Von Gardiner (see photos) has been named senior manager for Defense Department programs, and John Wallace VP-market management of Vienna, Va.-based NJVC. Gardiner was director of communications and information with USAF Special Operations Command at Hurlburt Field, Fla., and Wallace has been sales director for capital markets and banking corporate accounts, as well as VP-financial services industry at Hewlett-Packard.
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.
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.
Dean Foley has become sales manager of the aerospace division of West Springfield, Mass.-based Atlantic Fasteners. He has more than 25 years of experience in aerospace metals distribution.
Sir Martin Sweeting, executive chairman of Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd. and director of the Surrey Space Center at the University of Surrey, England, has received the International von Karman Wings Award for his contributions to aerospace, presented by the Aerospace Historical Society and the Graduate Aerospace Laboratories of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
USAF Lt. Gen. (ret.) Dick Newton has been appointed executive VP of the Arlington, Va.-based Air Force Association, succeeding David T. “Buck” Buckwalter. Newton was assistant vice chief of staff/director of the air staff at USAF headquarters at the Pentagon.
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.
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.
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...
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.
