Jeff has been involved in aerospace journalism since the mid 1990s. Prior to joining Aviation Week, Jeff served as managing editor of Launchspace magazine and the International Space Industry Report. He has been the editor and chief of Aviation Week's Aerospace Daily & Defense Report since 2007 and has been a regular contributor to Aviation Week magazine. He received his B.A. from the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Va.
Mission Specialists Piers Sellers and Mike Fossum completed the second spacewalk of space shuttle mission STS-121 on July 10, successfully restoring re-dundant command capability to the Inter-national Space Station's mobile transporter system. The astronauts replaced a reel assembly for a cable that provides power and data to the mobile transporter, a rail-mounted system that carries the station's 60-foot manipulator arm. The previous cable was inadvertently cut by a safing system in December 2005.
Major players in the U.S. information technology (IT) industry are warning that they will not be able to sell their commercial products to the Department of Defense if House defense authorization language for fiscal 2007 becomes law.
NASA has officially chosen to proceed with the troubled SOFIA airborne astronomy mission, which had its $57.1 million fiscal 2007 budget request cut to zero following a two-year schedule slip and cost growth due to technical problems. Administrator Michael Griffin finally confirmed that NASA will proceed with SOFIA during a July 6 speech to the NASA Advisory Council's science subcommittee in Washington. The details of when and how money might be reprogrammed to sustain the effort aren't yet known, according to a NASA spokesman.
