TOURS, France — An Australian-led high-speed propulsion research team is preparing to begin assembly of a scramjet-powered hypersonic demonstrator, following design changes to improve vehicle stability during its upcoming attempt at a Mach 8 flight test.
David Davenport (see photo) has been promoted to VP and regional operations manager of New York LaGuardia Airport-based FlightSafety International from manager of the Savannah (Ga.) Learning Center. Fabio Miguez was promoted to manager of the Columbus (Ohio) Learning Center from manager of the Detroit Metro/Toledo Center. He succeeds Chip White, who moved to the Gulfstream Learning Center. Daniel MacLellan has been promoted to regional operations manager and will continue as manager of the Dallas/Fort Worth Learning Center.
Academic exercises about whether Congress will allow a nearly $1 trillion in across-the-board budget cuts known as sequestration to take effect in January are taking on an entirely new reality. Aerospace and defense companies are already beginning to announce plant closures, layoffs and cutbacks, and at least one of them is citing sequestration specifically.
WALLOPS OPS: NASA has authorized Orbital Sciences Corp. to begin operations at the new launch pad built for its Antares rocket at the Mid Atlantic Regional Spaceport on Wallops Island, Va., although the state-owned facility still awaits space-agency certification for launches. Orbital and NASA plan to use Antares and the unmanned Cygnus capsule for commercial cargo deliveries to the International Space Station, with a first flight tentatively scheduled before the end of the year.
It's official: President Barack Obama last week signed into law a measure that confirms full ownership rights to artifacts received by Apollo-era astronauts from their missions. According to the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, NASA managers routinely allowed astronauts to keep mementos, pieces of hardware and personal equipment from the spacecraft during the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs. But beginning in the mid-2000s, NASA began to challenge the ownership of these artifacts.
CENTER DIRECTORS: Two NASA field centers will have new directors now that former Marshall Space Flight Center Robert Lightfoot has taken over as the No. 3 manager at agency headquarters. Lightfoot, who has been acting associate administrator since March 5, will take on that job permanently. Stennis Space Center Director Patrick Scheuermann will move to Marshall as director, and his deputy at Stennis, Richard Gilbrech, becomes the director of that field center. All three changes were effective last week.
Scientists examining data from NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover have concluded that imagery from three sites on the floor of Gale Crater represents rocks deposited there by water flowing down from the crater wall, probably billions of years ago.
An industry team says that a protected satellite communications family of terminals has been developed at no cost to the U.S. Defense Department and is ready for production once a government agency certifies its cryptological system.
TOURS, France — The European Space Agency remains on the hunt for an alternate method of launching the Experimental Re-Entry Testbed (Expert) followin...
HOUSTON — The already delayed departure of the European Space Agency’s ATV-3 cargo capsule from the International Space Station has been reset for Sept. 28 at the earliest to accommodate a potential station maneuver to steer clear of Russian satellite and Indian rocket debris. The avoidance maneuver of the station and its three-person crew was scheduled for Sept. 27 at 8:12 a.m. EDT, or about 2 1⁄2 hr. ahead of the projected closest approach of the satellite debris.
KAZAKH SATS: EADS space subsidiary Astrium has established Ghalam, a joint venture with Kazcosmos’ subsidiary Kazakhstan Garysh Sapary, to assemble, integrate and test satellites at a purpose-built facility in Astana, Kazakhstan, according to Kazcosmos chairman Talgat Musabayev. The venture will help fulfill Kazcosmos’ requirement for technology transfer and know-how as Astrium develops a pair of Earth observation satellites for the agency (Aerospace DAILY, May 6, 2011).
NASA may be able to return samples from Mars without significant international cooperation, in part by eliminating stovepipes in the way it organizes for scientific and human space missions.
HOUSTON — The B612 Foundation says it has made financial and technical strides in the first three months of the Silicon Valley non-profit’s bid to mount the world’s first private deep-space mission, a space telescope to greatly increase the identification of near Earth asteroids (NEAs) that could pose a collision threat.
NEW DELHI — India’s 101st space mission, the GSAT-10 communication satellite, will be launched Sept. 29 aboard an Ariane 5 rocket from the European spaceport at Kourou in French Guiana. “The 3.4-ton heavy satellite, GSAT-10, has been integrated with the Ariane 5 rocket along with Astra-2F spacecraft of SES as co-passenger for the launch Sept. 29 at 2:48 a.m. Indian time,” an Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) official says. Astra-2F belongs to the Luxembourg-based leading satellite operator SES.
TOO CONFIDENT: Analysts at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) believe aerospace and defense executives may be “overconfident” in the information security practices at their respective organizations, given the trends of information security budget slashing, rising security incidents and accelerating technology development. The survey of more than 200 executives found that “72% of respondents are confident that they have instilled effective security behaviors into their organization’s culture, yet most do not have a process in place to handle third-party breaches,” PwC says.
A business aviation-related article in the Sept. 17 issue (page 62) incorrectly identified which Bombardier Global model will offer a 7,300-nm range at Mach 0.85 cruise when it becomes available in 2016. It is the Global 7000.
