“We are more than 90% there,” says Tom Hartmann, Rolls-Royce Defense senior vice president for customer business. “We have just a handful of lift fans ready to deliver and those are just spare modules to support IOC."
After a suspenseful 17 days in Earth orbit, the Planetary Society reported the deployment start of its crowdsourced LightSail-A, a demonstration of solar sail technology that could one day propel spacecraft between the planets.
South Korea has publicly test fired a version of its Hyunmu 2 tactical ballistic missile, revealing a version with a longer first stage than previously shown, while one news service says the weapon can fly farther than earlier revealed.
Tired of having to gingerly launch unmanned surface vessels (USVs) from other manned surface ships, the U.S. Navy is searching for a way to launch a USV from an aircraft like other payloads, and the company Hydronalix says it has the technology for the task.
Logos Technologies is targeting civilian agencies, as well as military customers, with a compact, lightweight wide-area motion imagery (WAMI) system that can be carried by helicopters, light aircraft and tactical unmanned aircraft.
India’s Mangalyaan Mars probe has entered the “blackout” phase of its mission, in which all communications between the satellite and Earth will be blocked for about two weeks.
LOCKHEED MARTIN has $920.3m U.S. Navy advance procurement contract for long lead-time materials, parts, components for 78 F-35As (USAF-44; Italy-2; Turkey-2; Australia-8; Norway-6; other FMS customers-16), 14 F-35Bs (Marine Corps-9; Britain-3; Italy-2;), and 2 F-35Cs (U.S. Navy, Marine Corps). RAYTHEON declared quarterly dividend of $0.67 per share of common stock, payable Aug. 6 for shareholders of record as of July 1.
First-term Texas Republican Brian Babin will take over as chairman of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee’s space subcommittee, replacing Rep. Steven Palazzo (R-Miss.), who under House rules cannot hold the subcommittee chair because of his recent appointment to the House Appropriations Committee. Babin’s district includes NASA’s Johnson Space Center. A longtime Republican activist in southeast Texas, he was elected to Congress last year.
With such damage, “It is likely parts will be returned to the F-35 spares inventory as appropriate,” says F-35 Joint Program Office spokesman Joe Dellavedova. “Other components of the aircraft will be evaluated for potential reuse in other aircraft or training systems.”
Deliveries are to resume in 2017, and Kaman says launch customers include existing operators Rotex Helicopter of Switzerland, which uses its aircraft for helilogging, and Atlanta-based Helicopter Express, which conducts aerial firefighting and heavy lifting.
Known as Adeline (Advanced Expendable Launcher with Innovative engine Economy), the partly reusable launcher has been in the early stages of development at Airbus since 2010. Airbus says Adeline would be immediately adaptable to Europe’s next-generation Ariane 6.2 launcher, which is expected to enter service in 2020.
The Soyuz TMA-15M spacecraft is scheduled to depart the station’s Russian segment with NASA’s Terry Virts, the current ISS commander; the European Space Agency’s Samantha Cristoforetti; and cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov at 6:20 a.m. EDT.
Terran Orbital, a U.S. cubesat-services startup with origins in one of the engineering schools that developed the tiny nanosats as a teaching tool, has branched out to Europe with a new office in Turin, Italy, intended in part to avoid U.S. export-control regulations.
Business is brisk for U.S. naval aviators, putting pressure on funding and other resources needed for training, maintenance and even availability, officials and analysts say.
Engineers at Naval Ship Systems Engineering Station (Navsses) recently completed installation and testing of a digital voltage regulator (DVR) on the mine countermeasure (MCM) ship USS Scout (MCM 8).
The U.S. should keep applying pressure in the increasingly contentious island disputes involving China and its neighbors by showing how those problems affect sea security, says Mira Rapp-Hooper, an East Asian analyst for the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).
Northrop Grumman has unveiled the first of five Block 40-standard RQ-4B Global Hawk unmanned air vehicles for NATO’s Alliance Ground Surveillance (AGS) program amid growing company hopes of additional sales to individual member nations.
NASA says it is pleased with how various hardware and software changes being implemented at the Christopher C. Kraft Jr. Mission Control Center debuted during Exploration Flight Test-1, the first unpiloted orbital test flight of the Orion crew exploration capsule in late 2014.
