Startup space launch companies in general want help from the U.S. government to raise private development funds for their new rockets, rather than direct development contracts or cooperative agreements, a quintet of startup chief executives told a receptive House science space and aeronautics subcommittee Thursday.
Jack S. Gordon, president of Lockheed Martin Skunk Works, will retire Nov. 1, the Palmdale, Calif., unit announced Friday. Robert T. (Bob) Elrod, currently executive vice president at Lockheed Martin Tactical Aircraft Systems, will succeed him on that date. Gordon's retirement caps a 36-year career with Lockheed Martin, where he helped develop the SR-71, D-21 reconnaissance drone, F-117 and F-22. He became Skunk Works president in 1993.
The Senate last week passed appropriations conference reports providing fiscal year 2000 funds for the Pentagon and NASA, but the two bills faced different prospects at the White House. The DOD FY '00 appropriations bill, passed by the Senate in an 87-11 vote on Thursday, provides $267.7 billion for defense, $4.5 billion more than the president's request. The bill passed the House earlier in the week
Arianespace has won contracts to launch another direct television broadcast satellite for Luxembourg's Societe Europeenne des Satellites (SES) and the first new satellite ordered by Intelsat's NEWskies commercial spinoff. In separate announcements at the Telecom '99 conference in Geneva last week, the European launch consortium said it would launch the STS Astra 2D spacecraft in the third quarter of 2000 on either an Ariane 4 or 5 vehicle. Arianespace's deal is with Hughes Space&Communications, which built the HS-376 HP satellite.
LOOK FOR MORE UNION LABELS: AFL-CIO President John Sweeney pledges full support of the nation's largest labor organization to members of the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace (SPEEA) in their effort to bargain a better contract with Boeing and in organizing more workers at the company. "I think you have a tremendous opportunity to have a stronger voice now by working with other unions," Sweeney said during a speech in Seattle. "The other unions are really looking forward to working with you and helping you get a better contract with Boeing.
HUGE HUGHES: Hughes Space and Communications plans a new communications satellite that would draw on the latest spacecraft technology to create an antenna farm in the sky, mounting some 100 transponders and producing 25 kilowatts of power even at the end of its service life. The Hughes "702-plus," announced last week at Telecom '99 in Geneva, would use next-generation solar cells able to convert 35% of the sun's energy into power, and would cost 30% less per transponder than the HS 601 HP in use today.
PILING ON PAYLOADS: Air Force officials are mulling a proposal to place a host of different payloads, including some classified payloads, on Global Positioning System satellites. Some secret payloads, and perhaps communications and search and rescue payloads as well, may be put on a GPS IIF satellite, Air Force military space officials tell The DAILY. The idea of using the satellites for added missions is not a new one, and some have even suggested putting military payloads on commercial satellites.
INMARSAT IS BEGINNING full-scale development of new services that will give passengers and flight crews access to Internet, Intranet and e-mail and corporate network services while in flight, the consortium reported. Inmarsat said it already has designed and is implementing the technology platforms for similar services for the land mobile market. BT Skyphone is the first service provider to announce it will offer the new 64-kilobit-per-second services, expected late next year. It will be partnered it EMS Technologies of Canada, which will develop and supply avionics.
NASA has picked spacecraft designed to peer at gamma ray sources minutes after they appear and to map the positions and brightness of some 40 million stars as the next medium-class explorer (MIDEX) missions. The Swift Gamma Ray Burst Explorer, scheduled t be launched in 2003 at a total cost to NASA of $163 million, will carry gamma ray, x-ray and ultraviolet/optical telescopes. When a gamma ray burst is detected, it will rotate in orbit to peer at the source of the event, using it as a beacon to probe the most distant regions of the Universe.
The Air Force and industry team working on the Space Based Laser (SBL) may conduct a balloon-borne test of the system's components prior to proceeding with a full-up integrated flight test, Air Force officials at the Space and Missile Systems Center (SMC) here report. There is a possibility the Air Force and Boeing/TRW/Lockheed Martin SBL joint venture team may elect to fly the some of the SBL hardware on the High Altitude Balloon Experiment (HABE), Lt. Col. Randy Weidenheimer, SBL program director, told The DAILY in an interview.
'PICOSATS': Two satellites weighing less than a half-pound apiece are scheduled to go into orbit late next month in a test of how microelectromechanical system (MEMS) perform in space. Only a little larger than decks of cards, the two "picosats" designed and built by The Aerospace Corp. will fly in formation and communicate on a local network to demonstrate that swarms of MEMS-based satellites could function in orbit. The picosats will be released by Stanford University's student-built Orbiting Picosat Automated Launcher (OPAL), one of the payloads on the first U.S.
Aerojet will focus on acquisitions to grow in space electronics, following parent GenCorp's spinoff of its Polymer Products businesses, says Aerojet President Carl B. Fischer. But, he said, the company would be guided by its core competency, expertise in "the photon-to-message chain" - transforming analogue signals to digital signals.
Robert D. Springer, Lt. Gen. United States Air Force (Ret.), has been appointed president of NovaLogic Systems Inc., a subsidiary which supplies simulation technologies to the defense community.
David W. Jeffrey has been appointed managing director of the Logistics Execution Solutions (LES) unit in Sydney, Australia. Joseph S. Cantie has been appointed vice president, investor relations at the corporate headquarters in Cleveland. Don Andres has been named vice president and program manager of a TRW-led team to pursue the U.S. Air Force Space Command Integrated Space Command and Control Program (ISC2).
George R. Sterner has been named vice president and mission area executive, Naval Systems at Raytheon Systems Company. Jack Wohler has been named senior vice president for Business Development at Raytheon Systems Company.
House members yesterday passed the VA, HUD and independent agencies appropriations conference bill restoring some $900 million they had cut from NASA's fiscal 2000 spending levels and adding another $75 million to that, but the U.S. space agency lost the support of a key committee chairman over rider language that would let it keep commercial profits from the International Space Station.
The merger of the aerospace activities of Germany's DaimlerChrysler and France's Lagardere Group will create Europe's largest aerospace company and, said one industry analyst, essentially marks the birth of the long-discussed European Aerospace and Defense Company (EADC).
The U.S. Air Force and Boeing are moving forward with a program to develop a Satellite Transfer Vehicle (STV) that could rescue satellites boosted into the wrong the orbits, program officials here report. Col. Robert Cox, head of the USAF Space and Missile Systems Center's developmental planning office, said the STV could be available by 2002. Under current plans, he said, the STV might be used to rescue a Defense Support Program (DSP) satellite launched into the wrong orbit last April.
James B. Armor, Jr., Colonel (Brig. Gen. select), System Program director of NAVSTAR Global Positioning System Joint Program Office, Space and Missiles System Center, has been reassigned as the vice commander of Warner-Robins Air Logistics Center, Robins Air Force Base, Georgia. Douglas L. Loverro, Colonel, will succeed Armor as the new GPS Joint Program office director.
Jack Gaber has been appointed director of marketing and business development at the Israel Aircraft Industries International office in Arlington, Va. Gaber succeeds Tommy Guttman, who has returned to an executive position in Israel.
