The charge arose during a government-led review of the classified program in May, Lockheed’s chief financial officer told analysts during a teleconference.
Fresh off Blue Origin’s first human spaceflight, founder Jeff Bezos is offering to cut his company’s fee for a human lunar landing demonstration mission dramatically and add—at company expense—an orbital flight test.
The 10-min. suborbital spaceflight on July 20 marks the first time a crewed spacecraft made a debut flight without test pilots, test engineers or professional astronauts aboard.
Rocket Lab has modified the design and manufacture of the igniter for the Rutherford engine after a fault in this system was identified as the root cause of the company’s Electron launch vehicle failure on May 15.
An automatic-takeoff-and-landing capability is scheduled to be released to the operational fleet of General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc. MQ-9 Reapers owned by the U.S. Air Force next year.
Hard on the heels of being appointed chief executive of delivery-drone developer Volansi, former assistant U.S. Air Force Secretary Will Roper has been named to the board of electric vertical-takeoff-and-landing aircraft developer Beta Technologies.
Dassault Aviation has created a joint research laboratory in partnership with two French academic institutions dubbed Moliere, an acronym of the French for “innovative functional materials for aviation.”
The U.S. Air Force is preparing for its second Advanced Battle Management System capability release that will focus on improving command and control for U.S. Northern Command’s homeland defense mission.
Estes Industries, famous among model rocket enthusiasts for the company’s solid propellant motors, has spun off a new company sporting lineage to Aurora Flight Sciences that aims to provide engineering support for larger launchers.