Australia's Dept. of Defense has accepted two new CH-47D helicopters from Boeing Co. The new aircraft bring to six the number of Chinooks operated by the Army, and will boost the service's capacity for troop lift and logistic support, the Dept. of Defense said. Before the helicopters are accepted into service in mid-year, the department said, they will receive minor modifications to enhance safety and performance. C Squadron of the 5th Aviation Regiment in Townsville will operate them.
General Electric Aircraft Engines, Lynn, Mass., is being awarded a $14,579,077 modification to previously awarded requirements contract N00383-01-D-004M that provides for the purchase of 808 afterburner flameholders in support of the F404-400 engine on F/A-18 aircraft. This modification has option periods, which if exercised, would bring the total estimated value for the modification to $72,895,380. Work will be performed in Lynn, Mass., and is expected to be completed by March 2004. Contract funds will not expire at the end of the current fiscal year.
Boeing Corp. has received a contract worth $25.5 million to install a global positioning inertial navigation system (GINS) capability into the mission system and flight deck of the French Air Force's fleet of four E-3 Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) aircraft, the company announced yesterday. The aircrafts' altitude measurement system will also be upgraded to meet the near-term requirements of the European Global Air Traffic Management (GATM) system for reduced vertical separation minimum, Boeing announced.
The fiscal 2002 defense budget season formally begins this week as President Bush lays out his overall spending plan, but details are expected to surface slowly. Bush is scheduled to deliver a budget address to Congress Tuesday and submit an outline to lawmakers Wednesday, but he doesn't plan to unveil a detailed budget until April 3.
REFORM URGED: Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) says he wants Pentagon Comptroller-nominee Dov Zakheim to present a general plan for cleaning up the Defense Dept.'s accounting "mess" before receiving Senate confirmation. Grassley says the Pentagon's bookkeeping is so bad DOD doesn't know what it owns or spends, and it will be hard to justify an increase in the defense budget until the problem is solved.
COLOMBIA UPDATE: Colombia's anti-drug effort, which received a U.S. endorsement last year in the form of a $1.3 billion aid package that includes dozens of Black Hawk, Huey II and UH-1N helicopters (DAILY, Nov. 27), will be assessed at a hearing Wednesday by Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), chairman of the International Narcotics Control Caucus. Topics will include a program update and future budget needs. Assistant Secretary of State Rand Beers, U.S. Southern Command Commander-in-Chief Marine Corps Gen.
DEFENSE SPENDING: Senate Armed Services Committee member Mary Landrieu (D-La.) says she supports President George W. Bush's decision to "delay new procurement decisions" until Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld finishes a review of Pentagon strategy and force structure. But in a letter to Bush last week, Landrieu expresses concern that the president doesn't plan to boost funding for readiness by proposing an immediate fiscal 2001 supplemental spending bill or a big increase for operations and maintenance in the fiscal 2002 budget.
INDUSTRY WINDFALL: Redesigning the Defense Dept.'s business and support processes is designed to free up money wasted in overhead so the dollars can be reinvested where they really count: giving the military the teeth it needs to fight to the nations' wars. Business Executives for National Security's Tooth-to-Tail Commission issued an 11-part roadmap to do that, which may also have an ancillary benefit to defense contractors, although that was not the group's goal.
MACDONALD DETTWILER AND ASSOCIATES has been selected by the Canadian Space Agency to evaluate the capability of Spaceborne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data to enhance the operational monitoring of sea ice in Canadian waters. Funding will be provided under the Earth Observation Application Program. SAR is the only Earth observation sensor that can provide regular, all-season, high-resolution, wide-area coverage over sea ice.
FUNDAMENTAL TECHNOLOGY SYSTEMS of Orlando is the 21st team to enter into the $10 million International X Prize competition, sponsored by the St. Louis-based X Prize Foundation. The company has entered its Aurora vehicle into the competition, which seeks to create a privately financed and constructed spacecraft capable of flying three people to the edge of space (about 62 miles) and back.
BAE SYSTEMS CONTROLS has been selected to develop and produce Upper-Stage Remote Control Units for the Lockheed Martin Atlas V. The URCU contract is valued at about $20 million through 2006. The URCU regulates power distribution for vehicle avionics and performs engine control functions for the rocket's upper stage. URCU development is expected to take two years, and the current contract calls for production of four engineering development units and 14 production units starting in 2003.
U.S.-Russian cooperation on missile defense will be hindered if Moscow keeps helping other countries acquire weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and missile technology, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice told reporters late Thursday. Rice stopped short of saying Russia must end its weapons proliferation for there to be any cooperation on missile defense, but she did say Russian proliferation is "a fact that one has to take into account when you look at the question of what you can or cannot share."
TRADING LEADERS: Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) will chair the Senate Finance Committee's international trade panel in the new 107th Congress, replacing Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), who moved up to the helm of the full committee. Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) will be the trade subcommittee's ranking Democrat, replacing Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.), who retired from the Senate.
BACK TO THE DRAWING BOARD: Boeing is redesigning the throttle box of the T-45TS trainer "to eliminate inadvertent in-flight engine shutdowns and eliminate ground tailpipe fires caused by inadvertent movement of the throttle following engine shutdown," according to Naval Air Systems Command. The work is being carried out for Navair on a sole-source basis, and is slated for completion by May 1.
PANAMSAT CORP. announced the company's newest satellite, the PAS-1R Atlantic Ocean Region spacecraft, is on station and ready to begin delivering advanced video and data broadcasting services later this month. Following a November 2000 launch and in-orbit maneuvers, PAS-1R is now positioned in its permanent orbital slot at 45 degrees west longitude, where it will enable PanAmSat to meet its customers' needs for communications services throughout the Americas, Europe and Africa.
INTEGRAL SYSTEMS INC., Lanham, Md., will develop a replacement for the Data Collection System (DCS) Automated Processing System (DAPS) used by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to receive and distribute data from its Geostationary Environmental Operational Satellite (GOES) constellation. NOAA's baseline contract with Integral is worth $4.4 million over 18 months, and includes several options for additional work.
PREDATOR PACKAGE: The operational feasibility demonstration of integrating the Hellfire air-to-surface anti-armor missile on the Predator unmanned aerial vehicle (DAILY, Feb. 23) just got another boost. Late last week, the U.S. Air Force's Aeronautical Systems Center's Reconnaissance Systems Program Office awarded General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, Inc. a $6.1 million contract for logistics support from March through June 2001. "This three-month effort will test the Predator UAV in various operationally representative mission scenarios," the program office says.
Russian military aircraft invaded Japanese territorial airspace on Feb. 14, according to the Japanese Defense Agency. Japan protested but Russia denied the incident, the agency said.
FOUR MORE DAYS: NASA plans to collect data from the NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft through Wednesday, four days longer than the space agency had previously planned. The $223 million mission achieved the first landing of a spacecraft on an asteroid (DAILY, Feb. 13), and NASA had already extended its mission another 10 days beyond its planned shutdown (DAILY, Feb. 15). Another extension "allows us to build a much better sample," NASA's Jacob Trombka, team leader for the NEAR's gamma ray spectrometer, says.
BACK IN ACTION: NASA plans to begin preparing the Space Shuttle Columbia for its 27th trip to space. NASA has spent a year and a half revamping its oldest orbiter at the Boeing Shuttle facility in Palmdale, Calif., outfitting it with a new "glass cockpit" that replaced mechanical instruments with 11 full-color flat-panel displays that use less electricity and make the cockpit lighter. NASA also put Columbia through a weight-reduction program and began preliminary preparations that could allow it to dock to the International Space Station Alpha if needed.
NASA engineers say they are close to resolving a sporadic problem on the Galileo spacecraft in which the camera at times seems to be blinded by the effects of Jupiter's intense radiation. The spacecraft three times sent out an alarm from its camera system as Galileo passed close to Jupiter from Dec. 28 to Jan. 1, NASA said. But each time, the camera either managed to fix itself or was restored by commands from ground controllers, Aerospace Daily affiliate Aviationnow.com has reported.
Peregrine Semiconductor, a developer and supplier of integrated circuits, announced the first space-qualified 3 gigahertz Phase Locked Loop integrated circuits (ICs). The products are targeted for space and defense customers, with sampling beginning mid-March, the company announced last week.
COM DEV SPACE, a wholly owned subsidiary of COM DEV International Ltd., has signed contracts valued at about $1.4 million with the Canadian Space Agency to develop a range of space related technologies, including Ka-band dielectric microwave filters, Solid State switch matrices and space-qualified small cell lithium-ion batteries. The company said the technologies have the potential to revolutionize satellite design.
The U.S. Air Force is eyeing development of a microsatellite that could rendezvous with other space objects for monitoring and inspection. Seven companies have expressed interest and one will chosen in June to fabricate a demonstrator.
A comet that crashed into Earth 250 million years ago set off a horrific chain of events that eventually wiped out 90 percent of all life on the planet, researchers said Thursday. "It was the mother of all extinctions," said Luann Becker, an Earth and space scientist at the University of Washington, Seattle, who led the NASA-funded research. She spoke at a news conference at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C. The findings will be published Friday in the journal Science.
