INCREASING: The audit office says Eurofighter's costs increased 1 billion pounds ($1.84 billion) over last year, bringing the program's total overrun to 2.3 billion pounds ($4.2 billion). Typhoon deliveries began in June 2003, 54 months behind the original schedule. BAE Systems' Nimrod MRA.3 program costs, estimated earlier at around 3 billion pounds ($5.53 billion), are now 400 million pounds ($736 million) over budget and the in-service date of March 2009 is nearly six years behind schedule.
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.
The chairman of the House Armed Services Committee is signaling that the acquisition of long-range bombers will remain high on his list of priorities this year, suggesting the Air Force will face renewed political pressure to speed up its timeline for fielding new aircraft.
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.
OVERRUNS: Twenty major United Kingdom defense equipment projects have been identified by Britain's National Audit Office as showing "substantial cost and time budget overruns." The office tracked the programs up through March 2003. Four of these - the Eurofighter Typhoon, BAE Systems' Nimrod MRA.3 and Astute submarines and MBDA's Brimstone development of the Hellfire missile - were responsible for 90 percent of the 3.1 billion pound ($5.7 billion) 2003 overrun, the audit office says.
APPROVAL: The U.S. Department of Defense has approved the participation of all military services in the May 10-16, 2004, Berlin Airshow, the show said Jan. 23. European and international attendees will see "displays of new technology that would not be possible without DOD interest," show officials said.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
