During the first quarter of 1999 14 space launches with 21 satellites and two interplanetary probes were carried out worldwide, all successfully although one satellite failed in orbit.
U.S. military dependence on precision guided weapons is expected to grow in the coming years, but some experts anticipate a switch from expensive laser-guided weapons to more accurate munitions guided by global positioning satellites (GPS). Almost all of the munitions expended by U.S. forces in Kosovo have been precision guided munitions, Maj. Gen. Charles F. Wald, vice director for strategic plans and policy for the Joint Staff, said earlier this week. U.S. forces rely on them to keep collateral damage to a minimum.
The U.S. Dept. of Defense has accelerated production of the Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) for the Navy and Air Force, with Boeing set to begin delivering the second lot of the converted smart bombs in May rather than July as previously planned. To meet the added demand from the NATO attacks on Yugoslavia, Boeing has increased production at the St. Charles, Mo., facility where the company has been producing about 200 bombs each month, according to Boeing JDAM Program Manager Carl Avila. The production rate will now exceed 300 bombs per month.
Vice President Al Gore may have suffered slings and arrows for grabbing a little too much credit for the Internet, but NASA Administrator Daniel S. Goldin has taken another Gore idea and run with it. Gore's $75 million "Triana" spacecraft, planned to give a view of the whole Earth from the L-1 point where the sun's gravity cancels that of Earth (DAILY, Feb. 17), will give NASA experience in operating satellites both at L-1 and at L-2 in the other direction.
Rep. Chris Cox (R-Calif.) wants to make public this week a declassified version of his commission's investigation on U.S. policy regarding China and transfer of sensitive technology during overseas satellite launches. The White House has bucked efforts to declassify the report for weeks. Cox wants the report in the open before budget authorizers start work next month, House sources say. The White House will continue to try to halt the report's release because of its damaging content, sources said.
Harris Corp. is reorganizing itself into a pure communications equipment company, including spinning off its Lanier office equipment subsidiary to shareholders, the company reported last week. Harris said the reorganization will include:
A U.S. envoy will visit Europe next week carrying a promise to work with European Commission nations on pushing a Chapter 4 engine noise limit through ICAO if the EC in a vote scheduled April 29 will back off its determination to ban hushkitted aircraft.
The U.S. Navy and Marine Corps will conduct demonstrations of advanced technology concepts to expand their battlespace in littoral regions. The demonstrations, slated for this week and the third quarter of fiscal year 2001, are part of an advanced concept technology demonstration (ACTD) sponsored by the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Advanced Systems and Concepts. The demonstrations will showcase enhanced integrated command and control of dispersed units for faster maneuver and fire support from the sea.
Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) and British Aerospace have officially signed an agreement under which MHI will assemble main wing parts of the Airbus A-319 and A-320 as a subcontractor to the British manufacturer. The contract is worth about $2.5 million a year, but Airbus apparently expects MHI to participate in other Airbus programs, including the A-3XX.
Europe's Starsem consortium with Russia launched four more Globalstar satellites into low-Earth orbit yesterday, bringing to 20 the number of satellites the "Big LEO" communications network has in orbit. The launch, using a Soyuz rocket, took place at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. It was the fifth successful launch of Globalstar satellites as the constellation builds toward 48 satellites plus four on-orbit spares built by Space Systems/Loral.
A new, lighter horizontal stabilizer is being built into C-17 airlifters on Boeing's production line, the U.S. Air Force said. The stabilizer is a hybrid composite and metal structure that is 20% lighter than the all-metal tail originally designed for the plane. Additionally, it eliminates 90% of the parts, 81% of the fasteners and 70% of the tools needed to produce the structure. The new tails will be installed on the next 70 C-17s beginning with No. 51, scheduled for delivery in June to McChord AFB, Wash.
Lockheed Martin has made changes to its Theater High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile team as it gears up for its seventh try at hitting a target next month. John Little, a vice president and former THAAD program manager at the company's Missiles&Space Division in Sunnyvale, Calif., has made plans to retire from Lockheed Martin, the company said yesterday.
Boeing Commercial said it will digitize all its principal maintenance manuals so they can be accessed on compact disks. Maintenance documents traditionally were published in paper and microfilm. Tom Schick, executive VP, said that "We will offer this new digital tool for all Boeing and Douglas-built airplane models to help our customers streamline their maintenance processes." Compact disks will hold what are now multi-volume, loose-leaf binders that take up many feet of shelf space.
Delayed payments to Russian contractors on the International Space Station Service Module and delayed completion and delivery of hardware have forced the transfer of 22 "Phase II" tests on the critical module from RSC Energia near Moscow to the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, according to information provided by NASA late Wednesday.
NASA HAS SELECTED Sanders, a Lockheed Martin Co., for Phase II of the Remote Exploration and Experimentation (RE&E) supercomputing technology project, the company announced last week. The $6 million contract pays for a nine-month effort to demonstrate a computing system capable of at least 30 million operations per second per watt. The program team includes MPI Technology Inc. and the University of Southern California Information Systems Institution.
The list of prerequisites identified by a Johns Hopkins study before satellite navigation can provide sole means/sole service is so extensive that it amounts to a "significant system redesign," according a Litton paper. For the Wide Area Augmentation System, "almost every major component is impacted-the number of ground stations, the number of satellites, the ground receivers, the avionics and the correction algorithms," according to Victor Strachan, director of strategic development, Litton Aero Products.
The crisis in Kosovo "brings the [NATO] alliance together rather than putting it asunder under the heavy burden of air attacks," according to Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Thomas R. Pickering. "We all knew as we went down this road airpower's capacity to stop ground attacks....All they could do is over time degrade [Serbian Leader Slobodan] Milosevic's ability to use his ground forces," Pickering told reporters in Washington earlier this week.
F/A-18F Super Hornet No. F2 shot down unmanned target drones with two AIM-120 Advanced Medium Range Air-To-Air Missiles (AMRAAMs) and its M61 gun during a developmental test flight Saturday, the U.S. Navy said. The multi-tasked mission was to verify air-to-air capabilities before delivery of the F/A-18E/F for operational evaluation, which begins next month.
A Boeing Delta II rocket carried the long-awaited Landsat 7 Earth resources satellite into orbit yesterday, preserving the continuity of a 25-year database that has relied on Landsat 5 since 1984. Liftoff from Vandenberg AFB, Calif., came right on time at 2:32 p.m. EDT, and the $450 million satellite separated and deployed its solar arrays as scheduled a little more than an hour later. The satellite was built by Lockheed Martin Missiles and Space at its Valley Forge, Pa., facility.
The Pentagon may send additional aircraft within the next few days for ground attack and air defense suppression to beef up the NATO air campaign in Yugoslavia, Defense Secretary William Cohen told senators yesterday. "We intend to intensify the air campaign," Cohen said at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing. NATO Commander Gen. Wesley Clark's request for more planes is under review and should be resolved in the next day or two, Cohen said.
BOEING WILL TRY AGAIN to launch the new Delta III rocket with Loral's Orion 3 satellite aboard on the evening of April 21, following a delay last week caused by a series of minor technical and range glitches (DAILY, April 8). Liftoff at Cape Canaveral Air Station, Fla., is scheduled for a one-hour, nine-minute window that opens at 9:02 p.m. EDT Wednesday. The first attempt to launch a Delta III last summer failed when the thrust vector control system ran out of hydraulic fluid trying to compensate an unanticipated roll (DAILY, March 22).
General Dynamics withdrew its offer to buy Newport News Shipbuilding Inc. after the Dept. of Defense notified GD that it would not support the bid, GD reported Wednesday. Reports had surfaced earlier in the week that the proposal probably would be rejected (DAILY, April 13), and Defense Secretary William Cohen said the proposed merger posed "management and competitive challenges" that offset any potential cost savings (DAILY, April 15).
Improved operating margins in all three operating units helped Boeing to have "solid and clearly improving performance across the company," Phil Condit, chairman and chief executive officer, told reporters yesterday. The company reported earnings of $469 million in the 1999 first quarter on sales of $14.4 billion. A year ago, Boeing reported sales of $12.9 billion and profits of $50 million following a $219 million after-tax forward loss on the next-generation 737 program.
Asia-Pacific Mobile Telecommunications Pty. Ltd. (APMT) has dropped Hughes Space and Communications as the supplier of two geostationary satellites the Singapore consortium had planned to use for mobile telephone service across Southeast Asia, Hughes reported yesterday.
