related, MER Project Manager Peter Theisinger said Jan. 23. Each time the flight software is reloaded, the computer discovers a condition requiring it to reset, Theisinger said, although that condition is not always the same. Spirit had attempted to reset itself over 60 times as of Jan. 23, he said.
The U.S. Air Force needs to get better at determining whether enemy weapon systems on a battlefield are truly a threat to U.S. forces, according to a service official. While a tank of an opposing force may appear to pose a danger, for instance, it may actually be the case that the vehicle will not fire on U.S. ground troops because the people who manned it ran away to escape an earlier American air assault, said Brig. Gen. Stephen Goldfein, director of operational capability requirements for the Air Force.
Raytheon Co. will provide five Ship Self Defense Systems (SSDS) Mk 2 tactical ship sets under a $26 million contract from the Naval Sea Systems Command, the company said last week. The SSDS systems are being installed on all amphibious transport LPD-17 class warships, all amphibious assault LHD class warships and all CV/CVN aircraft carriers, including the Navy's newest carrier, the George H.W. Bush (CVN-77). Additional systems
Networked combat communications in Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) created greater situational awareness than in any previous military operation, according to Col. Fred Stein (U.S. Army, ret.), a senior principal engineer at the MITRE Corp.
TCM: The Air Force has awarded Lockheed Martin and Boeing contracts worth approximately $472 million each to begin the risk reduction and system definition phase of the Transformational Communications MILSATCOM (TCM) space segment (DAILY, Jan. 20). The space segment will consist of four or more geosynchronous and three polar-orbiting satellites.
SPACEDEV of Poway, Calif., has been awarded a study contract from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to explore new approaches for deploying a constellation of small communications satellites with a single or few launches, the company said. The project is a "great follow-on" for a company project "that is designing a cluster of three formation-flying small satellites for national missile defense," SpaceDev CEO Jim Benson said in a statement.
Lockheed Martin has chosen its missile production facility in Troy, Ala., as the site where it would build Joint Common Missile (JCM) if the company wins the prime contract for the program. The Troy facility produces the Longbow, Hellfire, and Javelin missiles, according to Rick Edwards, director of tactical missiles for Lockheed Martin.
Arianespace plans to launch the European Space Agency's Rosetta comet rendezvous spacecraft on Feb. 26, the company said this week. Arianespace began launch preparations in Kourou, French Guiana on Jan. 19 and plans to roll the Ariane 5 launch vehicle to the launch paid on Feb. 24. Rosetta was to have launched early last year to visit Comet Wirtanen, but the failure of Arianespace's heavier-lift Ariane 5 forced ESA to delay the launch and find a new target. Rosetta now is to visit Churyumov-Gerasimenko in November 2014 (DAILY, June 2, 2003).
Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) has asked NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe to reconsider his decision to cancel servicing missions for the Hubble Space Telescope, and is requesting that he appoint an independent panel to review the issue. In a Jan. 21 letter to O'Keefe, Mikulski, the ranking member of the Senate subcommittee on VA/HUD and Independent Agencies, also asked that all preparation and training activities associated with the servicing mission be continued until Congress has reviewed the situation and made a decision.
EURENCO: France's Group SNPE and SNPE Materiaux Energetiques (SME), Sweden's Saab and Finland's Patria have completed the merger of their explosives and propellants operations into a new company, European Energetics Corp., or Eurenco. SME and Group SNPE will own 60.2 percent of the company and Patria and Saab each will own 19.9 percent, Group SNPE said Jan. 22.
NASA is investigating a "serious anomaly" with the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) "Spirit" that has left it unable to send data back to Earth and apparently put it into a preprogrammed "fault mode," the space agency said Jan. 22. Mission controllers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., discovered the problem on the morning of Jan. 21 after sending a series of commands to the rover, which was poised to begin examining a rock near its landing site at Gusev Crater.
TRAINERS: A CAE-Thales Training & Simulation team has been selected as the preferred bidder to provide a range of NH90 helicopter training systems throughout Europe to NHIndustries (NHI). Contract negotiations are underway and should be completed this year, and the work is expected to be worth about 400 million euros ($520 million), CAE said.
TRAINER: Environmental Tectonics Corp. will provide its GYRO Integrated Physiological Trainer, Generation II flight simulator to the U.S. Air Force under a $1 million contract, the company said Jan. 22. The Air Force Research Laboratory will use the simulator for research into ways of combating pilot fatigue.
A U.S. Air Force study conducted on behalf of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has concluded that a commercial airliner would not be adequately protected if it were equipped with "aimpoint bias" technology that steered a shoulder-fired missile to a less vulnerable part of the airplane, according to Air Force researchers.
Raytheon Co. will supply turnkey air traffic management (ATM) systems for airports in Iraq under a $10.5 million contract, expanding its air traffic management systems presence in the Middle East. The contract includes equipment options worth up to $38.9 million, the company said. Other customers in the region include United Arab Emirates, Oman, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia.
The next test of the Missile Defense Agency's Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) system has been scheduled for Jan. 26, according to an MDA spokesman.
NASA FUNDING: The Senate Jan. 22 approved the fiscal 2004 omnibus conference report, which contains several appropriations measures, including the one that funds NASA. The legislation, which the House approved in December (DAILY, Dec. 9, 2003), now heads to President Bush for his expected approval. The conference report fully funds the Bush Administration's $3.97 billion request for the space shuttle but trims $200 million from the $1.7 billion request for the International Space Station.
NASA has postponed its plan to establish an International Space Station Research Institute (ISSRI) in the wake of President Bush's new space exploration plan, which targets missions to the moon and Mars. "A refocused research effort for the International Space Station will be to better understand and overcome the effects of human space flight on astronaut health, increasing the safety of future space missions," NASA said in a Jan. 22 statement.
