The U.S. Marine Corps, borrowing directed energy technology from the Air Force, is ready to begin field testing of its non-lethal energy beam designed to stop adversaries in their tracks without inflicting permanent harm.
TRACKING MIR: The U.S. government and the European Space Agency will contribute tracking and trajectory data to support the safe deorbit of the Russian space station Mir, slated for the middle of this month, the State Dept. says. The U.S. will also provide scientific data on atmospheric conditions, including solar activity, during the deorbit, although the government of Russia has stated it remains solely responsible for Mir's safe deorbiting.
BOEING ELECTRON DYNAMIC DEVICES, of Torrance, Calif., won several new contracts worth $34 million. EDD will provide traveling wave tube amplifiers (TWTA) and electronic power conditioners (EPC) to Alcatel Space Industries of Toulouse, France, and to Space Systems/Loral, of Palo Alto, Calif. EDD is a unit of the Boeing Co. EDD was awarded a contract to provide 164 TWTAs and EPCs to Alcatel and 16 more under a contract option. They will power four next-generation communications satellites for GE International.
All-round increases in sales, profits and order-book over 1999 were announced by Rolls-Royce on Friday, in preliminary results for the year ending Dec. 31, 2000. The largest growth was in sales, which rose by 27%, from 4.634 billion pounds ($6.72 billion) to 5.864 billion pounds ($8.5 billion) over the previous year. Underlying pre-tax profits soared by 18% from 368 million to 436 million pounds, while RR's order-book rose by 14%, from 11.5 billion to 13.1 billion pounds. A further 1.4 billion pounds had been announced, but not yet included, in the group's order-book.
DEFENSE SUPPLEMENTAL: Seattle's pain could become the military's gain. If the Bush Administration asks Congress to approve a fiscal 2001 supplemental spending bill to pay for damage from the Seattle earthquake, Rep. Norm Dicks (D-Wash.) may try to attach a defense supplemental to the earthquake legislation, a spokesman says. A stand-alone defense supplemental bill has run into opposition from the Bush Administration, which wants to complete its force structure review before considering extra money for defense. But President George W.
President George W. Bush plans to nominate Lincoln Bloomfield to be assistant secretary of state for political-military affairs, with responsibilities that include administering defense trade controls, the White House announced Thursday. Bloomfield served as deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs from 1992 to 1993 and principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs from 1988 to 1989.
The U.S. Army, moving to replace an Airborne Reconnaissance Low (ARL) aircraft that crashed on a drug surveillance mission in Colombia nearly two years ago, wants to know just how far the technology for the plane's radar and communications intelligence payloads has come since the mid-1990s when the type was first fielded.
Representatives of the U.S. aerospace industry are lining up against a Bush Administration proposal to cut the U.S. Export-Import Bank's budget by about 25 percent.
LORAL CYBERSTAR of Rockville, Md., a division of Loral Space&Communications, announced it will provide WorldCast Premier, its high-bandwidth, satellite-based Internet backbone service, to RACSA, Costa Rica's primary voice and data carrier. WorldCast Premier delivers streaming media and Internet content worldwide through Cyberstar's global IP network, which offers both one-way and two-way solutions. The company also recently signed a multiyear contract with Wipro.Net, one of India's leading Internet Service Providers, for its WorldCast Premier Internet access service.
I/NET INC., of Kalamazoo, Mich., received a $600,000 NASA contract to develop a form of intelligent control technology known as Complex Event Recognition Architecture, or CERA. The money will be generated over two years, according to the company. CERA is a computer-based system able to analyze complex situations in hostile or unusual environments. It is capable of contemplating a wide variety of variables in a given situation and either correcting problems on its own or prompting an operator to act.
SPACE VACANCY: Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) is giving up the chairmanship of the Senate Commerce Committee's space panel after only a few weeks on the job. Brownback, whose elevation to the chairmanship was announced Feb. 1 (DAILY, Feb. 6), has amassed too many subcommittee chairmanships under Senate rules and has to give one up. No successor has been announced.
BACK TO BRAC: Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld says he noticed the recent report by the Business Executives for National Security (BENS) Tooth-to-Tail Commission, co-chaired by former Sen. Warren Rudman (R-N.H.), calls for another round of Base Realignment and Closures (BRAC). "The base structure ought to fit the force structure," Rumsfeld says.
BOEING SATELLITE SYSTEMS of Los Angeles received a contract to provide a broadband communications satellite to EUTELSAT, the 48-member European Satellite Telecommunications Organization. The Paris-based organization is a new customer for BSS, the world's largest satellite manufacturer, and a unit of the Boeing Co. The satellite, which will be known as e-BIRD, is a spin-stabilized Boeing 376 HP. It is scheduled for launch in the second quarter of 2002 and is slated for an orbital slot at 25.5 degrees East longitude.
CONGRESSIONAL INTELLIGENCE: House Democrats have put together their lineup for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence for the new 107th Congress. Besides Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who had already been announced as ranking Democrat (DAILY, Jan. 5), Democratic committee members will be Reps. Sanford Bishop (Ga.), Jane Harman (Calif.), Norm Sisisky (Va.), Gary Condit (Calif.), Tim Roemer (Ind.), Alcee Hastings (Fla.) and Silvestre Reyes (Texas).
NORTHROP GRUMMAN CORP. extended its offer for the common and preferred stock of Litton Industries Inc. from March 1 to March 8. The company will extend the offer in increments of five business days or less until the Hart-Scott-Rodino (HSR) and European Union waiting periods have expired, and expects to extend it again on March 9. Northrop Grumman also withdrew and refiled its HSR notification to give the government more time to review the acquisition.
THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., has broadened the use of its Satellite Communications Facility (SCF) to include industrial space organizations for the first time. The laboratory has already signed contracts with three companies, Lockheed Martin's Consolidated Space Operations Contract (CSOC), Honeywell DataLynx and Universal Space Net, for a total annual value of over $5 million.
TACKLING TERRORISM: Rep. Jim Saxton (R-N.J.) will remain chairman of the House Armed Services Committee's Special Oversight Panel on Terrorism in the new 107th Congress, while Rep. Victor Snyder (D-Ark.) will continue as ranking Democrat, according to Armed Services. The panel also will consist of Republican Reps. Duncan Hunter (Calif.), James Hansen (Utah), Curt Weldon (Pa.), Terry Everett (Ala.), Roscoe Bartlett (Md.), J.C. Watts (Okla.), Jim Gibbons (Nev.), Robin Hayes (N.C.), Ken Calvert (Calif.) and Rob Simmons (Conn.), and Democratic Reps.
BOMBS AWAY:The U.S. Air Force would like to build a "future bomber" if it could, as laid out in the service's bomber study, says AF Chief Michael E. Ryan. A bomber "that would give us characteristics that go beyond the B-2s," he explains. "Increased stealthiness. Faster speeds so that it's not as vulnerable to both surface-to-air and air-to-air assets." At this point, the service doesn't know what it would look like yet, because the AF is projecting 15 to 30 years out, Ryan says.
Nearly 50 years after Chuck Yeager shattered the sound barrier in his orange Bell X-1, NASA is struggling in this century to break the technology barrier even as its fleet of futuristic X-craft dwindles. With the X-33 and X-34 rocket planes cancelled last week (DAILY, March 2) and a third program - the proposed X-38 lifeboat for Space Station crews - poised for elimination, the U.S. space agency is down to just three programs in its X files.
After five years and more than $1 billion, NASA is dropping work on two futuristic programs - the X-33 and X-34 - that were designed to pave the way for a successor to the 20-year-old space Shuttle. A day after announcing that President Bush's proposed budget cuts would force cutbacks in the International Space Station Alpha (DAILY, March 1), the U.S. space agency on Thursday said its would have to dump the X-33 and X-34 programs based on rising costs, Aerospace Daily affiliate Aviationnow.com reported.
Senate Armed Services Committee member Tim Hutchinson (R-Ark.) is urging the Defense Dept. to speed up plans to provide a C-130J plane for a training school at Little Rock Air Force Base. During a confirmation hearing Tuesday for then Deputy Defense Secretary-nominee Paul Wolfowitz, Hutchinson said the school's C-130J flight simulator is supposed to be up and running by 2004, but it isn't scheduled to get an actual C-130J plane until 2006. Hutchinson said he wants the transport plane delivered earlier to close that two-year gap.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld shed some light on the scope of the multi-part defense reviews he has been assigned to undertake by President Bush, saying they encompass financial management, acquisition reform, designing a national security strategy, military quality of life issues, and the organization of intelligent agencies.
An unmanned Russian Progress cargo ship docked successfully with the International Space Station's Zvezda Service Module at 4:50a.m. Eastern time Wednesday, Aerospace Daily affiliate Aviationnow.com has reported. The docking was the last in a series of automated instructions carried out in the Progress mission, which began two days ago when a Soyuz rocket blasted the cargo ship into space from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
NASA's cancellation of the Pluto-Kuiper Express due to budget overruns means the troubled program will be shut down just before the space agency was to receive industry proposals on how to do the mission cheaply. NASA had issued a formal announcement of opportunity (AO) on a Pluto mission on Jan. 19, but this week told lawmakers on Capitol Hill that "it's canceled," according to NASA science spokesman Don Savage.
(Editor's note: Following is a continuation of the text of responses by then Deputy Secretary of Defense-nominee Paul Wolfowitz to written questions from the Senate Armed Services Committee). Wolfowitz was confirmed by the Senate Wednesday. Q. What policies and procedures do you believe need to be changed in the export license control process that would reflect the right balance between national security and commercial interests?
